But it must await a time less torn with mortal urgency.
Come!”
“What’s wrong now?”
Bob Star made no move to rise, for nothing mattered, now.
“Jay bids you come and aid us to load the Halcyon Bird with rocket fuel.”
“Rocket fuel!” exclaimed Bob Star, dazedly.
“There’s none.”
“But there is!”
Bob Star helped the girl down from the ledge, and they followed Giles Habibula.
“Where—” he whispered breathlessly.
“Where did Jay find rocket fuel?”
“Ah, lad!”
The old man shook the bald dome of his head, which shone greenish hi the light of the comet.
“Ever the same is the fate of genius: it stumbles unknown into an unmarked grave.
It wasn’t Jay that found the precious fuel.
It was poor old Giles Habibula.”
“How did you find it?”
“Poor old Giles had started to seek wine with which to pull the fearful fangs of death.
But, beneath this mortal green sky, his aged spirit, weak and feeble as it is, rebelled against extinction.
Ah, so!
His precious genius awoke to the shocking touch of peril, and refused to be destroyed.
It recalled Jay’s theory that the owners of the asteroid must have hidden their fuel away against space pirates.
It recalled the nature of that other genius who built this place.
“Ah, and it set his old finger on the hidden fuel!”
They were crossing the rocket field.
The old man’s fat arm pointed toward the switch-box, built in the wall of the white house, which controlled the flood-lights.
“I simply walked to that box, lad, and opened it.
There is a deftness that lingers hi my old hands, lad.
I found the secret of the box, that would have evaded any other.
And there’s the fuel!” •
They came around the green-bathed hull of the Halcyon Bird.
Beyond, not a dozen yards from her air-lock, a little cylindrical metal house had risen through the gravel.
Hal Samdu was rolling black drums of rocket fuel from the door of it.
Bob Star ran to aid him.
No more than two hours later, Bob Star, with the commander and Kay Nymidee, climbed to the bridge of the Halcyon Bird.
Urgently, the girl pointed through an observation port, at the indigo disk of the master planet.
“Aythrin!” her soft voice cried eagerly.
“Staven Or-rco!
We go?”
The commander turned to Bob Star. “Can we make it?”
“We can try.”
His fingers touched the firing keys.
Blue jets washed the gravel field, and roared against the white columns of the deserted mansion.
The Halcyon Bird was alive again, and away into the green chasm of the comet.
The asteroid fell behind them, to dwindle and vanish against the ominous face of the purple sun.
Bob Star felt a pang of regret, at its destruction.
For it was in the cradle of its haunting, exotic beauty that he had come to know Kay Nymidee.
His love for her had spread, somehow, to its laughing groves and the wild splendor of its lichen-painted rocks and the peace of the long white house above the smiling lake.
He thought unhappily that now its mystery could never be solved.
After days of effort, Jay Kalam had confessed that he had failed to decipher the book that seemed to be a diary.