The rockets washed black pinnacles with roaring blue flame, and the Purple Dream flashed upward from Pluto’s cragged moon—off at last, John Star exulted savagely, off at last for far-off Barnard’s Star, to the aid of Aladoree!
“The delay———” whispered Jay Kalam.
“Too long, I’m afraid.
That black spider-ship has got too close—we can hardly escape it, now!“
12 Storm in Space
Cerberus, Moon of Pluto, fell behind, a cold gray speck, and vanished.
The Black Planet itself was swallowed in the infinite black abyss, and the splendid star that was the sun began to fade and dwindle in Orion.
They passed the speed of light.
The Sun and the stars behind were visible now only with rays they had overtaken; picked up and refracted in the lenses and prisms of the tele-periscopes, to correct the distortion of speed.
Giles Habibula lived, now, in the generator room.
Under the care of his fat and oddly steady hands, the geodynes ran almost perfectly.
That ominous snarl of destructive vibration went unheard for hours at a time.
And the Purple Dream drove on.
The tiny worlds of men were lost behind.
Ahead, the stars of Ophiuchus slowly spread, but still not even the highest powers of the tele-periscopes could show the faint point of Barnard’s Star—so dim in stellar death that it was only the tenth magnitude, as seen from Earth.
And only their haunted minds could picture its lone evil world, where Aladoree had been taken.
They drove on, day after day, at the utmost speed of straining generators—and the black flier followed.
Light from it would never overtake them, now.
The tele-periscopes failed to show its monstrous spider-shape.
Only the geodesic telltale screen betrayed it—for the telltale mechanism registered geodesic over-drive fields, instantaneously.
John Star begged Giles Habibula to nurse more thrust from the over-loaded geodynes, and he watched the faint red fleck on the screen.
It seemed to stand motionless, now.
Whether the generators ran well or ill, its distance never changed.
“They’re playing with us,” he muttered once, uneasily.
“No matter how fast we go, we never gain an inch.”
“Just following.”
Gnawing worry was apparent, even in Jay Kalam’s calm.
“They can catch us when they like.
Or maybe—if their communications equipment is up to it—they’ll just signal their friends at home to have our welcome ready.”
“I wonder why they don’t attack us, now?”
“Waiting to see our plans, I suppose. Or, more likely, they’re still hoping for a chance to get the Commander back, alive.”
For Adam Ulnar was still locked in the brig, a cheerful and philosophic prisoner with no apparent remorse for his treason; he had asked for paper and was busy writing the memoirs of his long career, for the proud archives of the Purple Hall.
Hopefully now, John Star whispered,
“If they won’t attack, perhaps we can give them the slip.”
Jay Kalam shook his dark head, slowly.
“I can see no way.”
On they drove, into the star-glittering crystal black of interstellar space.
All four of them grew haggard, from want of sleep, from the tension of effort and dread.
Only Jay Kalam appeared almost unchanged, always deliberate and cool, always gravely pleasant.
John Star’s face was white, his eyes burning with anxiety.
Hal Samdu, grown nervous and irritable, muttered to himself; he knotted his huge and useless fists, and sometimes glared at imaginary enemies.
Even Giles Habibula, incredibly, lost weight until the skin hung in pouches under his hollowed, leaden eyes.
Day by day the Sun grew smaller, until it was dwarfed by Betel-geuse and Rigel, until it was a faint white star, lost amid the receding splendors of Orion.
In the tele-periscopes, Barnard’s Star appeared and grew.
Runaway sun!
Red, feeble, dying dwarf. Racing northward out of the constellation Ophiuchus, in mad flight from the Serpent and the Scorpion. Long ago christened “Barnard’s Runaway Star,” from its discoverer and its remarkable proper motion, it was the nearest star of the northern sky and the nearest found to have a habitable planet.
Habitable—so the censored and fragmentary reports of Eric Ul-nar’s expedition had described it.
But the mad survivors of the expedition, rotting away in guarded hospital wards of maladies that the Legion specialists in planetary medicine could neither understand nor cure, had shrieked and whispered of a weird domain of half-known horror.
The rulers of that planet were the monstrous Medusae, and it was scarcely habitable for men.
John Star was watching that ancient, expiring sun one day, an eye of dull red evil in the tele-periscope.