It must be some time since you left her.”
Bob Star leaned forward, sick and trembling.
A gloating satisfaction in that careless voice cleft his spine like a cold axe.
Hoarsely, through stiff, unwilling lips, he forced the whisper:
“What about her?”
“I was alarmed for your mother, Bob,” the liquid mockery of Stephen Oreo’s voice flowed on.
“For she has been lost.
My new associates searched the System for her, in vain.
I was somewhat worried, for her life is the only barrier before me, now.
“But her capture has just been reported to me.
It appears that your father, on his Phantom Star, was taking her away from the System, toward the star 61 Cygni.
My associates have overtaken them.
And I hope soon, Bob, to meet your mother, here within the comet.”
15 The Cattle and the Herdsmen
Bob Star woke from a singular dream.
In the dream he had thought that his body had been exchanged for the shining form of one of the Cometeers.
And this bodiless entity, himself, was flying through the green vacancy of the comet’s interior.
Ahead of him, fleeing in a similar shining guise, was Stephen Oreo.
This Stephen Oreo, of the dream, was carrying away a woman.
He was going to consume her, hi some dreadful way.
Only a shrunken husk would be left, bleached, wrinkled, hideous.
And even the whimpering husk would die, and crumble to iridescent ash and fluid.
Sometimes the woman was his mother, and sometimes she was golden-eyed Kay Nymidee.
Somehow, even in his bodiless form, Bob Star carried a weapon.
He had no picture of its shape, but it was something that could destroy Stephen Oreo, and save the changing woman.
But a terrible fear was beating him down, out of the green abysm.
His shining shape was reeling under the incessant blows of a great red hammer of pain.
Stephen Oreo’s voice was shouting furiously at him, turned to agony by the cruel mechanism of the Iron Confessor:
“You can’t!
You can’t kill anybody!”
He woke, and knew that it was the low anxious voice of Kay Nymidee that had roused him.
“Sa daspete!” she was urging.
“Sa daspete!”
He was lying down, with his head on her knees.
Her hands were cool on his forehead, and they seemed to soothe the old pain behind the scar.
He looked up, to find her anxious face oddly blurred and strange beneath pale green light.
He tried to rise, and discovered the numbness of his body.
Hideous as his dream had been, recollection came back.
Ringing in his brain, he heard again the lightly mocking voice of Stephen Oreo:
“I’m not going to hasten your destruction, Bob.
A ship has been ordered here, to pick up you and your companions.
You will be taken, along with a load of the prisoners from Pluto, down into this fortress of my new companions.
And ultimately—”
A chuckle had come from that shining thing.
“Have you ever seen the way we feed, Bob?” that bright voice murmured.
“Well, you’re going to.
But while you’re waiting for that, there’s something else I want you to think about.
“I can’t be killed.
“You’ve already proved that, with your own guns.
And it’s no use clenching your fists and shaking your head—your face confesses your reluctant admiration of my new physical equipment.