“Kay—” he whispered.
“Darling—”
For a moment she relaxed against him, but then dread stiffened her.
Her haunted eyes went back to the comet, and her face in its green light was once more stark and strange.
“Mahnyanah—” came her fear-roughened whisper.
“Mahnyanah __?j
Bob Star released her.
“That’s right,” he whispered bitterly.
“We can’t relax for an instant, so long as Stephen Oreo is alive—”
“Staven Or-rco!”
She seemed to clutch at the name, with a puzzling desperation.
Her urgent voice repeated it, with that odd accent.
Her slim arm swept out toward the fearful, rising face of the comet.
And then she was talking furiously at Bob Star, once more, in her liquidly beautiful, incomprehensible tongue.
He shook his head, helplessly.
“Staven Or-rco!”
He caught the name again, but that was all he understood.
Her voice rose higher.
Tears began to glitter in her eyes.
She caught his shoulders, as if to shake him into understanding.
But she gave up at last, sobbing hi his arms.
The blue point of the sun had set, and the comet reigned.
Its greenish, awful face spanned the dark sky from horizon to zenith.
Visibly, terribly, it grew.
Beneath its unearthly light, the great building was warped into an unreal palace of nightmare.
Trees sprawled under it in black masses, like dark monsters crouching.
The higher, barren rocks glittered beneath it like fantastic spires of ice.
The Halcyon Bird had become a green ghost ship, when Bob Star and the girl came stumbling back to it.
The others were waiting outside the air-lock, staring at the fearful sky.
They looked ghastly; the strange radiance had turned their flesh lividly pale; their faces seemed like masks of horror.
There was to Bob Star something grotesquely incongruous hi the scholarly calm of Jay Kalam’s voice, speaking quietly to Giles Habibula.
“Obviously,” he was saying, “the Cometeers are able to generate and control some force analogous to gravitation.
We have an inkling of the possibilities, from the geodyne and our own gravity cells, but their tubular fields of that unknown force have infinitely more range and power.”
Giles Habibula was nodding automatically, his face lifted toward the onrushing comet and ghastly in its dreadful light.
“They must have an engineering science a million years ahead of ours,” Jay Kalam’s even voice went on.
“When you think of the tremendous power required to pluck a planet out of its orbit, or to drive the comet itself like a ship—” His voice fell away into a chasm of breathless silence.
With appalling speed, now, the green edges of the comet were rushing outward.
They were like green curtains dropping toward every horizon.
Bob Star had to swallow, to find his voice. It sounded harsh and rasping in the dreadful silence.
He asked Jay Kalam:
“Shall we go aboard?”
“If you wish,” the commander answered quietly.
“The ship is helpless; I don’t know that it offers any sort of safety.
I don’t know what the danger is.
You may do what you wish.
For myself I’m going to stay out here on the field, so that I can watch until—whatever happens.”
Bob Star caught Kay Nymidee’s arm, and drew her a little toward the air-lock.
But she shook her head, and looked up again at the expanding sea of the comet.
Waiting beside her Bob Star had a sudden unpleasant sensation that the asteroid was falling, with their bodies beneath—falling into a tremendous green abyss.
The pale, sharp edges of it rushed down to the horizon, and the whole sky was a dome of flaming green.