“Ah, lad, old Giles is glad to see you up again.
We thought you would never wake—”
“There!” Hal Samdu was rumbling.
“It must be the ship he said was coining for us.”
Lurching stiffly to his feet, Bob Star peered into the green sky.
He saw a flying thing, slanting down toward them.
It was a thick, horizontal saucer shape, red as that colossal machine standing above the blue horizon.
Its upper face formed a deck, which ringed a low red dome.
It came with no roar of rockets, nor any visible means of propulsion.
Bob Star caught apprehensively at Jay Kalam’s arm.
“What—” he whispered hoarsely, “what can we do?”
“Nothing, but try to preserve our lives,” said the weary-voiced commander.
“And watch for some chance—some miracle of fate— for so long as we live—”
The red disk came down gently, at some little distance.
The deceptive conditions made distance and size difficult to estimate, but it suddenly looked much larger than Bob Star had first supposed it.
The clang of some metal thing—perhaps the cover of a hatch— jarred Bob Star, even in his hopeless apathy.
He heard raucous hoots, and answering reverberations that were like the booming of great drums.
These were the same uncanny sounds, he realized, that he had heard from the invisible ship which carried Stephen Oreo away from Neptune.
A great, square opening gaped suddenly black in the crimson side of the disk.
A square door had fallen outward, to form an inclined gangway.
Marching down that incline came monstrous things.
No longer—despite the unsolved enigma of Kay Nymidee’s humanity—did Bob Star expect to find beings like men within the comet.
Yet he was not prepared for the mind-shaking impact of the things that came down the gangway. There were eight, of three different sorts.
The foremost was a ten-foot sphere of some silvery metal, surrounded with a dark equatorial band.
At first Bob Star thought that it was rolling; then he saw that only the band turned, sliding about the globe.
Each pole was a dark, glittering bulge, that looked like a faceted eye.
About each bulge were spaced three long, gleaming metallic tentacles, now coiled close to the hemispheres.
The two creatures behind were slender cones hi shape, nearly twenty feet tall.
They were bright green; their skins had an oily luster.
Their bases, apparently, were elastic, inflated membranes, expanded to hemispheres, upon which they bounded forward with a curious, astounding agility. The slender upper parts of the cones were flexible necks.
The dark, pointed organs that tipped them turned this way and that, like singular heads.
Green cones bouncing upon pneumatic cushions—they looked like grotesque nursery toys, but there was nothing toy-like about their air of deadly purpose.
The remaining five were slender tripedal giants.
Their lean bodies, vaguely suggestive of the human, stood perhaps fifteen feet tall.
They were covered with a dully glistening, dark-red armor, like the chitin of gigantic insects.
Each had six slender upper limbs, forming a kind of fringe about a cluster of stalked organs, where the head should have been.
They carried a kind of harness slung with a variety of curious implements or weapons.
“Mortal me!” gasped Giles Habibula.
“Are these fearful things the lords of the comet?
And not the shining monsters?”
“I don’t think so.”
The commander stood gravely watching their approach.
“I imagine these are the slaves of the Cometeers.
Herdsmen, perhaps, of the things they breed for food—”
He fell abruptly silent.
The white sphere turned a little aside, a few yards away.
It halted, resting on the dark belt.
Hoarse, raucous hoots came from it—like commands.
The green cones answered, with dull booming reverberations that seemed to come from their inflated pedal membranes.
The scarlet, three-legged creatures made no sound.