Every grid and filament has been twisted out of shape.
The very cathode plates are warped, so that they can never be tuned again.”
“They look all right,” Bob Star protested.
“Ah, so,” the old man wheezed sadly. “Their shining beauty is left.
But the precious life is gone.
I sat here, too full of wine—wine and caution—to stop the thing that killed them.”
He turned to fumble for another bottle.
“But let’s drink again, and speak no more of the fearful thing I saw.”
“You saw it?”
Bob Star took the bottle, and pulled him toward a bench.
“Sit down, Giles, and tell me what you saw.”
“Let me drink, lad,” he begged hoarsely.
“Let me drown that monstrous recollection, for dear life’s sake, while I’m still sane!”
Bob Star held the bottle from him.
“Ah, well, I’ll ten you what I saw,” he muttered at last.
“If you think it may help us guard your precious mother.
But it wasn’t what I saw that froze my poor old bones.
It was what I felt—the cold, foul breath of mortal evil.”
“Just what did you see?”
“The ache of coming harm has been gnawing at me ever since we left Neptune,” Giles Habibula wheezed.
“Even wine couldn’t kill it, altogether.
Suddenly, a little while ago, I knew that some fearful thing had crept into the ship.
I heard Mark Lardo howling louder.
“I should have fled from it, but there was nowhere to go.
And soon I couldn’t move, for that green mist came and chilled my poor old body.
I couldn’t move a finger, not even to lift a precious drop of wine.
Ah, so, lad!
I was sitting here on the deck, with the bottle between my knees.
I never needed a drink so much, in forty years of soldiering, but I couldn’t get the blessed bottle to my lips.
“Then the thing came down into the power room.
I could hardly turn my dim old eyes to see it, for that paralysis.
It came partly down the companionway and partly through the bulkheads.
Even the metal shells of the geodynes were no barrier to it.
It walked across toward them—”
“What was it like?” Bob Star broke in huskily.
“A man?”
“Don’t ask how it looked!” the old man begged.
“Let’s drink— and forget the wicked wonder of it.”
“Please!” Bob Star urged. “For my mother’s sake.”
“Ah, if we must.”
His fear-glazed eyes rolled upward.
“Ten feet tall it stood.
A thing of moving fire!
The head of it was violet, bright and tiny as a star, and cold as ice, wrapped in a little cloud of purple mist.
“The foot of it was another star, hot and red, in the middle of a little moon of reddish mist.
Between the violet star and the red one was a pillar of greenish light.
Spindle-shaped.
It kept whirling; it was never still.
“Around the thicker middle of the spindle was a broad green ring.
Some crystal, maybe.