The legion of space the.., p.20
The Legion of Space: The Complete Saga, page 20
Two little metal plates, perforated, so that one could sight through their centers. A wire helix, between them, connecting them. And the little cylinder of iron. One of the plates, and the little iron rod, set to slide in grooves, so that they could be adjusted with small screws. A rough key, to close a circuit through the rear plate. That was all.
Aladoree was making some adjustment to the screws. Then she bent, sighted through the tiny holes in the plates, toward the red Moon, with the black specks of the fliers against it. She touched the key and straightened to watch, with a curious, lofty serenity on her quiet, pale face.
John Star had vaguely expected some spectacular display about the machine, perhaps some dazzling ray. But there was nothing. Not even a spark when the key was closed. So far as he had seen, nothing had happened about the little instrument.
FOR A strange moment John Star fancied he was still insane. It was sheer impossibility that this odd little mechanism—a thing so small and so simple a child might have made it—could defeat the fearful invading science.
“Won’t it——” he whispered anxiously.
“Wait!” said Aladoree.
Her voice was perfectly calm, without trace of weakness or weariness. Like her face, it carried something strange to him. A serenity, a disinterested passionless authority. It was absolutely confident. Without fear, without hate, without elation. It was like—like the voice of a goddess!
Involuntarily, he stepped a little back from her in awe.
They waited, watching the little black flecks swarming over the face of the sullen Moon. Five seconds, perhaps, they waited.
And the black fleet vanished.
There was no explosion, neither flame nor smoke, no visible wreckage. The fleet simply vanished. They all stirred a little, drew breaths of awed relief. Aladoree moved to touch the screws again, the key.
“Wait!” she said once more, voice still terribly—divinely—serene. “In twenty seconds—the Moon——”
They gazed on the baleful globe. Earth’s attendant for aeons, now the dwelling of unearthly hordes, waiting for the conquest of the planets. Half conscious, under his breath, John Star counted the seconds, watching the red Moon of doom.
“—eighteen—nineteen—twenty!”
Nothing had happened. A breathless, heartbreaking instant of doubt. Then the red-lighted sky went abruptly black.
The Moon was gone. Like the fleet, it had vanished, without sound or flash or visible remains. It simply had ceased to exist.
“The Medusae,” Jay Kalam whispered, as if to assure himself of the unbelievable, “the Medusae are gone.” A long moment of silence, and he whispered once more: “Gone! They will never dare—again!”
“I saw—nothing!” cried John Star breathlessly. “How——”
“They were annihilated,” said Aladoree, strangely serene. “Even the matter that composed them no longer exists in our universe. They were flung out of all we know as space and time.”
“But how——”
“That is my secret. I can never tell—save to the chosen person who is to keep it after me.”
“Mortal me!” wheezed Giles Habibula. “Ah, the blessed system is safe at last. Ah, me, a mortal desperate undertaking it’s been to save it. You must be precious careful not to fall into hostile hands again, lass. Old Giles will never be able to go through all this, again, life knows!
“Ah, me! And here we’re left in the middle of the desert, in the dark and——”
His voice had snapped the tension that held them.
“John——” breathed Aladoree.
No longer was it the voice of a goddess. Its awful serenity was gone. It was all human, now, weak and shaken, appealing. John Ulnar found her in the darkness, made her sit down, and she sobbed against his shoulder, with happy sobs of relief.
“Ah, lass,” groaned Giles Habibula, “good cause you have to weep! We all may perish yet, for want of a mortal bite of food!”
NEARLY A year later the Green Defender, newest cruiser of the legion of space, flashed down to the Purple Hall, on Phobos. Though one red-gas shell had fallen on that tiny moon of Mars, during the Medusae’s bombardment, the great building had not been injured. The neutralizing solution had cured those affected by it; it had dissipated, been combined into harmless salts, until the dark sky of the little world was free from any stain of red.
The cruiser dropped on the landing stage that crowned the central purple tower. The new commander of the legion came gravely down the accommodation ladder, and John Ulnar went eagerly to meet him. Greetings over, they paused, looking down at the luxuriantly green convexity of the little planet, with grim memories of the last time they had been together here, when they took the Purple Dream.
“Not much trace left of the invasion,” remarked Jay Kalam.
“No, commander,” replied John Ulnar, with a little smile at the title. “Not one case of the madness left uncured, in all the system, I understand. And the red gone from the skies. It’s already history.”
“A splendid estate, John.” With admiration, Jay Kalam’s glance roved the richly green, curving landscape. “The finest, I think, in the system.”
John Ulnar’s face clouded.
“A responsibility I had to assume.” His voice was almost bitter. “But I wish I were back in the legion, Jay. With Hal and Giles. I wish I were back in the guard of Aladoree.”
Jay Kalam smiled. “You’re—fond of her, John?”
He nodded, simply. “I was—am. I hoped—until that night, when she used AKKA! I realized then what a fool I was. She’s a goddess, Jay! With the secret. She has a power—a responsibility. I saw that night that she had no time for—for love.”
Jay Kalam was still gravely smiling. “Did it ever occur to you, John, that she’s just a girl? Even if it is interesting to destroy a planet, she can’t be doing it all the time. She’s apt to get lonesome.”
“Of course,” John Ulnar admitted wearily, “she must have other interests. But she was—simply a goddess! I couldn’t ask her. Anyhow, it could never be me!”
“Why do you think that, John?”
“For one thing, my name! Ulnar. She hates it!”
“That needn’t worry you, John. The Green Hall, recognizing your distinguished service, has officially changed your name to John Star.”
“Eh?” he gasped.
Then Aladoree came through the air lock, Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula behind her. Her face sedate, gray eyes cool and grave, the clear sunlight working miracles of red and brown and gold in her hair, she looked at John Star in demure inquiry.
“Since the Purple Hall is the strongest fortress in the system,” Jay Kalam explained hastily, “the Green Hall requests you to assume the responsibility of guarding Aladoree Anthar.”
“If you are willing, John Ulnar,” added the girl, eyes twinkling.
His throat was dry. He searched in a golden mist for words, whispered them with an effort.
“I’m willing! But my name, it seems, is John Star.”
Still grave, but for her eyes, she said: “I shall call you John Ulnar.”
“But, you said——”
“I’ve changed my mind. I trust one Ulnar. More than that, I——”
She was suddenly too busy to finish the sentence.
“Ah, me!” observed Giles Habibula, approvingly watching the two. “It is evident we’re welcome, with the lass. Mortal evident! Especially the lass! Ah, and it looks like a good-enough place for a poor old soldier of the legion to pass his remaining years in peace. If kitchen and cellar bear proper proportion to the rest of the mortal building!
“Ah, Hal, if you can forget your precious pride in all those medals and decorations that Jay has showered on you since the Green Hall made him commander of the legion, let’s look about for a mortal bite to eat.”
THE END.
“AH LAD! Wait a bit, lad!” moaned the bald, blue-nosed fat man. “Old Giles can’t hold a pace so mortal swift. He’s not the man he was twenty years and more ago, when he went fighting out to bloody Yarkand, with the great adventure of the legion, to save the blessed human race!”
Puffing, the old man paused amid the bright verdure of the roof garden. His fishy eyes glanced back toward the slim, towering central pylon of the Purple Hall, behind them.
“No, lad,” he pleaded, “remember that Giles Habibula is only a poor old soldier, ill, crippled, tottering on the brink of his precious grave!”
His fat hand caught at the sleeve of Bob Star’s uniform. It was the green of the legion of space. It bore no insignia of rank, nor any decoration for service to the system.
“Tell me, lad,” he asked, “where are you dragging poor old Giles, so mortal early in the morning, before he has tasted his miserable scrap of breakfast?” Bob Star’s trim form had stopped beside a mass of snow-white bloom. Like his father, John Star, he was smallboned, quick, active. His lean, cleanly molded face was briefly lighted with a smile. His clear blue eyes looked back at the short, waddling figure of Giles Habibula, warm with a little glow of affection.
“All right, Giles,” he said pleasantly. “But hurry! I’m going to the little observatory, at the end of the roof.”
“But tell me, lad, what’s your mortal haste?” inquired the old man, plaintively. “Will the blessed stars fall out of space before we’ve had breakfast?”
The brief smile had gone. Bob Star’s thin face was left sober, grimly strained, almost prematurely old. Suddenly anxious, half fearful, his blue eyes left the vivid greenery of the fragrant roof, and climbed into the purple-black sky.
“What’s the matter, lad?” persisted Giles Habibula. “You’re too young to look so mortal grave.”
“I woke up before dawn this morning,” Bob Star told him, in a slow, worried tone. “I don’t know what woke me. But my head was worse than usual”—he touched a pale, singular scar on his forehead—“and I couldn’t go back to sleep.
“Looking out of my window, I saw something new in the sky—just a little greenish fleck. It was in Virgo, near the star Vindemiatrix. It wasn’t very big. But I couldn’t understand it; and, somehow, as I lay there, staring at it, with the old pain throbbing in my head, the most dreadful feeling came over me. The thing began to seem like a horrible eye staring out of space, and—well, anyhow, Giles, I’m afraid!”
A curious look—Bob Star thought it the shadow of consternation—passed across the yellow moon of the old man’s face. But his thin voice protested, unchanged: “So you drag poor old Giles up here on the roof, just to look at a mortal star?”
“But it isn’t a star,” objected Bob Star, in a puzzled tone. “It isn’t sharp enough to be a nova. Besides, no star ever had that strange, pale-green color. Perhaps it’s a comet—but any comet should have been detected and reported long ago, by the big gravity-free observatories out in space. I don’t know what it is!
“It has gone out of sight, since the Sun came up. But I’m going to try to pick it up with the telescope. I don’t know why the thing made me so afraid. Might have been the color of it; colors have queer emotional effects.
“Anyhow, it set my nerves on edge. I came up here as soon as I could get into my uniform.”
“Ah, lad, I know you did,” panted the old man, bitterly. “For I had to tumble my poor, aching old bones out of bed, and drag them along with you. Often I wish that Hal and I had been made the bodyguards of some lazier youth, lad. You know you are never still: you never rest.”
“I’m sorry, Giles,” whispered Bob Star. “I suppose it’s my head that makes me restless. But come on to the observatory.”
THE OLD MAN sighed, and wiped his seamed yellow face with the back of his fat hand.
“Ah, me!” he puffed, gloomily. “That mortal comet! It might have waited until my poor old bones were laid to rest. But it must come to disturb the last days of an ailing old man with talk of such bloody danger as makes the monstrous Medusae of Yarkand seem like pet kittens.
“Poor old Giles! No sooner does he sit down, with a bottle of wine in his trembling old hand, to stretch his legs before the fire of life and doze away into the last precious sleep, until this fearful comet must come, to start him awake with the threat of stellar war. Ah, in life’s name——”
Shocked, Bob Star seized the old man’s massive arm. His blue eyes bored into the fishy ones of Giles Habibula.
“Stellar war?” he rapped. “Then there is really danger? And you knew about the comet—already?”
Bewildered, the old man shook the wrinkled yellow globe of his bald head.
“Nothing, lad! In life’s name, I swear——”
Bob Star’s hard fingers sank into his flesh.
“Tell me, Giles! And tell me why you were keeping it from me. I’m no frightened girl, Giles. I can bear trouble.”
“Ah, well,” he yielded, reluctantly. “After all, ’tis but a whisper—a whisper in the legion. I have no secrets of the council, Bob. And ’twas your blessed father who commanded us to keep it from you. You’ll not let him know that old Giles told you——”
“My father?” Bob Star was muttering, bitterly. “He doesn’t trust me, Giles. He thinks I’m a weakling and a coward! I know he does!”
The old man shook his head.
“Not so, lad,” he said.
Bob Star jerked his head, as if to shake off a clinging fear.
“Anyhow, Giles,” he said, “tell me about the comet.”
“I have your promise, lad, not to tell your father?”
“I promise,” agreed Bob Star. “Go on.”
THE old legionnaire drew him cautiously across a lush, yielding carpet of grass, into the shelter of a mass of white-flowering shrubs. His fishy eyes darted furtively about the great roof, and up at the purple tower that pierced the dark sky of the little world. His nasal voice sank to a hissing whisper.
“The mortal thing was first seen ten weeks ago,” he revealed, “from the great space observatory, beyond Jupiter. It was plunging toward the system, with a speed that threw the precious astronomers into fits.
“The thing is no common comet, they say. It is no frail thing of pebbles and shining gas. The blessed astronomers don’t know what it is. Rut it’s bigger than any true comet ever was. The mortal thing is near twelve million miles long, lad! And it has a thousand times the mass of the Earth.
“It’s no member of the solar system. It’s a strange body, out of the mortal black gulf of space amid the stars.
“In the past few weeks, lad, the mortal thing has upset all the calculations of the astronomers. Its motion seems independent of outside forces. It slowed down, lad, when the pull of the Sun should have increased its speed! Now it is almost motionless. They say that it has assumed a regular elliptic orbit about our Sun, out five billion miles—’tis far beyond Pluto.”
The small, red eyes looked back across the garden, furtively. They looked hastily into the dark sky, and back again. And Bob Star knew, suddenly, that Giles Habibula was frightened.
“The mortal thing,” he said—and his thin voice quivered, “doesn’t behave like a comet. It acts like a space flier, Bob—like a space ship twelve million miles long.”
“What else?” whispered Bob Star. His voice was low with the hush of excitement, and edged with fear.
Giles Habibula sighed noisily, and shook his head.
“Ah, lad, that’s all that I know of it, all that anybody knows. The council has taken alarm—that’s why your father was called to Earth, to meet with them at the Green Hall. The observatories have been ordered to make public no further reports of the comet, for fear of undue panic. And Jay Kalam is making the legion ready to defend the system, in the event of stellar war.
“You may know, lad, that a new flagship is being built for the legion. The Invincible, Jay named it. ’Tis the greatest ship the system ever built, a thousand feet long. It carries a vortex gun, such as we used in the war with Stephen Orco.”
“Yes. What about it, Giles?”
“Well, there’s talk, lad, that some expedition will venture out in the Invincible, to investigate the mortal comet. A cloud of green surrounds it, that no telescope can pierce. The true nature of the fearful thing is yet unknown.”
Bob Star was standing very straight in the plain uniform that he had worn a year. His dark head was uncovered to the cold morning sun. The tense, slender fingers of one hand were tracing, as they often did, the white, irregular scar on his tanned forehead. His lean face was twisted to a mask of bitter grimness.
His hard jaws clenched until they were white. Then, abruptly, furiously, he exploded: “My father told you to keep it from me, eh? He treats me like a sickly baby! Why doesn’t he tell you, Giles, to rock me to sleep on your knee?”
II.
THE TIME was the third decade of the thirtieth century. The place was Phobos, the tiny outer moon of Mars. Once a ten-mile mass of barren stone, it had been transformed by the scientific magic of the planetary engineers into a shining garden.
Gravity cells, installed in the center of the satellite, insured terrestrial comfort. They retained the thin, artificial atmosphere, and anchored the miniature seas, the synthetic soil from which sprang the luxuriant vegetation of dark woodland and landscaped garden.
Against the dark, shining wealth of the gardens, the colored glass of the Purple Hall shone like a magnificent jewel. Three thousand feet high, to the rocket stage that crowned the square central tower, this ancestral dwelling was the most famous, the most splendid, within the limits of the system.
A minute planet of paradise, Phobos belonged to John Star, his inherited estate. Here, for twenty-two years, he had guarded and cherished that lovely woman, Aladoree, whose secret weapon, known only by the symbol AKKA, was the treasure and the fortress of the system. Here, too, their son, Bob Star, had been reared, save for the eight years of his attendance at the legion academy on Earth.
Bob Star and Giles Habibula had come from an elevator, upon the vast roof of the north wing. Breathing the fragrance of new blooms, in the cold air of morning, they had started toward a low dome of white metal, at the end of die roof.
