He’s afraid I couldn’t stand the shock!
Why doesn’t he order you to rock me to sleep in your lap?”
2 The Keeper of the Peace
Bob Star hurried on again toward the observatory dome.
Giles Habibula limped hastily after him, peering at the dark sky and starting at every rustle of the wind in the shrubbery, as if his fishy eyes had already seen some unpleasant visitant descending from the comet to the roof.
Outside the little dome, Bob Star paused.
He stood at the end of the roof, beside a low parapet of purple glass.
Far beneath lay Phobos—a moonlet so tiny and so rugged that it seemed like a solitary mountain peak beneath the palace, floating alone in space, detached from any world at all.
Yet it was green with transplanted forests, and spangled with artificial lakes.
He could remember when it had been large enough, and lovely to him, a dazzling triumph of the planetary engineers, its narrow valleys filled with all the adventure he could seek.
But that was in his boyhood, before he went away to the Legion Academy.
It was just a prison to him now.
Giles Habibula sat down on a bench in the sun.
He fumbled in the pockets of his unbuttoned uniform and found a little empty flask, with a graduated scale along the side.
He held it up to the sunlight, and his eyes dwelt gloomily upon a single lonely drop of the wine he loved.
“Go on, lad,” he whispered sadly.
“If you must look into the ghastly face of death!
Poor old Giles will wait here for you.
He’s good for nothing now, but to roast his aching bones in the sun.”
Inside the chilly gloom of the observatory, Bob Star sat down at the telescope.
Its mechanisms whirred softly, in swift response to his touch.
The great barrel swung to search space with its photoelectric eyes, and the pale beam of the projector flashed across to the concave screen.
Bob Star leaned to watch the screen.
It was a well of darkness.
White points danced in it.
The brightest, he knew, was the third-magnitude star Vindemiatrix.
Near it he found a patch of pallid green, oddly blurred.
He stepped up the electronic magnification.
Vindemiatrix and the fainter stars slipped out of the field.
The comet hung alone, and swiftly grew.
Its shape was puzzling—a strangely perfect ellipsoid.
A greenish football, he thought, kicked at the System out of the night of space—by what?
“Twelve million miles long!” he muttered huskily.
“Which means it can’t be any sort of solid matter.
With that low density, it has to be hollow.
But what’s inside?”
Using ray filters and spectroscope, with the full power of the circuits, he strove to pierce that dull green veil, and failed.
He sprang to his feet and stopped the instrument, impatiently snapping his fingers.
Outside, he walked heavily to where Giles Habibula sat.
“It’s no use,” he muttered.
“I found the cloud around it, but I failed to see inside. Nothing gets through—not a ray!”
He shivered again.
For he had never seen anything so bafHingly weird, so strangely terrible.
The comet was dreadful with the forbidden mystery of the dark interstellar wastes from which it had come, and its very vastness overwhelmed his mind.
It was something beyond the range and scale of men, as men are beyond the microscopic infusorians swarming in a water-drop.
“Well, lad, you’ve seen it.”
Giles Habibula was rolling cheerfully to his feet.
“The best astronomers in the System have done no more.
Let’s eat, before we perish.”
Bob Star nodded silently, his mind still numb with consternation.