And, as calmly as if he could not hear that hideous onslaught, Jay Kalam was still busy with the enigmatic mechanism in the long red case. Now he was fastening five wires to a binding post.
Kay Nymidee, eagerly aiding him, twisted one of the wires around Giles Habibula’s fat arm.
She made each of the others hold the end of a wire.
The gong still thundered its warning.
Bob Star watched the monstrous throng come down, until he could see the pattern of the tread on the black belts of the spheres, see the multiple heads of the silent giants.
“I had hoped,” he heard Jay Kalam’s calm voice, gravely regretful, “that they would follow the ship, and give us time—”
Hal Samdu rumbled imploringly:
“Hurry, Giles!”
“In life’s name,” gasped Giles Habibula.
“When I’m already dying—”
The foremost silver sphere was now close upon them.
Its white tentacles whipped out toward Kay Nymidee.
Bob Star set himself, to leap at it in futile, bare-handed desperation.
“Wait!” breathed Jay Kalam.
He made some quick, final adjustment within the rectangular red case.
A faint, momentary humming came from it, low at first, running up the scale of sound until it became ear-piercingly shrill, then inaudible.
And it seemed to Bob Star that the light abruptly changed, as if a. shadow had flickered across them.
The nightmare throng was indefinably distorted; it appeared somehow withdrawn, as if seen through an inexplicable veil.
Besides that, he sensed nothing.
But the white sphere jerked back its grasping tentacles.
The alien horde was abruptly silent, as if with consternation.
Monstrous things rebounded from the walls, retreating.
Beside him, Giles Habibula sighed deeply.
“Ah, me,” he gasped, with a vast relief.
“It’s done!”
Wearily, he wiped his pale yellow face with the back of his hand.
And Bob Star perceived that the entire bottom of the shaft had begun slipping away, like an enormously massive sliding door.
A dark slit appeared at one side of the shaft, and widened.
And presently they were looking down a great, square well, walled with jewel-smooth indigo, into another world, where a small green sun was shining, cold and dim. Jay Kalam was the first to speak, his voice faint with awe. “So this,” he said, “is the hidden fortress of the Cometeers.”
Bob Star was amazed at the extent of the space beyond that mighty door.
When they had pushed themselves through the shaft, and Giles Habibula had touched something that closed the vast barrier behind them, they all paused in a shuddering astonishment.
Bob Star’s sense of directions had changed again, and it now seemed that this vast, dimly lit void was above them.
It must have been fifty miles in diameter, he thought—perhaps five hundred.
It was roughly spherical.
The walls of it were partly wild cliffs of natural rock.
And partly they were tremendous flat surfaces of that hard blue armor.
Machines loomed far away, in that twilit vastness, larger than any he had seen on the surface of the planet.
They must be the engines, he thought, that ran upon the power of that captive sun to drive the clustered worlds of the comet like a ship.
He felt that he could almost sense that flow of illimitable energy, and it gave him a sense of crushed futility.
It made him ill again.
Suddenly he was clinging like a fly to the roof of this hollow world, and sick with the invincible fear that he was falling into the cold green sun at the center of it.
Then the green globe and the dim, cyclopean machines began to spin over and under him, over and under, until he shut his eyes, retching.
Faintly, he heard Kay Nymidee speaking, with awe and terror in her nervous voice, and the elation of a desperate daring.
“Kay says the weapon we seek is locked in the green sphere,” Jay Kalam interpreted.
“Two of the Cometeers, she says, are always stationed outside of it, on watch.
Even those guards can’t enter the sphere itself, for the metal of it is impregnated with forces that form a barrier to the energy-fields of their bodies.
Only a few of the rulers of the comet are able to pass that barrier.
“Kay and her father studied it with their projector, she says.
But they were never able to penetrate the barrier.
Kay doesn’t know how to enter, or what may be within.”