It showed intelligence and purpose.
It moved.
It—fed.”
His voice had caught, and his pale face stiffened, but he went on in a moment, almost calmly:
“It must have been, in a sense, material—it consumed ninety pounds of matter from the body of Mark Lardo.
Yet it was sufficiently free of the ordinary limitations of matter to travel through solid metal.”
He shrugged uncomfortably.
“Perhaps we should have expected something of the sort,” he added. “Because the Cometeers have obviously advanced far above us, scientifically—whatever their moral lag.
They must be able to manipulate matter and energy, perhaps even space and time, in ways still beyond us.”
Bob Star stood silent for a time, clinging grimly to his old belief in the humanity of the people of the comet—for that meant, to him, the reality of the girl he had seemed to see in the wall of Stephen Oreo’s prison.
But his faith in her existence died, before the silent horror that still stalked the ship.
“I’ve read an old legend,” he whispered suddenly, “of creatures that were believed to suck the blood of the living—”
“The vampire.” Jay Kalam’s dark head shook, as if with a helpless protest against what they had seen.
“A feeble and inoffensive myth, beside the Cometeers.”
He paused to draw a long, rasping breath.
“We had wondered what they want,” he muttered huskily. “Now I think we know.
I think they have come to the System for—food.”
A harsh, inarticulate rumbling came from Hal Samdu.
“Fight!” he sobbed.
“We must fight.
Giles, you must fix the generators.”
Tears shone in the old man’s eyes.
“It can’t be done,” he gasped.
“My proud beauties—they were murdered by the Cometeers!”
Bob Star returned with Jay Kalam to the bridge.
“We are now beyond the field of repulsion,” he reported, when he had taken observations.
“But we’re still flying away from the comet at a high veloc-ity, and helpless to do anything about it.”
He laughed bitterly.
“With only the rockets—”
At that moment the telltales flamed red.
The alarm gongs clanged.
He spun to scan the screen of the bow tele-periscope, and gasped breathlessly,
“Asteroid ahead!”
11 Murdered Asteroid
Bob Star’s fingers swept to the rocket firing keys.
The Halcyon Bird trembled to thundering exhausts.
Blue torrents of flame flared into the dark void ahead, lighting the screens of the tele-periscope.
“An asteroid?” Jay Kalam whispered.
“You’re certain?”
“I am,” Bob Star said, too busy to turn.
“The gravity detector shows a mass dead ahead.
Millions of tons.
The deflector fields wouldn’t swing it an inch.
But I’ve changed our course with the rockets—I think enough—”
“An asteroid—” Jay Kalam paused thoughtfully.
“The condensation theories of cosmogony have indicated the existence of such tiny bodies at the fringes of the system.
But I don’t believe one has ever been discovered, so far from the sun.
We’re a billion miles outside of Pluto’s orbit—”
At the tele-periscope, Bob Star had sharply caught his brath.
“I see it,” he cried.