Her beauty brought an ache to his throat.
Her sweet body glowed white against the darkness and the sapphire flame of the spiral chamber.
His first glimpse brought a confused and yet indelible impression of her straight, slim perfection, of the massed midnight of her red-glinting hair, of the pale, tragic oval of her face, and the wide, sad eyes of golden-flecked brown.
In a moment he saw that she was hurt.
Her white robe was torn and stained with red.
She swayed upon the vast sapphire.
The pallor of pain was on her face, and her eyes were deep and dark with agony.
He could see that she was fighting desperately against weakness and pain—and against something else.
Bob Star sensed a terrific, invisible conflict, in which her mind was making some supreme exertion—
He started toward her, impulsively driven to her aid.
Two yards from the wall, he checked himself.
She wasn’t here.
She was simply a shadow in the wall.
She was no more here than she had been in the prison on Neptune, two billion miles away.
Just a shadow—
Or not even that.
Perhaps she was mere hallucination, the daughter of a brain that Stephen Oreo had cracked with the Iron Confessor.
The red hammer of pain, not still for nine years, still beat behind that scar—and it seemed to him now that the blue fire in the crystals behind the girl, danced in time to its beat.
He realized abruptly that she hadn’t motioned him to keep away, as she had done before.
Her tragic eyes were fixed on his face, anxious, pleading—and dilated with desperate effort.
Reeling on the great sapphire, she held out her arms toward him.
And her image flickered, oddly.
It was just, he thought afterwards, as if he had been seeing her through a great sheet of some perfectly transparent crystal, and this barrier had been withdrawn.
He was startled then, to hear her voice.
It was a low, breathless cry—but somehow relieved and glad.
Some strange joy washed the pallor and the agony of effort from her face.
Her slim body relaxed, and she fell toward him.
A shadow, falling?
Fighting the numbness of incredulity, Bob Star sprang forward.
He swayed with an utterly astonished delight when her warm, real weight came into his arms.
For a moment she seemed lifeless.
Then brief animation stirred her.
She looked back toward the empty chamber, where sapphire flame still shimmered upward from the vacant pedestal.
A curious call, a single liquid, bell-clear note, broke from her lips.
Immediately the sapphire exploded like a great bomb of light.
Blue flame filled the niche.
It faded to a swirling confusion of shadow.
And the shadow died upon the black and scarlet wall.
As if exhausted, the girl went limp in his arms again.
He stood for a moment holding her, staring at the polished blankness of the wall.
“A shadow?” he whispered, and turned with her.
He carried her back through the dim length of that great hall, and across the wide, columned gallery, and out upon the gravel of the rocket field, to the Halcyon Bird.
Giles Habibula met him, below the air-lock.
“Well?” he challenged the old man.
“Don’t you think she’s real?”
“Real enough.”
The fishy eyes warmed with approval.
“And I’m glad to see you forgetting your sickly dreams.
A good thing for you.
Ah, and she’s a lovely lass.