Collected Short Fiction, page 246
“Staven Or-rco!” He caught the name again. And her word for the cometeers: “Aythrin!” Both were many times repeated, but there was no other word he understood.
Tears glittered in her eyes. She caught his shoulders, as if to shake him into comprehension. Then she collapsed in his arms, trembling with sobs.
The blue point of the sun had set, and the comet reigned. Its awful face, a vast, sharp-edged sheet of ominous pale-green flame, spanned the dark sky from horizon to zenith. Visibly, terribly, it grew.
The surface of the asteroid was hideous with its un-Earthly light. The great building was warped into an unreal palace of nightmare. Trees sprawled under it in black masses, like dark monsters crouching. The higher, barren rocks glittered beneath it like fantastic spires of ice.
The Halcyon Bird had become a green ghost ship, when Bob Star and the girl came stumbling back to it. The others were waiting outside the air lock, staring in awe-struck apprehension at the fearful sky. They looked ghastly, spectral. The terrible radiance had turned their flesh lividly pale; their faces were masks of uncanny horror.
There was to Bob Star something grotesquely incongruous in the scholarly calm of Jay Kalam’s voice, speaking quietly to Giles Habibula.
“Obviously,” he was saying, “the Cometeers are able to generate and control a force analogous to what we know as gravitation. We have an inkling of the possibilities, from the theory of the geodyne, and from the principle of our own gravity cells.
“Apparently, however, they are able to set up directional or tube-fields, that are in effect beams of force. They are instantaneous, and their power doesn’t fall off appreciably with distance. And evidently they carry almost illimitable energy, for they dragged Pluto out of the system as readily as they pulled the Invincible off her course.
“Probably the ships of the Cometeers are moved by the reaction of such invisible beams, acting against planets or other massive bodies. And no doubt the propulsion of the entire comet is accomplished in the same way, by reaction against the mass of the universe.
“The repulsion which, before, drove the Halcyon Bird back from the surface of the comet, is probably a variation of the same force.”
“Ah, so, Jay,” murmured the old man, when he paused.
But the livid, ghastly moon face of Giles Habibula was lifted toward the fearful flood of green flame swallowing the sky; and he gave no other sign of having heard.
“Such feats,” Jay Kalam’s even voice went on, “must require tremendous power. They must have some source a thousand times more efficient even than our atomic power tubes——”
HIS VOICE fell away into a chasm of breathless silence.
With appalling speed, now, the green edges of the comet were rushing outward. They were like green curtains dropping toward every horizon.
Bob Star had to swallow, to find his voice. It sounded harsh and rasping in the dreadful silence. It made Giles Habibula start and moan.
He asked Jay Kalam: “Shall we go aboard?”
“The rest of you may, if you wish,” said the commander. “The ship is helpless; I don’t know that it would be safer. I don’t know what the danger is. I don’t know what will happen when we strike the wall of the comet.
“But I’m going to stay out here on the field, so that I can see it better.”
Bob Star caught Kay Nymidee’s arm, and drew her a little toward the air lock. But she shook her head, and looked up at the expanding sea of the comet.
Abruptly, Bob Star had the unpleasant sensation that the asteroid was falling, with their bodies beneath—falling into a tremendous green abyss. The pale, sharp edges of it rushed down to the horizon, and the whole sky was a dome of flaming green.
He heard Jay Kalam whisper: “We’re about to strike it!”
A thin, agonized wail quavered from the lips of Giles Habibula. “Mortal me!” he gasped. “What will happen?”
Bob Star put his arms around Kay Nymidee, moved her a little into the shelter of the shining ship. What would happen? Would there be an impact? A hurricane of wind? Would the radiation harm them?
He waited, breathless. He could feel the quick beat of the girl’s heart against his side. There was an odd little flicker in the green vault of the sky.
But nothing happened. Waiting became unendurable. Shakily, he whispered: “When, commander? When will we strike?”
He heard Jay Kalam draw a deep, even breath.
“We’ve passed the shell of green,” he heard the commander’s calm voice. “We’re already inside the comet.”
Trembling, he gasped: “Already?”
“Look at the sky,” said the quiet voice, “and you will see.”
XX.
BOB STAR walked unsteadily beside Kay Nymidee, away from the hull of the Halcyon Bird. His bewildered eyes swept the sky. It was still green, an inverted bowl of pale, weird-hued flame. But it was swarming, now, with strange celestial bodies.
His startled glance darted from one to another.
They were mottled disks, like dark moons, strung across the green. They were of various sizes, variously colored, patched with a thousand merging shades of red, orange, yellow, brown, gray, white, black. All were flooded with sinister green.
They were clustered planets, crowding the green sky! The patches were continental outlines. The vast areas of green, he thought, must be seas, reflecting the green of the sky.
“A sun!” Jay Kalam was breathing, voiceless with amazement. “A sun within the comet!”
And following his steady, pointing arm, Bob Star saw a great ball of purple flame. Its hot color was fantastically strange, against the green. It was huge; it looked three times the size of the system’s sun, as seen from his home on Phobos.
Kay Nymidee had stepped quickly a little away from him. Her slender white arm, trembling, was pointing at one of the swarming dark planets, which hung well above the horizon. Unlike the others, it was not mottled. It presented an unflawed disk of indigo.
Between that vast indigo planet, and the globe of the purple sun, Bob Star saw three tiny lines of purple, parallel and close together. They were like three glowing, purple wires stretched from world to sun.
“Bob! Jay! Hal! Giles!”
The girl was calling them all by their names, softly accented. And still she was pointing at that colossal, featureless world of violet-blue.
“Aythrin!” she cried urgently. “Staven Or-rco!”
She ran to touch the bright, green-glinting hull of the Halcyon Bird, and then gestured as if it had risen toward the indigo world.
“Staven Or-rco!” she repeated, and ground her small hands together, as if obliterating something.
“See!” exclaimed Bob Star, eagerly. “She wants us to go to that blue planet! Stephen Orco is there, with the Cometeers—she calls them Aythrin. She wants us to go there, and kill him.”
The girl had watched him as he spoke, brown eyes shining.
Now she seized his arm, speaking at him furiously in her own language. She nodded, shook her head, shrugged, made faces, gesticulated.
Bob Star put his hands on her shoulders, to try to calm her. “It’s no use, kid,” he said. “We can’t understand. And we can’t fly the Halcyon Bird, if that’s what you want——”
“She has something more than that to tell us,” said the commander. “I wonder if she could draw it?”
He found writing materials in his pockets, and thrust them into her hands. She grasped them eagerly, when he demonstrated their use. She drew a circle, and pointed at the great indigo planet. Then she made some drawing within the circle, and held out the paper, talking rapidly again.
“The circle means the planet,” Bob Star said. “But the marking inside——”
He had to shake his head, as the others did.
And tears of frustration came suddenly into the girl’s eyes. She flung the paper down, with an angry, bewildered gesture, and burst into stormy tears, overcome by the manifest impossibility of her task.
Jay Kalam shook his dark head, regretfully.
“It’s too bad,” he said slowly. “I’m willing to grant, now, Bob. that she’s a native of the comet—although her humanity seems contrary to orthodox science. And I believe that she has some very important information about the Cometeers and Stephen Orco.
“But communication seems impossible. Without any common background of languages or culture, or even of thought forms, it would take her months, brilliant as she evidently is, to learn enough English to convey any complex or abstract ideas.”
He turned abruptly, and peered briefly up at the vast purple sun.
“We must go aboard, Bob,” he said, “and take what observations we can. We must discover as much as we can about the comet—and about what is happening to us.”
An odd little hush came into his voice.
“I think,” he went on, “that we won’t have much time for observations, Bob.”
“Why?”
“I believe that the asteroid is plunging on, toward that purple sun.”
FOR A TIME, within the little bridge room, they worked for the most part silently, except for whispered exclamations. Bob Star was speechless with the ever-renewed impact of the comet’s supernal wonder. It was Jay Kalam, still gravely collected, who began to put their discoveries into words.
“The comet,” he began quietly, “is a swarm of planets. We’ve counted one hundred and forty-three. Since we entered on the forward side of the asteroid, we must have seen them nearly all. We knew already, from its perturbations of the system, that the comet’s mass is approximately a thousand times that of Earth. The purple sun accounts for rather less than a fifth of it. The average mass of the planets, then, must be over five times that of Earth.
“These planets have been built into a ship. The green shell is the hull—an armor of repulsive force. The planets are arranged inside of it, spaced about a great ellipsoid——”
Bob Star nodded, and then said: “They are. But I don’t see how such a system could be stable. Such great masses, so closely crowded. What keeps them from collision, or from falling into the purple sun?”
“They must be held in place with etheric tube fields—with beams of force forming a stable network,” said Jay Kalam. “Those invisible beams are the frame of the ship.
“The purple sun,” he went on, speaking slowly, with a half-absent deliberation, as if merely to clarify his own conception of the comet’s amazing nature,—“the purple sun is at one focus of the ellipse. And the great indigo planet which so interested the girl is at the other——”
“Just look at it!” Tense-voiced, Bob Star spoke from the ocular of a telescope.
“What do you see, Bob?”
“The surface of it is absolutely smooth, like dark-blue armor,” Bob Star told him. “And there’re machines scattered over it. They’re far apart. And they must be enormous, to be visible at this distance——”
“Machines? What kind?”
“They’re too vast and complicated to describe. They must be miles high. Mostly built of something red. Towers, and moving shapes—disks and beams. Great balanced tubes, like telescope barrels, only they’re too long and thin.
“Over each one, there’s a kind of shimmering dome of green, that you can just see——”
His voice fell off, with a little gasp.
Jay Kalam waited a moment, rubbing at his dark jaw, and then asked: “What now?”
“You can see those three shining lines?” Bob Star asked, with poorly repressed excitement. “Like three wires stretched between the planet and the purple sun?”
“Yes?”
“Well, I’ve found them. And they’re great, shining beams. They come from the three biggest machines I’ve seen, spaced at the corners of a triangle. Three purple rays, shooting out toward the purple sun——”
“I see!” said Jay Kalam softly. “I believe I see it, now.”
BOB STAR turned reluctantly away from the telescope, rubbing at his eyes.
“Yes, commander?”
“The purple sun is not a real sun, like ours,” said Jay Kalam. “Our Sun has three hundred times the mass of the entire comet. That purple sun is far smaller than Jupiter.
“Its color, as well as its size, marks it off from natural luminaries. Its light, you recall, is almost monochromatic; it radiates no appreciable heat.
“What it is, Bob, is an atomic power generator. It is one more creation of the science of the Cometeers—the power room of the comet ship!
“That triple beam is the conduit that taps its power, and conveys it to the blue planet. And the blue planet must be the engine room and the bridge of the ship. The power from the purple sun must be distributed through the other machines you saw, to generate the etheric tube fields of force that maintain the organization of the comet and drive it through space.”
“And then,” Bob Star whispered, “that sun—it’s merely a fuel tank for the comet?”
“It must be, Bob. A fuel tank. And a furnace where matter is annihilated, to liberate fluid energy. It isn’t a natural sun. Atoms break down to supply the energy of natural suns. But that normal process must be too slow to supply the prodigious demands of the Cometeers. They must consume matter at a terrific rate, when the comet is driving through space at speeds even beyond that of light itself.
“And the fuel must be replenished.”
Bob Star looked at him, and his face went a little white. His hands clenched. “So that’s why!” he gasped. “That’s why I couldn’t recognize Pluto among these planets?”
Jay Kalam nodded, his dark eyes sober.
“It’s a week,” he said, “since we saw Pluto drawn into the comet. The Cometeers must have already stripped it of life—of everything they valued—and flung it into the purple sun!”
He was silent for a little time. His long, dark face was haggard, drawn, and rigid as a mask of death. And the voice that came from the thin lips was low, harsh, almost sepulchral.
“That seems to complete our picture of the Cometeers. They are universal marauders. They rove space from sun to sun. They pillage planets, and feed their vampire lives upon the living things they find. And they seize the planets themselves, to build into the comet swarm, or to burn in their purple sun, for fuel——”
Bob Star was yet staring at him, his lean face whiter still.
“Then,” he whispered blankly, “the asteroid’s flight toward the purple sun will not be stopped?”
The head behind that rigid, graven mask shook slightly.
“I think not,” said Jay Kalam, solemnly. “The Cometeers have already once raided the asteroid. Probably they have no farther interest in it, except as a speck of fuel.”
Absently, he was stroking again at his jaw. He asked presently, very softly: “How long have we, Bob?”
Bob Star remained standing for a moment in a dark reverie; he started nervously, and said, “Yes, sir!” and turned to busy himself hastily with telescope, calculator, and chronometer.
He straightened at last, shakily, and wiped sweat from his white forehead, with his hand.
“Three hours,” he whispered, huskily. “In three hours, commander, we will plunge into the purple sun.”
XXI.
JAY KALAM closed the door of the little bridge room with a weary finality. For a moment he leaned heavily against it. Then, walking with tired, dragging feet, he followed Bob Star down the metal length of the little covered deck, and out through the small cylinder of the open air lock.
Kay Nymidee, Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula were still outside, on the gravel of the little rocket field beside the long white house. They were ghostlike, uncanny, in the pallid-green radiance that shone from all the sky.
Hal Samdu’s gaunt, gigantic figure was standing bolt upright. His great, gnarled hands were clenching and opening again, convulsively. His shaggy head was flung back, and his blue eyes were fixed upon the indigo disk of the master planet. His rugged face was grimly savage.
“If Stephen Orco is there”—his voice was rumbling, harsh—“we must go—some way—and kill him! For Aladoree, Giles Habibula and Kay Nymidee were sitting together on the gravel. The girl was marking little diagrams with her finger, on the ground, and talking swiftly to the old man. He was patiently listening, wearily shaking his yellow head.
“Old Giles is sorry, lass,” he was saying gently. “But ’tis no use——”
They all looked up when Jay Kalam and Bob Star came down from the valve.
“Well, Jay?” boomed Hal Samdu. “Now we are within the comet, with Stephen Orco. How shall we move to kill him?”
Jay Kalam stepped back a little, wearily, to lean against the bright, green-washed hull of the Halcyon Bird. His dark eyes closed for a moment, and his long face, in that un-Earthly light, was a stiff mask of pain. “Still, Hal,” he said slowly, “there’s nothing we can do.”
He looked at Giles Habibula and the girl, with weary pity.
“In three hours,” he said, “the asteroid will fall into that purple sun. And we have no means to depart. We must perish, with it!”
Hal Samdu’s massive face twitched to a spasm of pain. Brokenly, he gasped a name: “Aladoree——”
Giles Habibula surged apprehensively to his feet. The globe of his little head rolled back, his small eyes peered fearfully at the purple sun, burning huge in the weirdly green sky.
“Mortal me!” he gasped convulsively. “But three blessed hours, Jay?” He swung toward the sagging figure of the tall commander; his thin voice grew pleading. “For life’s sake, Jay, can’t you give us more than that? Old Giles isn’t ready to die——”
His small, tearful eyes rested for a moment beseechingly upon the stiff mask of Jay Kalam’s face. Then he shook his head.
“Ah, me!” he moaned. “ ’Tis an evil way to die—burned alive in a mortal purple sun, within a comet! Ah, the ingratitude of man! That an aged, wounded legionnaire should be so rewarded, for his years of faithful service to the blessed system!”
He blinked the tears out of his dull eyes.
“Ah”—he choked—“death—death! Is old Giles so feeble he must yield to death? Must the eternal fire of his precious genius be extinguished, now?”
