Moaning under his breath, Giles Habibula applied himself.
As the inner door, also, closed behind them, Bob Star clung to the glowing wall, regarding the box with a certain incredulous awe. Already he was a little disappointed.
His vague expectations had included something more impressive than this red chest, so small that one man might almost have carried it.
“It’s no use,” he whispered.
“No use!”
For what manner of weapon, hidden in so small a space, could defeat the tremendous science whose awe-compelling evidences had surrounded them so long?
He went cold and rigid with alarm when another vibration whispered through the palely shining metal.
Kay Nymidee began to tremble.
From her white, drawn lips came a strained, unconscious little cry.
“The outer door,” Jay Kalam whispered.
“They are coining.”
“Ah!” gasped Giles Habibula.
“Here!
It’s open!”
Bob Star sprang apprehensively to his side, to help throw back the lid of the scarlet box.
He hardly knew what he had expected to find.
He couldn’t imagine what might destroy that shining thing which now held the mind of Stephen Oreo.
He peered anxiously into the box, and his jaw fell slack open upon a voiceless cry of dismay.
For it was empty.
For a moment he felt numb and faint with consternation.
Intolerable vertigo came back.
He was shaken with painful, futile retchings.
The green walls of the small, square room spun about him.
Quivering cold with sweat, he clung to the edge of the empty box.
“Jay, it’s all in vain,” he heard Giles Habibula’s weary murmur.
“There’s nothing—” The old man’s breath went out, with a hopeless sigh.
“Ah, me!” he wheezed.
“Never did fate perpetrate such a fearful jest!
“Never did men ever struggle so, for no reward at all.”
His bald head shook sadly.
“We roved the frozen night of Neptune’s polar desert to find a ship, and fought a mad cannibal for it.
We voyaged the perilous wastes of space, until the shining monster met us.
We dwelt amid the haunting horror of the asteroid, and entered the terror of the comet upon it.
We plunged close to death in that atomic furnace.
We took that ship, when they tried to make cattle of us, and came fifteen thousand miles upon it, into the core of an armored planet.
We worked locks that were fearful difficult, and made our bodies into a living ship of space—ah, poor Hal, who perished for us!
Now old Giles Habibula has exhausted his precious well of genius, to break into the strongest safe in all the universe.
“But all in vain.
The thing is empty—”
Sobs choked his voice.
Moved by a thought that the weapon might be really in the box, perhaps concealed by another invisibility-device, Bob groped for it hopefully.
His searching fingers found only hard bare metal.
With a helpless shrug, he looked up at Jay Kalam and Kay Nymidee.
Ghostly white, the girl was staring down into the empty box.
Her bloodless face had gone flaccid with despair.
Her eyes were wide, dull with the death of hope.
Her body looked limp, nerveless—he thought she would have fallen, had there been gravitation to make anything fall.
Jay Kalam was rigid and silent, ashen-faced.
Though he somehow had kept his expression of grave composure, it had no meaning.
His eyes were blank windows into vacant space, with no light in them.