He wanted to deny that, because it was too monstrous to be true.
He had heard nothing, certainly.
His eyes had seen nothing.
Yet, somehow, even before Jay Kalam touched his arm, his mind had been shrinking away from some fearful, unseen presence.
“Look!”
The cry burst harshly from his lips.
“The green—” A greenish mist was obscuring the instruments before his eyes.
His body tingled to a sudden, stiffening chill.
All his sensations were somehow blanketed.
Very faintly, he heard Jay Kalam’s whisper:
“Is this what happened at Oreo’s prison?”
He couldn’t answer.
His body had become a clumsy, unresponding machine.
He realized that he was falling.
Dully, from a vast distance, he heard the thin mad screams of Mark Lardo:
“Don’t let it eat—”
10 The Cometeer
Bob Star picked himself up painfully from the deck of the narrow bridge.
His limbs were numbed and tingling uncomfortably.
A dull, persistent ringing faded slowly from his ears and left a dreadful silence in the ship.
The screams of Mark Lardo had ceased.
He realized abruptly, with a sense of sick defeat, that he couldn’t hear the geodynes.
Jay Kalam was moaning, where he had fallen, and Bob Star bent to examine him.
His body was queerly lax.
The skin was flushed, and cold with sweat.
Heart and breath were irregular and slow.
Bob Star turned back to the instruments.
The geodesic indicators showed axial deflection zero, field potential zero.
The ship was being flung away from the comet, helpless now hi that field of repulsion.
“Our visitor?” Jay Kalam spoke faintly, from where he lay.
“Gone?”
“I think so.”
Bob Star went stiffly to help him get up.
“What was it?”
“I don’t know.”
Bob Star tried to swallow the dry fear in his throat.
“I didn’t see anything except that green haze—”
“I wonder if it really was a haze?”
Jay Kalam was still swaying giddily, but a grave alertness had come back to his thin face.
“Or was it perhaps the effect of a radiation which short-circuits nerve fibers.
Legion engineers have experimented with radiation that seems to do that.”
He glanced at a chronometer.
“How long were we unconscious?”
“Perhaps ten minutes,” Bob Star said.
Jay Kalam sent him to see what had happened to the others.
A stifled groan led him to the gun turret.
Hal Samdu was just dragging himself up behind the great proton needle, stiffly flexing his mighty arms.
“Aye, Bob,” he rumbled.
“What came upon us?”
“I don’t know yet.