Collected short fiction, p.245
Collected Short Fiction, page 245
“Pluto’s gone,” he reported to Jay Kalam. “It has been pulled into the comet.”
The commander, at his desk, looked up from the black-bound diary and his litter of penciled sheets. His long, dark face was drawn with care, and he spoke in a voice that was low and weary: “Into the comet?” he repeated, flatly. “And the Cometeers will destroy the colonists, as they murdered the men on this asteroid. And some other planet will follow, and another.”
His eyes were black and dull with pain.
“They’re murdering the system, Bob, as they murdered this little world. And your mother——”
Bob Star’s lean hands knotted with agony.
“And there’s nothing we can do!” he muttered. “Nothing——”
XVIII.
BOB STAR was striding restlessly, alone, through the silent twilight of a vast hall in the brooding desolation of the white mansion. The feeble daylight of the asteroid filtered dimly through lofty clerestory windows. Pallid violet shafts fell upon high walls paneled with black and scarlet. The wide floor was hard white metal. From the entrance, the hall ran three hundred feet before him, a gloomy tunnel of voiceless mystery.
A baffled urge drove him through it, the gnawing fangs of a frustrated purpose. Every night, upon the asteroid, he could watch the pale, strange oval of the green comet, sliding across the sable sky. Its weird menace was burned into his very soul; he was ever haunted by visions of Stephen Orco, the archtraitor, seeking his mother to murder her.
Yet no action was possible. His roving of the asteroid had become but a purposeless means of filling bitter, hopeless days.
Bob Star stopped abruptly on the metal floor, sharply sucking in his breath. His heart was suddenly racing, with a light, uneven beat. And his eyes stared with incredulous intensity at a scarlet panel on the wall.
He had seen a vague shadow moving there. And it brought back a shadow and a vision that had come to him in the prison fortress on Neptune, and a face that had never since left his sweet and troubled dreams.
With a rigid, trembling eagerness, he stepped a little toward the flickering shadow. Huskily, his voice whispered, “Come to me again. Please—come to me!”
The lovely image of that white, strange girl had etched itself into his mind. He had yearned to see her again. He had hungered to know that she was no phantom of his tortured mind—as Giles Habibula and Jay Kalam had insisted she must be—but real, living human flesh.
A thousand times he had turned over the amazing riddle of her appearance, without coming on any solution. Still, despite the convincing arguments of Jay Kalam, he half believed that she must be a dweller in the green comet.
And the resolution had hardened in him to solve the mystery of her—after Stephen Orco was dead—and somehow to find her, in the infinitude of space and time, so that he could banish the shadow of trouble from her face.
“Come,” he was whispering. “Come back to me!”
The glowing shadows swirled swifter and stronger upon the black-and-scarlet wall. An increasing blue light burned amid them, brighter than the pale shafts that slanted from the high windows.
His heart paused when, abruptly, the shadows rushed together, and sprang into a perfect, burning reality.
It seemed to him as if a strange niche had suddenly been cut in the wall. Its shape was a singular, tapered spiral, like the inside of some ancient shell from the dry seas of Mars. It was black. And it flamed with innumerable lights, from variform crystal runes of blue. A manyangled pedestal of purest sapphire burned supernally at the bottom of it.
Upon the pedestal, as before, stood the girl.
Her beauty brought an ache to Bob Star’s throat. She had been lovely in his dreams, until he had feared his dream woman more perfect than the real. But now, when he saw her again, the dream became a forgotten shadow.
Her sweet body glowed white against the darkness and the sapphire flame of the spiral chamber. His first glimpse brought a confused and yet indelible impression of his straight, slim perfection, of the massed midnight of her red-glinting hair, of the pale, tragic oval of her face, and the wide, sad eyes of golden-flecked brown.
It was a moment before he realized that she was hurt.
Then he saw that her long white robe was tom, spotted with scarlet. She swayed upon the vast sapphire. The pallor of pain was on her oval face, and her eyes were deep and dark with agony.
Her face was strained with effort, her slim body was tense. She was fighting desperately against weakness and pain—and against something else. Bob Star sensed a terrific, invisible conflict, in which her mind, her will, was making supreme exertion.
HE STARTED toward her, impulsively driven to her aid.
Two yards from the wall, he checked himself. She wasn’t here! She was simply a shadow on the wall. She was no more here than she had been in the prison on Neptune, two billion miles away. Just a shadow.
Or not even that. Perhaps she was mere hallucination, the daughter of a brain that Stephen Orco had half destroyed with his dread omega ray. The red hammer of pain, not still for nine years, still beat behind that scar—and it seemed to him that the blue fire in the fantastic crystals that encrusted the black curves, behind the girl, scintillated in time to its beat.
Had his tortured mind cracked under the agony of defeat and despair?
“Tell me,” he whispered imploringly. “Are you real? And where are you? Where are you, so that I can find you and——”
He stopped himself. He couldn’t do that. He was growing mad—talking at a shadow on the wall. But, he remembered, before, the shadow had come to warn him. Was this another warning? Was there a new danger?
Then he realized that she hadn’t motioned him to keep away, as she had before. Her tragic eyes were on his face, anxious, pleading—and dilated with desperate effort! Reeling on the great sapphire, she held out her arms toward him.
And, abruptly, her image flickered, oddly. It was just, he thought afterward, as if he had been seeing her through a great sheet of some perfectly transparent crystal, and this pellucid barrier had suddenly been snatched away. She had broken through some intangible wall, between them.
Her lips moved, then. He was startled to hear her voice. It was a low, breathless cry—but somehow relieved, glad. Some strange joy washed the pallor and the agony of effort from her face. Her slim body relaxed, and she fell toward him.
A shadow, falling?
Fighting the numbness of incredulity, he sprang forward. He was faint with utterly astonished delight when the warm, real weight of her came into his arms.
He stood voiceless, dazed, supporting her. He was paralyzed with a fear that somehow she would vanish again, even from his arms.
For a little time she was limp, lifeless. Then brief animation stirred her. She looked back toward the empty chamber, where sapphire flame still shimmered upward from the vacant pedestal against the blue crystals upon the spiral curves of the ebon wall.
A curious call, a single liquid, bell-clear note, came from her lips.
Immediately the sapphire exploded like a great bomb of light. Blue flame filled the niche. It faded to a swirling confusion of shadow. And the shadow died upon the black-and-scarlet wall.
EXHAUSTED, the girl went limp in his arms again.
Bob Star stood for a moment holding her, staring at the wall. “A shadow?” he whispered, “A vision? A dream? Or am I mad?”
He picked her up in his arms, and walked back through the dim length of the silent hall, and across the wide, columned gallery, and out upon the level gravel of the rocket field, to the silvery length of the Halcyon Bird.
Giles Habibula met him, below the air lock. He stopped, anxiously watching the seamed, yellow moon face. After all, was she real? Would the old man see her?
The fishy eyes warmed with approval.
“Ah, lad,” he murmured, “old Giles is precious glad to see you turn from sickly dreams to reality. ’Tis a good thing for you, lad. Ah, and she’s a blessed lovely lass! Tell me, lad, isn’t she fairer than your vision?”
Bob Star laughed joyously, and squeezed the girl in his arms.
“No,” he told the old man, smiling. “Because she is the vision.”
Staring, Giles Habibula wheezed: “Where did she come from, lad?”
“Out of the wall,” Bob Star told him, and laughed at his baffled doubt.
The thick lips hung open for a moment, then Giles Habibula caught himself. “Lad,” he announced, “Jay wants you! He just sent me to find you, and ask you to come at once to the bridge.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, lad—save that he has found some cause for mortal alarm.” Bob Star, after a moment’s wonder, said: “I’ll come. But first I must find a place for her.”
There were vacant cabins aboard the Halcyon Bird, and Giles Habibula waddled ahead to open a door and spread fresh covers on a bunk, for the girl.
“What ails the precious lass?” he wheezed. “Is she much injured?”
“I think not,” Bob Star told him, easing the dark head to the pillow. “I hope not——”
“There’s blood on her clothing.”
“Her shoulder’s scratched. It doesn’t look serious. But she’s been through some terrible ordeal. She seems worn out, completely exhausted, and frightened——”
The girl had seemed unconscious. But the golden eyes fluttered open as Bob Star’s arms drew away from her. Her oval face was strained again, anxious. She struggled to sit up, clutching urgently at his arm.
He tried to make her lie back.
“Don’t worry, kid,” he told her, smiling. “Just take it easy. Everything’s all right. You just——”
Her voice interrupted him. It was low, strained and husky with weary effort.
Bob Star shook his head. Even in her forced, tired voice he could sense the liquid beauty of her language. But it was completely strange to him. He caught not one familiar word—nor had he expected to.
But the anxious girl turned to Giles Habibula, as if puzzled, even disconcerted, by his lack of comprehension.
The old man cocked his yellow head, listening to her low, swift speech, jerky with desperate exertion. At last he heaved a melancholy sigh.
“Ah, lass,” he said heavily, “your voice is precious sweet! And ’tis evident you have something to say you think mortal important. But”—and he shook his head sadly—“your tongue is one old Giles never heard before.”
Still fighting a dead weariness, the girl turned back to Bob Star. Her weary, liquid voice ran on, raggedly. Her white face was a mutely urgent appeal.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he said. “But we can’t understand. When you’re rested, we’ll find some way——”
Her fingers closed on his arm, with a convulsive, desperate strength. Her voice went louder, higher, and sobs were breaking in it. Tears of baffled frustration glittered in her golden eyes.
“What could she be trying to say?” Bob Star muttered. “It must be important. When she came before, it was to warn me about the Cometeers——”
Her fingers relaxed from his arm. She slipped back to the bunk again, breathing heavily.
“Poor, brave kid,” he whispered.
“She’s out again——”
“Ah, so,” said Giles Habibula. “She was staggering under a mortal burden of weariness and care, lad. ’Tis rest she needs, and sleep. But I wish we could have understood her message!”
“This cut on her shoulder?” said Bob Star, apprehensively. “It can’t be serious?”
“Ah, no, lad. ’Tis but a scratch. Rest and sleep will soon repair her strength.
Old Giles will dress her little wound, lad, and watch her; his old hands have yet a certain skill. And you must go on to the bridge.”
Bob star started. “I’d forgotten,” he said.
JAY KALAM turned from the instruments, at Bob Star’s entrance. His dark face wore the grave, abstracted little smile that Bob Star knew to mean severe stress.
“Bob,” he said immediately, in a low voice which vet betrayed a suppressed anxiety, “will you please check the orbital motion of the asteroid, and our motion with respect to the green comet?”
“Yes, sir.”
With a reluctant glance back toward the door, Bob Star went hastily to the instruments. He turned from them at last, with an expression of startled incredulity.
“From your face, Bob,” said the commander, with a grave little smile, “I believe your results check with mine.”
“My observations show,” Bob Star said dazedly, “that the asteroid is moving out toward the comet!”
Jay Kalam nodded, with his imperturbable composure.
“They check,” he said. “I was almost unwilling to trust my own results. The asteroid is meshed in a tube field of force, Bob. We are to be drawn into the comet as Pluto was!”
XIX.
THE COMET lay close ahead of the plunging asteroid.
To watch the last sunset, Kay Nymidee had scrambled with Bob Star’s aid to the top of a high, bare pinnacle, beyond the rocket field. They were sitting, side by side, on a cushion of scarlet moss. Their feet dangled over a precipice.
Beneath lay the irregular, convex surface of the tiny world, molded by the dead genius of its mysterious master into vistas of fantastic, haunting beauty. Slopes of pale-emerald grass smiled with peace, and bright masses of flowering woodland laughed joyously. But above them, everywhere, rugged peaks and ridges loomed solemnly, gorgeously strange in lichen coats of green and gold and scarlet.
And the purple blackness of the sky was a vault of never-fathomed mystery. Its burning myriad of stars were never dimmed or clouded. Day might illuminate the face of the asteroid, but never its sky.
Now the sun was setting, at the backs of Bob Star and the solemn-eyed girl, a point of blue-white splendor, attended by the tiny flecks of Jupiter and Saturn. It cast black, knife-sharp shadows of the two upon the sheer, lichen-crusted opposite wall of the gorge.
Before them, above black shadows and flaming lichens, the comet was rising—for the last time. The ellipse of it came up like a featureless mask of hideous green, peering malevolently over the edge of the tiny world. Its leering face was near, now, huge.
Bob Star caught the girl’s hand; Kay Nymidee clung to him with an instinctive grasp.
“Temyo ist nokee,” she murmured, shivering, in her own strange tongue. Her voice was deep and husky with dread.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I suppose we’ll soon be inside the comet.
But there’s nothing we can do——” He checked himself, and forced a smile. “But don’t you worry, darling——”
Nearly a week had passed since the girl’s amazing arrival on the asteroid; and now she seemed almost recovered from whatever trying ordeal had preceded her advent. The scratch on her shoulder was healed; for three days she had been able to leave her cabin; her fair skin was glowing again with health.
Through their efforts at communication, Bob Star had learned her name—Kay Nymidee. He had learned that her home had been, indeed, in the comet. He had found that she hated and feared the Cometeers—whom she called aythrin.
And that was about all.
She had appeared disappointed and bewildered by the failure of the legionnaires to understand her strange language. And she had tried, desperately, to learn their own tongue. Bob Star had pointed out objects, to teach her nouns, had illustrated the meanings of simple verbs. He had found her a brilliant and eager student; she could already make a good many simple, concrete statements. But anything more abstract than the greenness of grass or the sweetness of wine was still a heartbreaking impossibility.
Bob Star glanced at her, and again her breath-taking beauty held his admiring eyes. The sinking, distant sun, catching her head from behind, filled the mass of her dark hair with living gleams of red. Her face was a wide oval of white beauty, though now the green rays of the comet had overcast it with a look of strange foreboding.
Wide, golden, her eyes were on his face. In the failing light, the pupils were great pools of tragic darkness. They were haunted with consuming sorrow, with an utter despair that he mutely yearned to brush away.
They lighted, when he looked into them, with a wistful golden light. The warmth of a tender smile glowed for a moment on her face.
Bob Star caught her to him, with impulsive fervor.
“Kay,” he whispered. “Darling——”
A poignant ache grasped his throat, chokingly. “I love you—so much!”
His lips sought for hers. And his eyes were suddenly dim and smarting with tears; a sharp pain stopped his breath.
For a moment the vital warmth of her body yielded, relaxed against his side. Her dark hair brushed his face, soft, fragrant. Her full, parted lips were lifted for an instant, responding.
Then dread stiffened her. Her slender body jerked away, as if from a cold shock. Her haunted eyes went back to the comet, and her face in its green light was once more terrible with agonized forebodings.
“Mahnyanee”—came her fear-roughened whisper—“Mahnyanee——”
Bob Star released her.
“That’s right, kid,” he said soberly. “We’ve no right to think of anything else, so long as Stephen Orco is alive and——”
“Staven Or-rco!”
SHE seemed to clutch at the name, with the desperation of agony. Her urgent voice repeated it, with a curious accent. Her slim arm pointed out, at the fearful, rising face of the comet. And then she was talking furiously at Bob Star, in her liquidly beautiful, incomprehensible tongue.
He shook his head, muttering: “It’s no use, kid.”
Her voice rose higher. She made frantic gestures, at him; toward the argent spindle of the Halcyon Bird behind them; including the entire asteroid. Always her slender arms swept back toward the comet.
