The Cometeers, page 2
part #2 of Legion Series
“Go on, lad,” he whispered sadly. “If you must look into the ghastly face of death! Poor old Giles will wait here for you. He’s good for nothing now, but to roast his aching bones in the sun.”
Inside the chilly gloom of the observatory, Bob Star sat down at the telescope. Its mechanisms whirred softly, in swift response to his touch. The great barrel swung to search space with its photoelectric eyes, and the pale beam of the projector flashed across to the concave screen.
Bob Star leaned to watch the screen. It was a well of darkness. White points danced in it. The brightest, he knew, was the third-magnitude star Vindemiatrix. Near it he found a patch of pallid green, oddly blurred.
He stepped up the electronic magnification. Vindemiatrix and the fainter stars slipped out of the field. The comet hung alone, and swiftly grew. Its shape was puzzling – a strangely perfect ellipsoid. A greenish football, he thought, kicked at the System out of the night of space – by what?
“Twelve million miles long!” he muttered huskily. “Which means it can’t be any sort of solid matter. With that low density, it has to be hollow. But what’s inside?”
Using ray filters and spectroscope, with the full power of the circuits, he strove to pierce that dull green veil, and failed. He sprang to his feet and stopped the instrument, impatiently snapping his fingers. Outside, he walked heavily to where Giles Habibula sat.
“It’s no use,” he muttered. “I found the cloud around it, but I failed to see inside. Nothing gets through – not a ray!”
He shivered again. For he had never seen anything so bafflingly weird, so strangely terrible. The comet was dreadful with the forbidden mystery of the dark interstellar wastes from which it had come, and its very vastness overwhelmed his mind. It was something beyond the range and scale of men, as men are beyond the microscopic infusorians swarming in a water-drop.
“Well, lad, you’ve seen it.” Giles Habibula was rolling cheerfully to his feet. “The best astronomers in the System have done no more. Let’s eat, before we perish.”
Bob Star nodded silently, his mind still numb with consternation. They were halfway back across the roof, when the old soldier paused, pointing westward as abruptly as if he had seen the comet.
Turning, Bob Star saw a white arrow with a head of pale blue flame. It wheeled above the rusty crescent of Mars, and grew in the sky. A rustling whisper came into the air. The shrubbery shook to a roaring gale of sound. A silver spindle flashed overhead, so near that he could see the black dots of observation ports, and recognize the Phantom Star.
“My father!” He felt the roof quiver faintly, as the landing ship came down on the great stage that topped the central tower. “He’ll know all about the comet, and what the Green Hall has done.”
“Your mother is waiting in the Jade Room,” a guard in the corridor told Bob Star. “There was an ultrawave message from John Star. He’s coming to meet her there.”
The Jade Room was enormous, its high walls paneled with jade-green glass and polished silver. On two sides, vast windows overlooked the darker green and brighter silver of the landscaped moonlet. The floor and the massive furnishings were of Venusian hardwoods, shining ruby-red.
His mother, she who had been Aladoree Anthar, sat quietly in a great chair that made her seem almost tiny. She looked up as he came in, and a quick smile brushed the pale trouble from her face. He could guess how grave her thoughts had been, but she said only:
“You’re up early, son.”
He paused inside the door, feeling painfully awkward. She was very lovely and he knew she intended to be kind. Yet, when anything reminded him of her great trust, she became a personage, too aloof and great to be his mother. He asked nervously:
“Father’s coming here?”
“He just landed.” Her breathless gladness made her seem human again. It made him want to run to her and put his arms around her. Somehow it filled his eyes with tears.
He had started impulsively toward her, when he heard what she was saying:
“Your father sent a message ahead to ask me to wait for him here, alone. Perhaps you had better go outside, Bob, for just a few minutes.”
That stopped him. He stood looking at her. His fingers were twisting savagely at a button on the front of his tunic. It came off in his hand, and he glanced down at it blankly.
“Why, Bob!” His mother came quickly toward him from her throne-like chair. “Is something wrong? What makes you look so strange?” She caught his arm gently. “You’re shaking. Are you ill?”
He shook his head, blinking angrily at his tears.
“I’m all right,” he muttered huskily. “If you didn’t treat me this way!”
“Bob!” Her face looked hurt. “I didn’t mean to seem unkind – ”
“You’re too kind!” he broke in harshly. “But I want to be trusted. I want a chance to live – even if it means a chance of getting killed. I can’t stand to be shut up here, when things are happening.” He caught a sobbing breath. “If you want to be really kind, send me out to explore the comet on the Invincible.”
She stepped back quickly, her face suddenly pale.
“I didn’t know you knew,” she whispered. For a moment she was silent, and then she shook her head regretfully. “I’m sorry, Bob,” she said. “I had no idea you felt this way. John and I are very proud that you were chosen to be the next keeper of the peace.” She looked at him anxiously. “Doesn’t that promise you danger enough?”
“But how can I ever learn to face danger?” he demanded bleakly. “If you and father keep on treating me like a child. Guarding me like a prisoner!”
“I hope we haven’t sheltered you too much.” Moving closer to him, she seemed to hesitate. “There – there’s something I’d better tell you, Bob.”
He stiffened, at the sudden gravity of her voice.
“You know you made a very brilliant record at the academy, Bob – your father and I are very proud of that. Only one student ever finished with a higher average. He was Stephen Orco.”
He winced from that name, his fingers drifting instinctively toward the scar on his forehead.
“When you graduated, Bob, the commanding officer told us he was worried about you. He thought you had driven yourself too hard, trying to beat Orco’s marks. He showed us a report from the staff doctors. They agreed that you were near a nervous breakdown, and they advised a year of complete rest for you before you were given any duty. He warned us not to tell you about the report until you were better.”
She smiled at him hopefully.
“I’m sure you’re all right now,” she said. “But that’s why you’ve been here.”
Bob Star was staring past her, at the windows and the ragged near horizon.
“It wasn’t overwork that hurt me,” he whispered faintly. “It was Stephen Orco – ”
But his mother wasn’t listening. He turned, and saw that his father had entered the room. John Star came striding across the wide red floor, trim and straight as always in the green of the Legion. Hard and slender, he looked little older than his son. He came straight to
Aladoree, and administered a brief soldierly kiss, and handed her a heavy, sealed envelope.
“Darling,” he said, “this is an order from the Green Hall Council.” Gravely preoccupied, he turned to his son. “Robert,” he said, “I wish to see your mother alone.”
Bob Star stood speechless. The jade-green walls were cold as ice. The red floor was a terrible emptiness. His knees were going to buckle, and he had nothing to hold to.
“Please, sir – ” His dry throat stuck.
“Let him stay, John,” his mother said quickly.
“If it’s about the comet,” he muttered hoarsely, “I’ve already seen it.”
“It is,” John Star looked at Aladoree, and nodded abruptly. “You may sit down, Robert.”
He collapsed gratefully into a great chair and clung to the cold red hardwood, trying to stop the trembling of his hands. He saw his mother’s wide gray eyes lift slowly toward John Star, from the document she had taken from the envelope. Her face was white with an incredulous dismay.
“John.” Her voice was very quiet. “This is an order for me to destroy the object in Virgo, at once, with AKKA.”
John Star’s nod had a military severity.
“The resolution to destroy the cometary object was approved by the Council eight hours ago,” he said briskly. “I brought the order to you at the full speed of the Phantom Star – a record crossing.”
The big gray eyes rested for a time on John Star’s face.
“John,” his mother asked very softly, “do you know what you are asking me to do?”
“Certainly.” John Star looked at her with an annoyed impatience. “I spoke before the Council, in favor of the motion. The vote was very close. There were sentimental objections.”
“Perhaps I’m sentimental,” she answered quickly. “But I don’t want to destroy that object – not unless we must. Because it’s something very wonderful – so wonderful that none of our scientists will undertake to say what it is.”
She stepped quickly toward him.
“Can we just erase it from existence, without ever knowing?”
“We can – we must!” Still standing, John Star had drawn his lean body very straight. “Consider the arguments for the destruction of that unknown object and the beings who appear to operate it like a ship – the news reporters had coined a word for them, before we set up the censorship. The Cometeers!
“Their science must be immensely ahead of our own – except that they probably don’t possess your weapon. And their hostility is as certain as their power!”
An oratorical ring had come into John Star’s voice, as if he were quoting phrases from his talk before the Council.
“On Earth, everywhere in the System, the law of survival has set even the most closely kindred forms of life to killing one another. The Cometeers can’t be our kinsmen, in any degree – they may be something we couldn’t recognize as life at all.
“Logically, they must be our enemies.
“The peculiar motion of the cometary object is itself sufficient evidence of some purpose in relation to our planets. That purpose is necessarily for the benefit of the Cometeers, because they are obviously a successful and hence a selfish type of life – however they may look!”
Aladoree was shaking her head.
“I’m not so sure of your logic.”
“The sentimentalists in the Council tried to question it,” John Star answered. “Fortunately, the Cometeers have already given us more convincing evidence of their hostile intentions.”
He paused dramatically, and Aladoree asked softly:
“How is that, John?”
“They have already visited most of our planets.”
“People,” Bob Star broke in, “have actually seen them?”
“Not exactly.” John Star didn’t look away from his wife. “The creatures of the comet are – or made themselves for the occasion of their visits – invisible. But they’ve left signs enough.”
Aladoree asked quickly, “What have they done?”
“They came in some massive machine, whose drive-fields were powerful enough to disturb our ultrawave communications. Evidently their first object was to investigate our defenses – the invisible ship always landed near some Legion stronghold. On Earth, twenty-four hours ago, the raiders killed four guards – with a frightful weapon. They entered a locked vault, which we had thought impregnable. They escaped with a precious military secret.”
John Star stepped quickly toward his wife. Suddenly he was no longer the soldier and orator, but only a man, anxiously begging.
“Please, darling!” he whispered. “I know you have the right to veto the first order. And I know what a terrible responsibility you carry. I think I understand your feelings. But this danger’s too great and near to be denied. For all we know, one of the invisible Cometeers may be with us now, in this very room!”
He glanced quickly about that jade-and-silver chamber. Agony whitened his lean face, and tears shone in his eyes. Impulsively, he swept Aladoree into his arms. Bob Star stepped quickly back, astonished; he had almost forgotten that his father was a human being, as well as a soldier.
“Won’t you do it, darling?” he was pleading. “For your sake – and for mine!”
Gravely, Aladoree pushed his arms away.
“What was the secret,” she asked, “that the Cometeers got?”
John Star turned to look at his son. His lips drew tight. He nodded slowly, as if in reluctant admission of Bob’s right to be here.
“They learned,” he said, “that the man known as Merrin is still alive.”
Bob Star watched the new dismay that swept the color from his mother’s face. He saw the slight, shocked movement of her head. Her voice, when at last she spoke, seemed oddly quiet.
“It makes all the difference, if they know about – about Merrin. It leaves us no choice.” She nodded unwillingly. “If they’ve found out – that, then they must be destroyed.”
Chapter 3
The Fulcrum and the Force
Bob Star stood watching his mother, frowning with a puzzled anxiety. With the stern regret with which she had made that terrible decision still lingering on her face, she had turned quickly away from him and his father. She was bent now over a small table of polished Venusian scarletwood, busy with a few little objects she had gathered from about her person: her watch, a pen and a mechanical pencil, a metal ornament from her dress, an iron key.
“Must I go?” he whispered.
She looked up at him, with a grave little smile.
“You may stay,” she said. “Since one day you are to become the keeper of the peace. Though there’s very little to see.” She glanced at the harmless-seeming objects on the little table. “You could watch a thousand times without learning the secret,” she added, “because the control of AKKA is more than half mental.”
She was busy again. With a deft skill that seemed to show long practice, she unscrewed the barrel from the pen and removed two tiny perforated disks from the back of the watch. Upon the mechanical pencil, whose working parts provided a fine adjustment, she began assembling a tiny, odd-looking contrivance. The platinum chain of the ornament seemed to form an electrical connection, and the clip from the pen would function as a key.
Bob Star peered at it, and whispered unbelievingly.
“Is that little gadget – all there is?”
“It’s all there is to see.” Her fine eyes came back to him for an instant, frowning with the gravity of her task. “This little device is merely the lever,” she said. “The force that moves it is mental. The fulcrum on which it works – ” Her pale lips drew stern. “The fulcrum is the secret.”
Bob Star shook his head, staring at that tiny instrument.
“You mean that you destroyed the Moon, when those other invaders from the Runaway Star had made their fortress there – with only that for a weapon?”
“With the same sort of lever.” She glanced at John Star, and he gave her an awed little smile, as if they both were living again through that dreadful instant. “I made that one from bits of wreckage from the bombed Green Hall, and parts of a broken toy.”
Bob Star leaned closer, dazedly.
“It seems impossible that you could destroy anything so vast as the comet – with only that!”
“Size doesn’t matter,” she said quietly. “Neither does distance. This little device you see is only the lever, remember, through which that force can be applied to any object in the universe.” She glanced up again, still frowning with her preoccupation. “The effect is a fundamental, absolute change in the warp of space, which reduces matter and energy alike to impossible absurdities.”
Bob Star was silent for a moment, breathless. He shrank back a little, shaken with a startled dread, from this gravely smiling woman. She was his mother no longer, but something as strange and terrible as the Cometeers must be. Shining on her face was a calm, passionless serenity.
“Mother – mother,” he whispered huskily. “You’re like – like a goddess!”
It seemed strange that she should hear him, in her remote detachment. But she turned to him soberly, and said: “It’s lonely, Bob – being a goddess.”
Her eyes left him. For a few moments she worked in silence, assembling the device. But presently she paused again, to look up at him.
“Bob, there’s one thing you ought to know now, since you’ve been chosen to be the next keeper. That’s the reason there must be only one keeper – the reason you must wait for the secret, until the doctors find that it is no longer safe with me.”
He stood listening, cold with a troubled expectation.
“There is one limitation to the use of AKKA.” She hesitated, frowning at him soberly. “Even the existence of that limitation is a high secret, which you must not repeat.”
He nodded, waiting breathlessly.
“To use the same figure of speech,” she said quietly, “there is only one fulcrum.”
“Huh?” His breath caught. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s just one fulcrum,” she repeated quietly. “That is not a literal statement, but it’s all I can say before you are to be entrusted with the secret. What you must understand is simply this: If two people know the secret, and try to use their levers at the same time, neither can succeed. It would be entirely useless to the two of us, if we tried to use it independently.”
“I see.” He stepped toward her quickly, moved by a sudden dread. “What happens to you?” he whispered sharply. “After you have told me?”
“Nothing painful.” Her gray eyes looked up again, shining with a serenity that he couldn’t understand. “You can see that the knowledge must not be left where it might be unsafe.”
“You mean – ” He knew what she meant, but suddenly he couldn’t say the words. “Aren’t you afraid?”
She shook her head. To his amazement, she was smiling.
