But it’s twelve million miles long, lad—imagine that! And it has a thousand times the mass of Earth. It can’t be any member of the System, they say.
A strange body, driving out of the black gulf of space amid the stars.”
Bob Star had drawn back dazedly.
“I see,” he whispered huskily.
“And what else about it?”
“The astronomers are tearing out their hair, lad.
So your father told us.
Because the thing has upset all their calculations.
Its motion is all wrong.
When the pull of the sun should have begun to increase its speed—it stopped!”
The old man’s shifty, red-rimmed eyes looked quickly out across the garden, and up at the dark sky, and hastily back at Bob Star again.
It shook him to see that Giles Habibula was frightened.
“What stopped it?”
“Nobody in the System knows.”
The rusty voice dropped lower.
“Now it’s just hanging there.
Five billion miles out—far beyond Pluto!
That isn’t the motion of any kind of comet, Bob.
A space ship might stop that way—if you can imagine a space ship twelve million miles long!”
“What else?”
Bob Star stood taut with a mixture of dread and excitement.
“What’s happened since?”
“That’s all I know—except that the Council is alarmed.
You can’t blame ‘em!
That’s why your father was called to Earth, to meet with them at the Green Hall.
They’ve ordered a censorship on any news about the comet—as if the people can’t be hurt by a military secret!”
“I wonder what they’re planning?”
“That’s top secret, but I know the talk of the Legion.”
The old man turned to glance furtively behind him again.
“I suppose you’ve heard of the Invincible?”
“The new battleship?”
“The greatest ship the System ever built.”
Giles Habibula beamed with a momentary pride.
“A thousand feet long, and armed with a vortex gun—the great new weapon that won our war with Stephen Oreo.
A thing almost as dreadful as your mother’s secret device.”
“I know,” Bob Star whispered impatiently.
“But what about it?”
“I’ve no high secrets, lad,” the old voice rasped.
“All I know is the talk of the Legion.
But I hear the Invincible is to carry some sort of expedition out to discover what’s inside that green cloud—to operate the comet like a ship!”
Fat fingers tugged again at Bob Star’s sleeve.
“You’ll remember, lad?” Giles Habibula begged.
“You won’t tell your father?”
Bob Star stood very straight in that undecorated uniform, his dark head uncovered to the cold and distant sun rising now beneath the fading scimitar of Mars.
The fingers of his right hand were tracing, as they often did, the triangular scar on his forehead.
His tanned face was bleakly set.
“Don’t worry, Giles,” he said quietly.
“I won’t tell.”
Abruptly, then, he exploded:
“So my father told you to keep it from me?