The anonymity of its unknown writer was now forever secure.
The purpose of that hidden laboratory, the meaning of the looped cross of life above the crossed bones of death, the possible connection between the asteroid and Stephen Oreo—those riddles were beyond answer now.
“Have we fuel enough,” the commander was asking, “to reach the master planet?”
“The tanks aren’t half full, but we had time to load no more.”
Bob Star was silent for a time, frowning as he read the calibrated screens and tapped out his calculations.
“I believe we can do it—”
His voice caught, as the telltales flashed and the gongs began to ring.
Startled, he swung back to the instruments.
“The power beam—if that’s what it is,” he whispered huskily.
“Between the planet and that atomic engine.
It has caught us, with its own field of force.
A danger I hadn’t expected.”
He paused to read the screens again, and swiftly calculated a new course for the ship.
“I think we can keep free, but this costs fuel.”
Checking his figures again, he shook his head and bit his lip.
“I’m afraid we’ll land a little too hard for comfort.”
Stern-faced, abstracted, he turned again to screens and calculator, fighting a silent battle to conserve every precious drop of fuel.
In hours, perhaps the flight was long.
But always it seemed to Bob Star that they had hardly left the asteroid, before the Halcyon Bird was slanting down out of a pallidly green sky that swarmed with many-colored worlds, toward the dark, strangely level surface of the master planet.
That great world seemed a perfect sphere of indigo, unbroken by mountain or sea.
It appeared absolutely featureless, save for the overwhelmingly colossal machines, red and mysterious beneath their pale domes of greenish radiance, that scattered it at distances of hundreds or thousands of miles.
As that dark, strangely forbidding surface expanded before them, Kay Nymidee pointed through an observation port at the looming bulk of one of those machines.
“Go—” she said eagerly, and groped for a word, “there!”
Bob Star nodded, and set the nose of the Halcyon Bird toward it. Then he looked doubtfully at a fuel gauge.
“I’ll try,” he whispered.
But the needles crept inexorably toward zero.
The even drumming of the rockets was interrupted by a warning cough.
He shook his head, and brought the Halcyon Bird to a jarring landing upon the strange flatness of the indigo world, with rockets dead before the ship was still.
“The tanks are empty,” he muttered blankly.
“The ship won’t move again.”
Kay Nymidee seized his shoulder, and pointed imploringly at the crimson, cyclopean mass of the machine ahead, a bewildering and fantastic enigma of red metal, within its transparent shell of shimmering green.
“Sorry, Kay.”
He shook his head again.
“We just couldn’t make it.”
The mute reproach hi her brown eyes changed slowly to frightened dismay.
“Perhaps we can walk, if we aren’t discovered,” Jay Kalam suggested hopefully.
“Kay seems determined to take us to the machine.
And it doesn’t look so far—”
“The distance is deceptive,” Bob Star told him, “because of the vast size of the planet, and the remarkable clearness of the atmosphere, and the lack of any other object for comparison.”
“How far is it?”
Bob Star looked at his instruments.
“According to my last observation,” he said, at last, “that machine is about a hundred and twenty miles from us.”
The hostile impact of an alien world struck the five with shocking violence, when they left the air-lock of the useless Halcyon Bird. It was five hours later.
They had spent the time in preparing to undertake a desperate march of more than a hundred miles.
Bob Star and Hal Samdu were dragging two sledges improvised from metal doors torn from within the ship, packed with food, water, and weapons.
The runners sang musically across the flat infinity of the planet’s surface.
The puzzling substance of it was absolutely smooth, hard and slippery underfoot.
Nowhere, so far as they could see, was it broken by any irregularity.
At first they found walking difficult; Giles Habibula fell sprawling twice.
As a compensatory advantage, however, the sledges, once started, glided along with little effort.