“It’s a sad thing, lad, but the age of man has ended.
Those monsters are to rule the System now.
Perhaps we’re lucky to be among the first to meet the Cometeers—to die before we know what they really are.
But I want to meet them drunk.”
He tipped up the bottle again.
Bob Star went back to the tele-periscopes, and watched the comet grow.
The sharp-edged, greenish oval of it looked the size of an egg, and the size of a man’s head.
It spread across the black of space.
It swallowed the stars; became a sea of green, overflowing all the heavens.
He and Jay Kalam examined it with every instrument the ship possessed.
“I can’t make anything out of it.”
The commander shook his head, baffled and visibly afraid.
“That green surface is a perfect geometric ellipsoid.
It is absolutely featureless.
At this distance, we ought to be able to see anything as small as a house or a ship or a tree.
But there’s nothing at all.”
“The raiders were invisible,” Bob Star remarked.
“And it may be that they live on the surface we see.”
Jay Kalam rubbed thoughtfully at the dark angle of his jaw.
“But I don’t think so.
More likely, I think, that green surface will turn out to be a kind of armor—though of no material we know.
The hull, let us say, of an enormous ship.
It does move like a ship.
Our next problem may be to get inside.”
And still the object spread.
It had covered half the stars, when the alarm gongs rang.
Apprehensively, Bob Star sprang to the instruments.
He took swift readings from the glowing dials, and integrated the results upon a calculator.
“We’ve met a powerful repulsive field,” he told Jay Kalam.
“It’s already absorbing more of our momentum than the geodynes are.”
He called the power room, to order the braking of the generators stopped, but still that repulsion mounted.
He called Giles Habibula again, to meet it with the thrust of the geodynes.
At quarter speed— At half—At full thrust-He turned at last to the commander, shaking his head in bewildered defeat.
“All our forward speed is gone,” he whispered hoarsely.
“We’re drifting back from the comet now—against the full power of the geodynes.”
“That seems to show that the green surface is really a kind of armor,” Jay Kalam said slowly.
“A barrier of the same kind of energy, perhaps, that is drawing Pluto toward the comet.”
“Anyhow, we can’t get through.”
Bob Star straightened, trying not to show his sick despair.
“From the readings I got, that repulsion must increase to infinity at the green surface.
Nothing could break through—” A shrill scream of terror cut off his voice.
“It’s the madman,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Mark Lardo.”
The bubbling shriek came again:
“They’re here!
And they’re hun-gry!
Don’t—don’t let them eat!”
Bob Star turned back to his instruments, to read the intensity of that repulsion again.
The prisoner had been screaming at intervals, ever since his capture—though never with such an ungoverned abandon as this.
He started, when he felt Jay Kalam’s hand on his arm. “Bob.” The commander’s low voice was dry with dismay. “I think there is—something—with us, aboard.”