Collected Short Fiction, page 253
“The diary records a curious struggle. One entry praises your perfections, your supernal powers; it glows with his love for you—for he loved you, with the love of an artist for his masterpiece, and the love of a man for his son.
“The next is a gloomy record of doubts and misgivings, filled with evidences of the fiendish coldness that he could never eradicate. It ends with the determination to destroy you.
“Unfortunately, however, Eldo Arrynu never brought himself to the task. His love forced him into a regrettable compromise. He sealed you into a magnelithium cylinder, with everything necessary to preserve your life. And he cast you adrift in space, far from the asteroid.
“By concealing his identity from you,” said the commander, solemnly, “he hoped to escape the consequences of his folly. But even so, you destroyed your maker, Stephen Orco, when you loosed the Cometeers upon the system!
“The mental torture of your long, helpless confinement in the cylinder must have been an adverse influence in the formation of your character. I suspect that much of your desire for power and superiority is by way of compensation for that imprisonment.
“But you were never human——”
“I am grateful, commander,” broke in the mocking levity of Stephen Orco’s voice, “for this revelation. But I fail to perceive any advantage to you in having made it. Certainly it makes me no more merciful to you or to mankind to know that I am not a man.”
The farther shining form made an imperative forward motion.
The voice of Stephen Orco said, hastily: “Now you may prepare to die.”
LISTENING to the commander’s quiet, solemn narrative, Bob Star had been staring fixedly at the luminous shape that held the mind and the voice of Stephen Orco: the pillar of spinning greenish mist, emerald-ringed, between the red throbbing star and the violet.
His breast was racked with the conflict of strange emotions. So Stephen Orco was no man, had never been! That explained part of the old fear, the terrible, ancient hatred that had so twisted his life. It was no man that had seared his brain with the flaming ray of torture, on that fearful night at the academy—it was an alien thing!
With that knowledge, the bright pulse of pain behind the old scar seemed to waver in its beat for the first time in nine years. And his haunting fear seemed to shrink.
He was still crouching beside the empty red box. And old Giles Habibula was still bent over it, beside him, still weeping noisily, and frequently blowing his nose.
“Now you may prepare to die,” he heard the swift, final words of Stephen Orco. “My colleague seems peculiarly apprehensive of your presence in the chamber of generation——”
The voice still spoke when Bob Star felt the slight, unobtrusive pressure of the old man’s arm against his side. And the thing was pressed into his hand from behind.
The clear, instant light of revelation burst upon him; he knew why the commander had fought, with his deliberate disclosures, for vital time.
He stole a quick glance at the object Giles Habibula had slipped into his hand. It was a black cube, two inches on an edge. Projecting from one face was a little red knob. Its surface had the soapy slickness of a polished gem. It felt cold. It was oddly heavy in this weightless spot, but more solid, he thought, than a similar bulk of lead.
He tried to conceal his abrupt, quivering tension. In the first instant, he knew that this was the weapon they had sought—and that he himself must use it, very quickly! Before those twin, flaming specters, he could not pass it to another.
And this was his chance! He recognized it, tremblingly. This was the moment he had yearned for through nine dreadful years—the opportunity to mend the broken something in him, to save his very sanity.
But the old scarlet pain shattered against him like an avalanche. The ancient fear shrieked: “You can’t!”
And his arm turned to ice.
Then—it all happened in fractional seconds, while Stephen Orco’s voice spoke a single sentence—he heard an eager little cry. And the bright image of Kay Nymidee came into the turmoil of his mind. The oval face smiled at him. The warmth of golden eyes thawed his fear.
Faint, shuddering, Bob Star twisted desperately at the scarlet knob.
A pale, ghostly streamer of silvery radiance swept from the opposite face of the ebon cube.
With a sharp, violent gesture that broke through the web of fear, he brought the cube up, so that the white beam swept toward Stephen Orco.
OUT OF THE AIR came the beginning of a low, apprehensive cry. It changed to a terrible scream. It died in a bubbling of pure, ultimate agony.
Bob Star’s glance followed the wisp of silver light. The two luminous beings, he saw, were already dissolving into ghostly swirls of scintillant atoms. They dissipated, vanished.
Stephen Orco and the lord of the comet were dead.
The green walls rushed away from Bob Star and he was lost in a dark void of terrible stillness. Time was stayed. His mind was frozen, and through it, like the reverberations of a colossal gong, quivered the fatal words: “Stephen Orco is dead. Stephen Orco is dead.”
In that strange cessation of life and time, the fact was at first paradoxically appalling. It shattered the orientation, the very meaning of his existence. Each repetition of those momentous words was a stunning blow that drove him deeper into the dark chaos of that static abyss.
Timeless eternities endured before that darkness and confusion was broken by the first glow of incredulous joy. Slowly, then, his mind was buoyed up with an ultimate satisfaction; it was lifted on the supernal wings of a deep content, and borne at last back toward awareness of the green-walled chamber.
His old fear, the sure realization had come to him, had died with Stephen Orco. He knew suddenly that he would never be afraid again. That monstrous thing, born in his brain as it lay helpless under the dread torture of the omega ray, was now forever banished. A singular elation had surged into him, to replace it, a secure and deathless confidence.
And he perceived abruptly that the pitiless throb of pain behind his old scar had ceased. Gratefully, he welcomed the deep, vast relaxation that came to ease the old strain. He knew suddenly that for nine years he had not truly rested, and that now he could.
It was the magic hand of a supernal psychic victory that had healed the old mental wound—although Jay Kalam afterward suggested that on the physical side the orange-colored organic ray from the green cone must have had some accidental therapeutic influence toward counteracting the sinister effects of the omega ray.
When awareness of the room came back he had dropped the black cube.
He pushed himself across to Kay Nymidee, and grasped her hands. They had been cold and rigid, but warmth was flowing back into them. Her face was suddenly flushed with joy, and her smile washed the shadows from it for the first time since Bob Star had known her.
“You did it, Kay,” he whispered. “You did it!”
She laughed, with a low, glad sound. Then she was in his arms, sobbing, almost hysterical.
CURIOUSLY, Jay Kalam picked up the little cube which had become covered with a thick, gleaming mass of white frost crystals. He brushed away the frost and turned the red knob again, but no silver ray responded.
“It seems to be dead,” he said. “Exhausted.”
“I remember,” Bob Star told him, “that it felt oddly light before I dropped it. And it was getting very cold. Perhaps I turned the knob more than necessary.”
The commander nodded.
“I suspect,” he said, “that you released a great deal of energy in some form——”
His grave tones broke off; his dark eyes flashed down at the cube; in a hushed, tense voice he asked: “Did you notice? They were both stricken before you lifted the ray!”
His lean finger scraped the stubble on his jaw.
“A very little of it was enough to destroy them. I wonder——”
He closed his dark eyes, and said deliberately: “The aythrin are complex etheric vortexes, constructs of vibration, fixed energy fields. Stephen Orco told us that. And they look somehow like magnetic fields made visible.
“Ordinarily they are stable, as the vibratory forces of an ordinary atom are stable—eternal. But this cube, I suppose, must have released some key vibration that destroyed their stability. It simply unlocked their own stored energy, to annihilate them, as atoms are disrupted by their interfering fields in our power tubes.
“That, at least, is a suggestion——”
“Jay?” interrupted the anxious whine of Giles Habibula, who had ceased his noisy weeping. “The mortal shining creature—it is dead?”
“I’m certain,” Jay Kalam told him, “that Stephen Orco and the master of the comet are dead—and perhaps others of the Cometeers. The force Bob released was evidently very great.”
“And Bob’s blessed mother,” the old man pursued, “will be safe, now?”
“If she was uninjured, Giles, I think so. Safe—and free to use AKKA to defend herself and the system. For Stephen Orco won’t be using his knowledge against her any longer.”
“Ah, so,” wheezed Giles Habibula, happily. The scarred yellow moon of his face was beaming. He wiped the tears out of his small eyes with the back of his hand, and blew his nose again. His sickness, for the moment, was forgotten.
“If Aladoree is saved, nothing else matters so mortal much!”
Jay Kalam nodded, gravely smiling. His dark eyes were fixed again, speculatively, upon the little cube which was still crusted with gleaming frost.
“Where did you find it, Giles?” he asked. “We thought the box was empty.”
“Ah, so,” wheezed the old man. “It was empty.”
He brushed his fat hands together happily.
“The mortal box was empty,” he repeated. “But old Giles has the knack of getting at locked and hidden things. Surely you must at last admit his precious genius, Jay, when it has saved the blessed system?”
“Of course, Giles,” said the commander, with smiling admiration. “How did you find it?”
The dull round eyes looked down again at the empty box of scarlet metal, at the curious designs upon its sides, in argent and jet.
“The purpose of that pattern intrigued me,” said Giles Habibula, “for the makers of the mortal safe did not indulge in useless ornamentation. And it led my fingers to a hidden lock. The rods are set flush with the surface—they form the black circles in the design.
“My poor old fingers found the lock, just as the monsters came into the room. So I gave you the signal, Jay, and then set out to master the lock while you diverted the attention of the fearful creatures.
“Ah, me!” he sighed, “the genius of old Giles Habibula will never again endure such a desperate trial. His poor old heart would fail. Ah, Jay, death was mortal near when I solved the riddle of the lock.
“And then, of a sudden, the blessed cube was lying in the bottom of the box. Life knows where it had been!” His small eyes peered up intently as he asked, “What would you think, Jay?”
Reflectively, the commander was rubbing at the dried blood on his chin.
“Outside of our space, it may have been,” he said slowly. “That wouldn’t be impossible to the science of the Cometeers. It must have been that! The cube was concealed in extra-dimensional space, held, no doubt, by fields of force that drew it back when the secret lock was worked.”
His dark eyes fell thoughtfully to the little cube again.
“It seems very stupid of them,” Bob Star put in, “to have delayed so long to kill us, when we were so near the secret of——”
The commander shook his head.
“I think I have it,” he said. “I think the Cometeers were not quite frank with Stephen Orco. They let him believe that his new body was wholly invulnerable. They kept the secret of this weapon as an advantage to counterbalance his knowledge of AKKA.
“Remember, he referred to this place as the ‘chamber of generation.’ He must have been deceived as to the nature of its secret.
“Stephen Orco, then, must have been quite confident of his own immortality, and free of any fear until the end.
“His companion, the lord of the comet, was quite obviously apprehensive, and impatient to be done with us. But he was unable to take any very precipitate action without danger of rousing the suspicions of Stephen Orco.
“It was that curious situation that gave us the time——”
JAY KALAM was interrupted by a bulky missile that came plunging down the square well of the entrance, and thudded noisily against the green metal wall opposite.
It gasped for breath, straightened, and became the body of Hal Samdu. It was still marked with battle, and patched with reddened bandages. But the rugged face bore an eager smile, and the blue, clear eyes were shining joyously.
“Aye, Bob,” he rumbled, “I told your mother I should find you in here.”
“My mother?” echoed Bob Star, husky with gladness. “Then—then she——”
“Aye!” said the giant. “She is waiting on the ship, outside. And your father, too. The strange slaves of the Cometeers are about them. But you needn’t mind them, for they are friends, since the damned aythrin are gone——”
Gravely eager, Jay Kalam’s voice cut in: “The aythrin are gone? All of them?”
Hal Samdu nodded his shaggy head.
“Aye,” he rumbled. “So John Star has learned from the slaves. The power you set free in here destroyed them all, to the limits of the comet.”
“I had hoped so,” said Jay Kalam.
And his dark, joyous eyes fell again to the little black cube, from which the frost was beginning to melt.
Hal Samdu’s big hand grasped Bob Star’s shoulder.
“Come, Bob,” he said, “to your mother.”
John Star was waiting at the entrance, to help them to the deck of the ship. His small, hard body was trim and soldierly as ever, in the green of the legion. His bronzed face was smiling with pleasure.
Bob Star was secretly amazed when his father embraced him, and he felt the wetness of a tear on that tanned cheek. A lump came up in his own throat when his father called him, for the first time in many years, not “Robert,” but “Bob.”
Then he was on the red, smooth metal of the railed deck. Above was the twilight of the hollow world, still silently throbbing with the power of those unimaginable machines, whose builders were gone. Far back, beyond the dome in the center of the deck, were ranked a score of the strange slaves of the Cometeers, white globes, slender green cones, lank, many-limbed red giants.
The slaves were silent. Bob Star sensed their awe of these few insignificant bipeds, who had so amazingly vanquished their dread lords.
HIS MOTHER was waiting. She came to meet him, walking with the same slender grace. Even in this dusk, the old magic lights were playing through her brown hair. And her cool gray eyes were luminous with joy.
Rejoicing to the comforting feel of weight and balance, that banished the last threat of sickness, Bob Star ran to take her in his arms. She kissed him and laughed, blinking the tears out of her eyes.
“My son!” she gasped, happily.
“Bob! You’ve grown a frightful beard!”
She embraced Jay Kalam and Giles Habibula, who long ago had been her guards.
Then Bob Star presented Kay Nymidee, with his arm around her, saying: “Mother, here is a stranger. She is alone; her parents and all her people were murdered by the Cometeers. She doesn’t speak much English—yet. I want to make her welcome, mother. For it was she who guided us to victory; and because—because I love her!”
Through a painful constriction in his throat; he choked out the name: “Kay—Kay Nymidee.”
“Hal told me,” his mother said.
Mistily, he saw his mother smile, and clasp the shy and diffident girl in her arms.
“Kay,” he heard her murmur, “darling—my brave little darling——”
And Kay Nymidee whispered something, softly, in her own strange language, and laughed a little, shakily, with a weary, happy relief.
Smiling gently, his mother took his hand, and Kay’s, and put them together.
“I’m glad, Bob,” she whispered. “Glad——”
Bob Star tried to say something, but the queer little ache in his throat wouldn’t let him speak. He was beginning to feel tired. A singular peace had been stealing into him, since the old pain was dead. For the first time in nine years, he wanted to rest. He was sleepy.
“Kay will go bade with us to the Purple Hall,” he heard the cool magic of his mother’s voice. And suddenly he was yearning poignantly for the music of Kay Nymidee’s laughter, in the peaceful beauty of the gardens of Phobos.
“This ship will take us there,” his mother was saying, “in two days, John says. These queer beings seem “eager to obey.”
“When we are rested”—his own voice was murmuring—“when we are rested, I’m going to learn Spanish, and teach Kay English——”
The girl stirred in his arms; slowly, softly, she whispered, “Yes—darling—”
His father’s crisp voice, then, cut through his fatigue: “—then, commander, what is to be done about the comet?”
“There are, I think, three possible alternatives,” he heard Jay Kalam’s deliberate reply, “and the choice among them must be left to the council. The entire comet may be destroyed with AKKA—that would be completely irrational. Or it may be kept as a permanent part of the system. Or the liberated races of the comet, if they are capable and desirous of doing so, may be permitted to depart in it.
“I should vote for the last alternative.
“At any rate”—and enthusiasm glowed within the grave, tones—“the comet offers us a magnificent accession of new knowledge. I am going to return immediately with an expedition of experts in every branch of learning. A stupendous opportunity——”
Bob Star was very tired, and Kay Nymidee’s arm felt warm against him.
Faintly, as from a vast distance, he heard Giles Habibula’s plaintive voice: “Come, Hal, and let us see if there are any proper human victuals upon the precious ship!”
THE END
“The next is a gloomy record of doubts and misgivings, filled with evidences of the fiendish coldness that he could never eradicate. It ends with the determination to destroy you.
“Unfortunately, however, Eldo Arrynu never brought himself to the task. His love forced him into a regrettable compromise. He sealed you into a magnelithium cylinder, with everything necessary to preserve your life. And he cast you adrift in space, far from the asteroid.
“By concealing his identity from you,” said the commander, solemnly, “he hoped to escape the consequences of his folly. But even so, you destroyed your maker, Stephen Orco, when you loosed the Cometeers upon the system!
“The mental torture of your long, helpless confinement in the cylinder must have been an adverse influence in the formation of your character. I suspect that much of your desire for power and superiority is by way of compensation for that imprisonment.
“But you were never human——”
“I am grateful, commander,” broke in the mocking levity of Stephen Orco’s voice, “for this revelation. But I fail to perceive any advantage to you in having made it. Certainly it makes me no more merciful to you or to mankind to know that I am not a man.”
The farther shining form made an imperative forward motion.
The voice of Stephen Orco said, hastily: “Now you may prepare to die.”
LISTENING to the commander’s quiet, solemn narrative, Bob Star had been staring fixedly at the luminous shape that held the mind and the voice of Stephen Orco: the pillar of spinning greenish mist, emerald-ringed, between the red throbbing star and the violet.
His breast was racked with the conflict of strange emotions. So Stephen Orco was no man, had never been! That explained part of the old fear, the terrible, ancient hatred that had so twisted his life. It was no man that had seared his brain with the flaming ray of torture, on that fearful night at the academy—it was an alien thing!
With that knowledge, the bright pulse of pain behind the old scar seemed to waver in its beat for the first time in nine years. And his haunting fear seemed to shrink.
He was still crouching beside the empty red box. And old Giles Habibula was still bent over it, beside him, still weeping noisily, and frequently blowing his nose.
“Now you may prepare to die,” he heard the swift, final words of Stephen Orco. “My colleague seems peculiarly apprehensive of your presence in the chamber of generation——”
The voice still spoke when Bob Star felt the slight, unobtrusive pressure of the old man’s arm against his side. And the thing was pressed into his hand from behind.
The clear, instant light of revelation burst upon him; he knew why the commander had fought, with his deliberate disclosures, for vital time.
He stole a quick glance at the object Giles Habibula had slipped into his hand. It was a black cube, two inches on an edge. Projecting from one face was a little red knob. Its surface had the soapy slickness of a polished gem. It felt cold. It was oddly heavy in this weightless spot, but more solid, he thought, than a similar bulk of lead.
He tried to conceal his abrupt, quivering tension. In the first instant, he knew that this was the weapon they had sought—and that he himself must use it, very quickly! Before those twin, flaming specters, he could not pass it to another.
And this was his chance! He recognized it, tremblingly. This was the moment he had yearned for through nine dreadful years—the opportunity to mend the broken something in him, to save his very sanity.
But the old scarlet pain shattered against him like an avalanche. The ancient fear shrieked: “You can’t!”
And his arm turned to ice.
Then—it all happened in fractional seconds, while Stephen Orco’s voice spoke a single sentence—he heard an eager little cry. And the bright image of Kay Nymidee came into the turmoil of his mind. The oval face smiled at him. The warmth of golden eyes thawed his fear.
Faint, shuddering, Bob Star twisted desperately at the scarlet knob.
A pale, ghostly streamer of silvery radiance swept from the opposite face of the ebon cube.
With a sharp, violent gesture that broke through the web of fear, he brought the cube up, so that the white beam swept toward Stephen Orco.
OUT OF THE AIR came the beginning of a low, apprehensive cry. It changed to a terrible scream. It died in a bubbling of pure, ultimate agony.
Bob Star’s glance followed the wisp of silver light. The two luminous beings, he saw, were already dissolving into ghostly swirls of scintillant atoms. They dissipated, vanished.
Stephen Orco and the lord of the comet were dead.
The green walls rushed away from Bob Star and he was lost in a dark void of terrible stillness. Time was stayed. His mind was frozen, and through it, like the reverberations of a colossal gong, quivered the fatal words: “Stephen Orco is dead. Stephen Orco is dead.”
In that strange cessation of life and time, the fact was at first paradoxically appalling. It shattered the orientation, the very meaning of his existence. Each repetition of those momentous words was a stunning blow that drove him deeper into the dark chaos of that static abyss.
Timeless eternities endured before that darkness and confusion was broken by the first glow of incredulous joy. Slowly, then, his mind was buoyed up with an ultimate satisfaction; it was lifted on the supernal wings of a deep content, and borne at last back toward awareness of the green-walled chamber.
His old fear, the sure realization had come to him, had died with Stephen Orco. He knew suddenly that he would never be afraid again. That monstrous thing, born in his brain as it lay helpless under the dread torture of the omega ray, was now forever banished. A singular elation had surged into him, to replace it, a secure and deathless confidence.
And he perceived abruptly that the pitiless throb of pain behind his old scar had ceased. Gratefully, he welcomed the deep, vast relaxation that came to ease the old strain. He knew suddenly that for nine years he had not truly rested, and that now he could.
It was the magic hand of a supernal psychic victory that had healed the old mental wound—although Jay Kalam afterward suggested that on the physical side the orange-colored organic ray from the green cone must have had some accidental therapeutic influence toward counteracting the sinister effects of the omega ray.
When awareness of the room came back he had dropped the black cube.
He pushed himself across to Kay Nymidee, and grasped her hands. They had been cold and rigid, but warmth was flowing back into them. Her face was suddenly flushed with joy, and her smile washed the shadows from it for the first time since Bob Star had known her.
“You did it, Kay,” he whispered. “You did it!”
She laughed, with a low, glad sound. Then she was in his arms, sobbing, almost hysterical.
CURIOUSLY, Jay Kalam picked up the little cube which had become covered with a thick, gleaming mass of white frost crystals. He brushed away the frost and turned the red knob again, but no silver ray responded.
“It seems to be dead,” he said. “Exhausted.”
“I remember,” Bob Star told him, “that it felt oddly light before I dropped it. And it was getting very cold. Perhaps I turned the knob more than necessary.”
The commander nodded.
“I suspect,” he said, “that you released a great deal of energy in some form——”
His grave tones broke off; his dark eyes flashed down at the cube; in a hushed, tense voice he asked: “Did you notice? They were both stricken before you lifted the ray!”
His lean finger scraped the stubble on his jaw.
“A very little of it was enough to destroy them. I wonder——”
He closed his dark eyes, and said deliberately: “The aythrin are complex etheric vortexes, constructs of vibration, fixed energy fields. Stephen Orco told us that. And they look somehow like magnetic fields made visible.
“Ordinarily they are stable, as the vibratory forces of an ordinary atom are stable—eternal. But this cube, I suppose, must have released some key vibration that destroyed their stability. It simply unlocked their own stored energy, to annihilate them, as atoms are disrupted by their interfering fields in our power tubes.
“That, at least, is a suggestion——”
“Jay?” interrupted the anxious whine of Giles Habibula, who had ceased his noisy weeping. “The mortal shining creature—it is dead?”
“I’m certain,” Jay Kalam told him, “that Stephen Orco and the master of the comet are dead—and perhaps others of the Cometeers. The force Bob released was evidently very great.”
“And Bob’s blessed mother,” the old man pursued, “will be safe, now?”
“If she was uninjured, Giles, I think so. Safe—and free to use AKKA to defend herself and the system. For Stephen Orco won’t be using his knowledge against her any longer.”
“Ah, so,” wheezed Giles Habibula, happily. The scarred yellow moon of his face was beaming. He wiped the tears out of his small eyes with the back of his hand, and blew his nose again. His sickness, for the moment, was forgotten.
“If Aladoree is saved, nothing else matters so mortal much!”
Jay Kalam nodded, gravely smiling. His dark eyes were fixed again, speculatively, upon the little cube which was still crusted with gleaming frost.
“Where did you find it, Giles?” he asked. “We thought the box was empty.”
“Ah, so,” wheezed the old man. “It was empty.”
He brushed his fat hands together happily.
“The mortal box was empty,” he repeated. “But old Giles has the knack of getting at locked and hidden things. Surely you must at last admit his precious genius, Jay, when it has saved the blessed system?”
“Of course, Giles,” said the commander, with smiling admiration. “How did you find it?”
The dull round eyes looked down again at the empty box of scarlet metal, at the curious designs upon its sides, in argent and jet.
“The purpose of that pattern intrigued me,” said Giles Habibula, “for the makers of the mortal safe did not indulge in useless ornamentation. And it led my fingers to a hidden lock. The rods are set flush with the surface—they form the black circles in the design.
“My poor old fingers found the lock, just as the monsters came into the room. So I gave you the signal, Jay, and then set out to master the lock while you diverted the attention of the fearful creatures.
“Ah, me!” he sighed, “the genius of old Giles Habibula will never again endure such a desperate trial. His poor old heart would fail. Ah, Jay, death was mortal near when I solved the riddle of the lock.
“And then, of a sudden, the blessed cube was lying in the bottom of the box. Life knows where it had been!” His small eyes peered up intently as he asked, “What would you think, Jay?”
Reflectively, the commander was rubbing at the dried blood on his chin.
“Outside of our space, it may have been,” he said slowly. “That wouldn’t be impossible to the science of the Cometeers. It must have been that! The cube was concealed in extra-dimensional space, held, no doubt, by fields of force that drew it back when the secret lock was worked.”
His dark eyes fell thoughtfully to the little cube again.
“It seems very stupid of them,” Bob Star put in, “to have delayed so long to kill us, when we were so near the secret of——”
The commander shook his head.
“I think I have it,” he said. “I think the Cometeers were not quite frank with Stephen Orco. They let him believe that his new body was wholly invulnerable. They kept the secret of this weapon as an advantage to counterbalance his knowledge of AKKA.
“Remember, he referred to this place as the ‘chamber of generation.’ He must have been deceived as to the nature of its secret.
“Stephen Orco, then, must have been quite confident of his own immortality, and free of any fear until the end.
“His companion, the lord of the comet, was quite obviously apprehensive, and impatient to be done with us. But he was unable to take any very precipitate action without danger of rousing the suspicions of Stephen Orco.
“It was that curious situation that gave us the time——”
JAY KALAM was interrupted by a bulky missile that came plunging down the square well of the entrance, and thudded noisily against the green metal wall opposite.
It gasped for breath, straightened, and became the body of Hal Samdu. It was still marked with battle, and patched with reddened bandages. But the rugged face bore an eager smile, and the blue, clear eyes were shining joyously.
“Aye, Bob,” he rumbled, “I told your mother I should find you in here.”
“My mother?” echoed Bob Star, husky with gladness. “Then—then she——”
“Aye!” said the giant. “She is waiting on the ship, outside. And your father, too. The strange slaves of the Cometeers are about them. But you needn’t mind them, for they are friends, since the damned aythrin are gone——”
Gravely eager, Jay Kalam’s voice cut in: “The aythrin are gone? All of them?”
Hal Samdu nodded his shaggy head.
“Aye,” he rumbled. “So John Star has learned from the slaves. The power you set free in here destroyed them all, to the limits of the comet.”
“I had hoped so,” said Jay Kalam.
And his dark, joyous eyes fell again to the little black cube, from which the frost was beginning to melt.
Hal Samdu’s big hand grasped Bob Star’s shoulder.
“Come, Bob,” he said, “to your mother.”
John Star was waiting at the entrance, to help them to the deck of the ship. His small, hard body was trim and soldierly as ever, in the green of the legion. His bronzed face was smiling with pleasure.
Bob Star was secretly amazed when his father embraced him, and he felt the wetness of a tear on that tanned cheek. A lump came up in his own throat when his father called him, for the first time in many years, not “Robert,” but “Bob.”
Then he was on the red, smooth metal of the railed deck. Above was the twilight of the hollow world, still silently throbbing with the power of those unimaginable machines, whose builders were gone. Far back, beyond the dome in the center of the deck, were ranked a score of the strange slaves of the Cometeers, white globes, slender green cones, lank, many-limbed red giants.
The slaves were silent. Bob Star sensed their awe of these few insignificant bipeds, who had so amazingly vanquished their dread lords.
HIS MOTHER was waiting. She came to meet him, walking with the same slender grace. Even in this dusk, the old magic lights were playing through her brown hair. And her cool gray eyes were luminous with joy.
Rejoicing to the comforting feel of weight and balance, that banished the last threat of sickness, Bob Star ran to take her in his arms. She kissed him and laughed, blinking the tears out of her eyes.
“My son!” she gasped, happily.
“Bob! You’ve grown a frightful beard!”
She embraced Jay Kalam and Giles Habibula, who long ago had been her guards.
Then Bob Star presented Kay Nymidee, with his arm around her, saying: “Mother, here is a stranger. She is alone; her parents and all her people were murdered by the Cometeers. She doesn’t speak much English—yet. I want to make her welcome, mother. For it was she who guided us to victory; and because—because I love her!”
Through a painful constriction in his throat; he choked out the name: “Kay—Kay Nymidee.”
“Hal told me,” his mother said.
Mistily, he saw his mother smile, and clasp the shy and diffident girl in her arms.
“Kay,” he heard her murmur, “darling—my brave little darling——”
And Kay Nymidee whispered something, softly, in her own strange language, and laughed a little, shakily, with a weary, happy relief.
Smiling gently, his mother took his hand, and Kay’s, and put them together.
“I’m glad, Bob,” she whispered. “Glad——”
Bob Star tried to say something, but the queer little ache in his throat wouldn’t let him speak. He was beginning to feel tired. A singular peace had been stealing into him, since the old pain was dead. For the first time in nine years, he wanted to rest. He was sleepy.
“Kay will go bade with us to the Purple Hall,” he heard the cool magic of his mother’s voice. And suddenly he was yearning poignantly for the music of Kay Nymidee’s laughter, in the peaceful beauty of the gardens of Phobos.
“This ship will take us there,” his mother was saying, “in two days, John says. These queer beings seem “eager to obey.”
“When we are rested”—his own voice was murmuring—“when we are rested, I’m going to learn Spanish, and teach Kay English——”
The girl stirred in his arms; slowly, softly, she whispered, “Yes—darling—”
His father’s crisp voice, then, cut through his fatigue: “—then, commander, what is to be done about the comet?”
“There are, I think, three possible alternatives,” he heard Jay Kalam’s deliberate reply, “and the choice among them must be left to the council. The entire comet may be destroyed with AKKA—that would be completely irrational. Or it may be kept as a permanent part of the system. Or the liberated races of the comet, if they are capable and desirous of doing so, may be permitted to depart in it.
“I should vote for the last alternative.
“At any rate”—and enthusiasm glowed within the grave, tones—“the comet offers us a magnificent accession of new knowledge. I am going to return immediately with an expedition of experts in every branch of learning. A stupendous opportunity——”
Bob Star was very tired, and Kay Nymidee’s arm felt warm against him.
Faintly, as from a vast distance, he heard Giles Habibula’s plaintive voice: “Come, Hal, and let us see if there are any proper human victuals upon the precious ship!”
THE END
