She nodded, shook her head, shrugged, made faces, gesticulated.
Bob Star put his hands on her shoulders, to try to calm her.
“It’s no use,” he told her.
“We can’t understand.
And we can’t fly the Halcyon Bird, if that’s what you want—”
“She has something more to tell us,” said the commander.
“I wonder if she couldn’t draw it?”
He found writing materials in his pockets, and thrust them into her hands.
Eagerly, she drew a circle, and pointed at the great indigo disk.
Then she made some marking within the circle, and held out the paper, talking rapidly again.
“The circle means the planet,” Bob Star said. “But the marking inside—”
He had to shake his head, as the other did.
And tears of frustra-tion came suddenly into her eyes.
She flung the paper down, with an angry, bewildered gesture, and burst into stormy tears.
“It’s too bad.”
Jay Kalam shook his dark head, regretfully.
“I’m willing to grant, now, Bob, that she’s a native of the comet— although her humanity seems contrary to orthodox science.
It’s likely enough that she came to bring us information of some sort about the Cometeers and Stephen Oreo.
“But nothing she knows is going to help us.
Without any common background of languages or culture, or even of thought-forms, it would take her months or years, brilliant as she evidently is, to learn enough English to convey any complex or abstract ideas.”
He turned abruptly, and squinted at the purple sun.
“We must go aboard, Bob,” he said, “and take what observations we can.
We must discover as much as we can about the comet—and what is happening to us.”
Something mushed his voice.
“I think,” he added “that we won’t have much time for observations.”
“Why?”
“I believe the asteroid is falling into that captive sun.”
For a time, on the bridge, they worked silently.
Bob Star was speechless with the ever-renewed impact of the comet’s wonder.
It was Jay Kalam, still gravely collected, who began to put their discoveries into words.
“This object we’ve called a comet,” he began quietly, “is a swarm of planets.
We’ve counted one hundred and forty-three.
Since we entered on the forward side of the asteroid, we must have seen them nearly all.
We knew already, from its gravitational effect on the System, that the comet’s mass is nearly a thousand times that of Earth.
The captive sun accounts for rather less than half of it.
The average mass of the planets, then, must be over three times that of Earth.
They’ve been built into a ship.
The green barrier is the hull—an armor of repulsive force.
The planets are arranged inside of it, spaced about a great ellipsoid—”
“What I don’t see is how such a system could be stable.”
Bob Star looked up uncomfortably.
“Such great masses, so closely crowded— what keeps them from collision?”
“They must be held in place with those same tubular fields—• beams of force, set to balance gravity.
The frame, so to speak, of the ship.”
The commander spoke deliberately, half-absently, as if to set his own ideas in order.
“The captive sun is at one focus of the ellipsoid.
The planet which disturbs Kay so much is at the other—”
“And look at it!”
Bob Star was peering at the screen of a tele-periscope.
“The surface of it seems absolutely smooth, but look at those machines!