It grew small, hurtling away into the greenish twilight.
Giles Habibula was abruptly sobbing, noisily.
For a moment Bob Star felt the salt sting of tears in his own eyes, and an ache in Ms throat.
But then he saw the pale, green ball again, almost upon them.
And he gasped hoarsely:
“Look—there!”
For he had seen one of the shining guardians of the globe.
A magnet of living light, with the red star and the violet for poles and the misty spindle between them like the field of a magnet turned to animate flame.
It was more than alive.
It was wondrous and beautiful and infinitely dreadful.
They drifted close to it—and it paused abruptly in its slow flight about the sphere.
Bob Star’s breath stopped.
His skin felt cold with a sudden sweat, and his body tensed uselessly.
He hung helpless in the air; there was nothing he could reach and nothing he could do.
For an instant the creature stood still.
The pulsation of the bright stars ceased.
And the misty spindle seemed frozen into a pillar of greenish ice.
Then burning life returned.
The Cometeer darted way, in the direction Hal Samdu had gone.
“It was Hal that it saw,” Jay Kalam whispered. “But it will soon be looking for us.”
A moment later, they thudded against the cold, hard metal of the faintly glowing sphere.
They crouched upon it, held by a slight attraction.
More like an asteroid than the green sun it had first appeared to be, it was, Bob Star thought, perhaps half a mile in diameter.
Kay Nymidee was whispering swiftly to Jay Kalam.
“She says the weapon is inside,” he interpreted quietly.
“This ball is a land of safe.”
“Ah, so!” gasped Giles Habibula.
“And what a safe!”
18 At the Empty Box
Every safe, Jay Kalam reasoned, must have a door.
They searched, shuffling very carefully across the coldly glowing metal, walking by the aid of its slight gravitation.
At last they came to a square, twenty-foot depression, surrounded by a low metal flange.
Giles Habibula scrambled down into the pit, and examined a triple circle of projecting metal rods.
“Ah, me!” he moaned with dismay.
“If that last lock was difficult, this one is impossible.
The masters of the comet couldn’t open it themselves, with all their precious science, if ever they lost the combination.
What a lock!
You could try possible combinations at random till the universe runs down, and the odds are a million to one the door would still be closed.”
His thick fingers, so uncannily sensitive, so amazingly deft, were already swiftly busy, sliding the rods in and out, twirling them.
Intently he was listening, although Bob Star could hear no faintest sound.
The others clung to the flange above him.
Bob Star, at intervals, was still acutely ill.
And momentarily he expected to see the dread, shining pillar of one of the Cometeers materialize beside him, perhaps to speak with the triumphant voice of Stephen Oreo.
Urgently, Jay Kalam inquired at last, “Can’t you do it, Giles!”
The old man looked up, to wipe sweat from his sick yellow face with the back of his hand.
He shook his head.
“It’s a fearful test of my genius, Jay.
Never was such a lock built in the System.
The emperors of the comet must not trust their own guards.”
Wearily, he bent again.