“But credible enough, with what we know of the Cometeers.
The bare facts are all she has been able to tell me.
Kay’s Spanish, you see, and mine are almost two different languages.
Mine is due to an interest hi the plays of Lope de Vega, who wrote fourteen hundred years ago.
Hers is the Spanish of a thousand years later, still farther changed by four hundred years of adaptation to an alien environment.
Her accent is so unfamiliar that it is the merest accident that I recognized her tongue at all—when she told Hal Samdu to stop.
And her scientific words, of course, are nearly all totally unfamiliar.
That makes her message peculiarly difficult to understand.”
“Four hundred years?” Bob Star gaped at him.
“Have the Cometeers been here before?”
Jay Kalam shook his head, explaining:
“You may recall, Bob, from your history books, that during the latter part of the twenty-sixth century the Andean Republic passed through a brief golden age.
For a few years, hi science and nearly all the arts, as well as in wealth and military power, it was the leading nation of Earth.
“The climax of that splendid era was the Conquistador expedition.
In the greatest geodesic cruiser that had ever been built, a hundred men and women left Santiago upon what was planned to be the System’s greatest voyage of science and exploration.
“The Conquistador never returned.
“The hundred had been the intellectual flower of the republic.
Their loss may have been the blow that broke the golden age, because the northern lands soon resumed their supremacy, and Spanish is now almost a dead language.“
“The Conquistador—•?”
“It was captured by the Cometeers,” Jay Kalam said.
“Apparently their ships were continually sent ahead, at velocities far beyond the speed of light, on scouting expeditions—I suppose in search of planetary systems worth raiding.
“Such an invisible scout met the Conquistador, somewhere beyond Pluto.
Her entire crew was carried back to the comet, which was then some hundreds of light-years away.
“Many of the prisoners were kept alive, and eventually a few of them escaped.
Aided by other enslaved beings, they got away from the master planet, in a captured ship, and reached one of the outlying planets of the cluster.
“For two generations they existed as miserable fugitives, until the survivors found their way into a great cavern, where they weren’t immediately discovered.
They had learned the plans of the Cometeers and they determined to warn and aid the System.
Kay Nymidee is their daughter—after four hundred years.
“They made scientific progress.
The projector that brought Kay to the asteroid is their most brilliant achievement.
I don’t entirely understand her explanation, but apparently it operates by warping space-tune to bring two remote points so close together that light— or even, finally, a material body—can cross the gap.
“The machine, anyhow, was developed by Kay’s father.
And he had been using it to send Kay into the secret places of the Cometeers, after their secrets.
They detected it when she was trying to warn you, on Neptune.
They raided the cavern.
Kay is the only one who escaped.
At the last moment, her father used the machine to send her to you, upon the asteroid.”
Bob Star caught eagerly at his arm.
“What has she been trying to tell us?” he gasped abruptly.
“About Stephen Oreo and the Cometeers?”
“The Cometeers can be destroyed,” Jay Kalam said. “But Kay doesn’t know how.
She knows only that the means exists.
She says the Cometeers are ordinarily immortal.
But their rulers possess some secret agency that can destroy them—something invented by the an-cient designers of their artificial bodies.
She has no idea what it is, but she does know where the secret is kept.”
“Where?”
“In a fortress deep inside this planet—you remember Kay’s drawing?”
Breathless and trembling, Bob Star nodded.
“Well, this planet is a world truly dead—cold to the center.
It is honeycombed with cavernous hollows, as we might have suspected from its low mean density.