Silently, the scarlet panel swung inward, and white lights flashed on beyond.
“Walk ahead, lad,” he asked. “And keep your weapons handy.
It’s possible that someone is yet alive in the hidden space below.
And life’s too precious to be wasted, in any desperate encounter with proton pistols—”
Bob Star walked eagerly ahead, down a narrow, long flight of winding, rock-hewn stairs.
He found no living thing below, however.
What he did find merely increased the haunting enigma of the asteroid.
At the foot of the stair, cut into the very heart of the tiny world, was an enormous chamber.
It contained an elaborate biological research laboratory.
There were powerful microscopes, radiological and chemical apparatus, ovens, incubators and vats of ghastly specimens—most of them human.
The Cometeers, apparently, had found the place as readily as had Giles Habibula.
The dust of seven human beings lay shimmering on the floor.
Back aboard the Halcyon Bird, Jay Kalam listened to Bob Star’s account of the find, with thin lips compressed.
He didn’t speak, and Bob Star asked:
“Have you deciphered the diary?”
“No,” the commander shook his head.
“It’s more difficult than I had expected.”
Time went by upon the planetoid, each hour a new drop of bitterness hi the cup of the four Legionnaires.
One hope faded, and another.
They found no signal apparatus, no spare geodynes, not even an extra drum of rocket fuel.
The mystery of the lonely rock still evaded them.
Jay Kalam reported no progress with his efforts to read the secret diary.
At last, from the bridge of the helpless Halcyon Bird, Bob Star watched Pluto approach the pallid ellipse of the cometary object.
For many days it had been plunging outward from its former orbit.
He waited with a troubled wonder to see it checked by that field of repulsion, but nothing stopped it.
It struck that sea of shining green, and vanished.
He turned the tele-periscope back to Neptune.
It reassured him for a moment to find that next planet in its place, but then he saw the gap between Neptune and Triton looked too wide.
The satellite was already on its way.
“Triton!” he muttered huskily.
“Then Neptune—and finally the Earth.”
His lean hands clenched helplessly.
“But there’s nothing we can do—”
That same night, he was striding restlessly, alone, through the silent gloom of a great hall in the white mansion.
Pale lights burned cold on high walls paneled with black and scarlet.
The white floor was hard white metal.
He paused upon it suddenly, staring unbelievingly at a panel hi the wall,
He had seen a moving shadow there.
It brought back a shadow and vision that had come to him in the fort at Neptune, and a face that had not yet faded from his uneasy dreams.
Trembling with eagerness, he stepped quickly toward the shadow.
In spite of himself, he was whispering:
“Come back to me! Please come back—”
The shadows darkened and began to glow, somehow sinking back beyond the surface of the black-and-scarlet wall.
A pure blue light was born among them, brighter than their flaming edges.
His heart paused when they rushed together, and became a perfect, luminous reality.
It seemed to him as if a deep niche had suddenly been cut in the wall.
Its shape was a tapered spiral.
It was black. It flamed with innumerable lights, from scattered crystal flakes of blue.
A many-angled pedestal of purest sapphire burned within it.
Upon the pedestal, as before, stood the girl.