“Ah, no, lad.
Just a scratch.
Rest and sleep will soon repair her strength.
Old Giles will dress her little wound, lad.
His old hands have yet a certain skill.
Don’t forget Jay wants you on the bridge.”
“Bob,” the tall commander greeted him, in a low voice which yet betrayed a suppressed anxiety, “will you please check the orbital motion of this asteroid, and our motion with respect to the cometary object.”
Jay Kalam stood watching, while he read the positions of the sun and Jupiter and Sirius on the calibrated screens of the tele-periscope, and bent to tap out his quick calculations.
“I see the answer on your face.”
The commander nodded, at his expression of startled apprehension.
“It checks with my own.
The asteroid has been caught in another tubular field of force.
Apparently we are to be drawn out into the comet, along with the larger planets.”
13 Fuel for the Comet
The cometary object hung close ahead.
To watch the last sunset, Kay Nymidee had scrambled with Bob Star’s aid to the top of a high, bare pinnacle, beyond the rocket field.
They were sitting, side by side, on a cushion of scarlet moss.
Their feet dangled over a precipice.
Beneath lay the irregular convexity of the tiny world, molded by the dead genius of its unknown master into vistas of fantastic, haunting beauty.
Grassy slopes smiled with peace, and bright masses of flowering woodland laughed joyously.
But above them, everywhere, rugged peaks and ridges stood solemnly and gorgeously strange in lichen-coats of green and gold and scarlet.
And the purple blackness of the sky was a vault of never-fathomed mystery.
Day might illuminate the face of the asteroid, but never its sky.
Now the sun was setting, behind Bob Star and the girl, a point of blue-white splendor, attended by the tiny flecks of Jupiter and Saturn.
It cast black, knife-sharp shadows of the two upon the cragged opposite wall of the gorge.
Before them, above black shadows and flaming lichens, the comet was rising—for the last time.
The ellipse of it came up like a featureless mask of hideous green, peering malevolently over the edge of the tiny world.
Its leering face was near, now, and huge.
Bob Star caught the girl’s hand; Kay Nymidee clung to him with an apprehensive grasp.
“Temyo ist nokee,” she murmured, in her own strange tongue.
Her voice was deep and husky with dread.
“Yes,” he whispered, “I suppose we’ll soon be inside the comet.
But there’s nothing we can do—” He checked himself, and forced a smile.
“But don’t you worry, darling—”
Nearly a week had passed, since her inexplicable arrival on the asteroid; and now she seemed almost recovered from whatever ordeal she had undergone.
The scratch on her shoulder was healed, her fair skin glowing again with health.
Through their efforts at communication, Bob Star had learned her name—Kay Nymidee.
He had learned that her home had been indeed in the comet.
He had found that she hated and feared the Cometeers—whom she called aythrin.
But that was all.
She had appeared disappointed and bewildered by the failure of the Legionnaires to understand her language.
She had tried, desperately, to learn their own, making Bob Star point out objects, to teach her nouns, and act out the meaning of simple verbs.
A brilliant and eager student, she could already make a good many simple, concrete statements.
But anything more abstract than the greenness of grass or the sweetness of wine was still beyond her reach. Bob Star glanced at her, and again her breathtaking beauty held his eyes. The sinking, distant sun, catching her head from behind, filled the mass of her dark hair with living gleams of red. Her face was a wide oval of white beauty, though now the green rays of the comet had overcast it with a look of strange foreboding.
Wide, golden, her eyes were on his face.
In the failing light, the pupils were great pools of tragic darkness.
They were haunted with consuming sorrow, with a sick despair that he yearned to brush away.
But they lit, when he looked into them, with a wistful golden light.
A tender smile glowed for a moment on her face.
Bob Star caught her against him, impulsively.