The Cometeers, page 6
part #2 of Legion Series
He had to touch it – that was all.
And the score of nine years would be settled. An intolerable burden would be lifted from him. Even that old pain, he felt, would go, and the System would be safe from the malign genius of Stephen Orco –
He was aware, then, that the prisoner had seen him. The blue eyes, cold and burning with a reckless defiance, had lifted from the book. The handsome face smiled mockingly. Stephen Orco got lazily to his feet and came strolling to that transparent, unbreakable wall. He pointed at the red button, and slapped his leg with silent merriment. His full lips formed a derisive, soundless greeting.
Bob Star felt a sudden desire to speak to him. This was their first meeting since that night of torture. He tried to hope that his haunting fear would somehow vanish, an illusion born of pain, when he met Stephen Orco under these new circumstances.
Yes, the officer said, there was a telephone, but its use was forbidden.
“You saw my orders,” Bob Star insisted. “It’s necessary for me to speak with Merrin.”
After a conference with the commandant, it was arranged. Bob Star was left alone in the square, gray room outside that crystal wall. A magnetic speaker thumped, and then he heard the clear, rich baritone of Stephen Orco:
“Greetings, Bob! I’m amused at your efforts to touch that red button.”
Bob Star felt his face stiffen.
“Laugh if you like,” he muttered harshly. “But I can do it – if I must.”
“Try again, if you like.” Orco’s taunting laughter rang loud from the speaker. “No, you’ll never do it, Bob. Not since that night with the Iron Confessor – I’ve seen too many times what that ultrasonic pulse does to brain tissue and the thing called courage. I’ve never been afraid that you would kill me. And I’m certain no other will – because of a foolish code the Legion has.”
Shuddering with a sick humiliation, Bob Star swung desperately toward that red button. He reached for it grimly – but his old fear yelled, you can’t! A numbing chill struck down his hand. He staggered back, his shoulders sagging with defeat. Tears blurred his eyes. His hands knotted impotently.
“I’m really glad to see you,” Stephen Orco’s voice was booming. “Because you must have been sent here upon the foolish hope that you could destroy me. That means that my already rather fantastic defenses are considered inadequate. I conclude therefore that I have powerful allies outside, and that I may hope shortly to be set free.”
“Not if I can prevent it!”
“But you can’t, Bob. I’ve beaten you.” Bob Star was astonished and disturbed to see the black enormity of hate that peered suddenly through that mocking levity. “I’ve broken you, forever.”
Orco’s voice was suddenly lower, a breathless, thickened rasping, monstrous and clotted with his hate.
“When I first learned of your existence, while I was only a child, it filled me with fury to think that an utterly incompetent weakling, through no effort or merit of his own, should one day become the most powerful of men – while I had nothing. I resolved then, before I had ever seen the gilded boy of the Purple Hall, to crush you and take all your heritages for myself.”
Stephen Orco paused. His wide mouth broke into a sudden, brilliant smile of satisfaction, and his tone was light again when he resumed: “You weren’t hard to break, Bob. The Iron Confessor killed all the danger in you, that first night. Afterwards, I admit, ethical questions disturbed me, but time soon answered them. Consider it this way: One of us has AKKA given to him; the other must discover it by his own efforts. Which better deserves it?”
“The keeping of AKKA isn’t any sort of selfish advantage,” Bob
Star answered huskily. “It is a tremendous task, that fills the life and finally demands the death of the keeper.” He caught his breath. “But how – how did you discover it?”
The prisoner smiled patronizingly.
“I’m going to tell you, Bob,” he said blandly. “If only to establish my superior rights to the secret and the perfect justice of my actions. I might remark, by the way, that I don’t intend to let the care of the secret become any sort of distressing mortal burden to me. The trouble with you, Bob, is just that you weren’t big enough for the job.”
He shook his head mockingly, at Bob Star’s trembling impotence.
“Anyhow,” he continued easily, “I simply followed the methods of investigation that should have suggested themselves to any person of intelligence. I collected the data available, formulated hypotheses to explain them, tested the hypotheses by experiment, and so finally arrived at a satisfactory conclusion.
“While I was still at the academy, I obtained secret access to a secret library, and studied there all the existing accounts of the use of AKKA, since the time of its discovery by your mother’s great ancestor, Charles Anthar – while he himself was a prisoner, guarded almost as carefully as I am.
“The last recorded use of the weapon had been to destroy Earth’s old satellite – after it had been seized and fortified by the Pretender’s unsuspecting allies. With my foster father’s space yacht, I searched the orbit the satellite had followed. I finally found three small metallic buttons.
“No larger than the end of my thumb, they were all that remained of the Moon. I have since come to realize how very fortunate I was to find a single atom. It was only because your mother was working hastily, with a crudely improvised instrument, that the annihilation of the heavy elements was not quite complete.
“Some months of careful work, in a laboratory financed from my foster father’s funds, revealed the nature of the partial effect of AKKA upon those metallic specimens. From effect to cause was a matter of mathematical reasoning. It remained but to test alternative hypotheses, and elaborate the surviving construction – and the secret was mine.”
The prisoner paused, smiling again.
“Don’t you agree with me, Bob, that such abilities merit reward? I am certainly the most gifted of men; reason assures me that I am therefore their rightful ruler. And I should have been that already, Bob – but for one blunder.”
Hoarsely, Bob Star whispered, “What was that?”
“I failed to kill your mother.” Stephen Orco shrugged carelessly. “The trouble was that I didn’t see, until too late, the singular limitation of the weapon. I didn’t try to use it until she was also trying. It failed for both of us, and that blunder put me here. But it’s one I shan’t repeat, when I find another chance.”
He chuckled maliciously.
“I’m not afraid to tell you that,” he added cheerfully. “Because I know you can’t touch that red button – not even to save your mother’s life.”
Bob Star knew then what he must do, but still he couldn’t do it – at any rate, not yet. Wearily, he signalled for the guards and had the telephone disconnected. With the prisoner sealed again in that tomb of silence, he waited alone in the little outer room, bleakly resolved to stay there until he could press that button – or until the need was gone.
Stephen Orco had calmly returned to his chair and his book. He relaxed in the green robe, sipping at his drink, apparently oblivious of any danger to his life. Twice again Bob Star left the hard bench where he waited, trying to touch that button.
The simple act was utterly impossible. The effort did nothing but accelerate that unceasing throb of pain inside his head and turn him faint with illness. He gave up for the time, desperately hopeful that the stimulus of emergency would nerve him for the deed, if any crisis came.
Hopelessly, he stumbled back to the bench.
His eyes, as he sat there, widened abruptly. His breath sucked in, and his lean hands clenched. He leaned forward, staring at the hard gray wall. For he thought that its surface had begun to shimmer with vague, moving shadows.
The massive door was still locked behind him. The alarm gongs were silent. The sheet of vitrilith was still intact, and the lounging giant beyond it still ignored him. There was no hint of another presence with him – none save the creeping shadows on the wall. He watched them, breath-taken.
A misty blue circle flickered against the gray. Ghostly shadow shapes darted through it. Abruptly then, as if some tri-dimensional projector had come suddenly into focus, the hard armor of the wall melted into an amazing scene.
He looked into a curious chamber, sunk now like a deep niche into the cell wall. Its surface followed tapering spiral curves, and the color of it was an absolute black, spangled with small crystals of brilliant blue that were various as snowflakes.
The girl stood inside that sudden hollow in the wall, upon a many-angled pedestal of blue transparency. An unsteady flame burned deep within that great sapphire block, and its fitful light danced against the tiny flakes of blue.
Vividly real against that spiral shell of darkness and blue fire, the girl stood watching him. Her expression had a desperate, almost agonized intentness. One slim white arm was thrust out and upward, in what seemed a gesture of warning. The pale oval of her face was grave with the expectation of danger, and her bright lips parted, as he watched, as if she had spoken some warning word.
No sound reached him, however, and the silence brought him a sudden doubt of what he saw. With a bewildered shrug, he got up from the bench and started uncertainly toward the wall. Her solemn brown eyes following his movement, in a way that made him sure that she was really watching, and she stopped him with an imperative gesture.
She turned, then, to point through the transparent slab at Stephen Orco, who now seemed absorbed in his book and drink. Keeping her distressed golden eyes on Bob Star, she gestured urgently toward the red button that he had failed to touch.
He started toward it again, and again all the agony of the Iron Confessor rose up out of the past to stop him. He turned helplessly back toward the girl, with a sick misery in his eyes. She plainly wanted him to kill Stephen Orco – and he wondered suddenly if her panic-stricken loveliness could be nothing more than hallucination, the vivid symbol of his own impotent desire.
She saw him turn, and a tragic sadness shadowed her face. The light died in her golden eyes. White knuckles lifted to her mouth, in a gesture of bleak frustration. Suddenly then, she started as if she had heard some silent voice. She shuddered, beckoning him toward the red button again, desperately and hopelessly.
Then, as the urgent pleading of her face changed to sad compassion, a bomb of cold flame exploded in the blue pedestal. Sapphire sparks danced across the crystal rime upon the spiral walls. Blue radiance filled the niche, and slowly died. Dark shadows thickened, and silently dissolved.
The gray wall was whole again.
And Bob Star was once more alone. He swayed, trembling. Tears of defeat and despair burned his eyes. He flung his head and looked sharply at Stephen Orco, who was just setting down his empty glass, his attention still lost in the book.
Confusion roared in Bob Star’s mind. Had she been real? All his doubts had been suspended, in that last moment of his useless effort and her sad departure, but now the question hammered at him. A living person – where? Or only a tormented projection of his own unendurable predicament.
He jumped, when the gong shattered the silence in the room. Harshly, from a speaker beside it, rasped a hoarse command: “Emergency stations! Secure all doors! Stand – ” The voice choked strangely. “Quick!” It was a ragged whisper now. “Invisible things – I can’t see – ”
Now! Bob Star’s breath gasped out. He must act now, or betray the Legion. Fighting a numbing inertia, he swung toward the gray wall. The push button winked at him, a red, malicious eye. He was aware that Stephen Orco had laid aside the book, to watch him with a careless amusement.
He contrived to take another halting step. Abrupt sweat chilled him. His ears were roaring again. For the effort had plunged him back into the grasp of the Iron Confessor. Once more he felt the pressure of that cold steel band around his head, and the cruel thrust of that three-edged blade, and the burning agony of that unendurable vibration. He could see Stephen Orco’s furious face against the darkness of that room, and hear his savage voice, amplified and changed to unbearable pain:
“So you don’t like it, pup? Then you had better change your mind. Because you’ll never be able to do anything about it. I’m fixing you now so you can’t kill anybody. This machine is stronger than anybody’s will. When it gets through breaking you, you’ll stay broken. Even if you weren’t a sniveling coward before, you’ll be one now.
“You can’t kill me. You can’t kill – ”
Those taunting words echoed again in his mind, with the imperative effect of a posthypnotic suggestion. He couldn’t kill – but he must! The image of that frightened girl in the wall came back to spur him on, and he took another dragging step toward that push button.
But still he couldn’t kill –
Something was wrong with the lights in the room. They were turning green. Or was there a green light shining through the massive door behind him. The crisis was here. Now he had to act, and there were only two more steps –
A greenish mist had flooded the room, rising swiftly against the transparent barrier that separated him from Stephen Orco – or was it only in his eyes? The gray walls swam, until he thought they were going to dissolve into another inexplicable vista.
His skin began to prickle strangely. Something numbed all his sensations. Stiffness seized his limbs. He thrust his arm out frantically toward that red push button – or tried to. But he no longer had an arm. Darkness annihilated everything. He didn’t know when he hit the floor.
Chapter 7
The Beast of the Mists
The muttered thunder of descending rockets awoke Bob Star. Bitter cold had stiffened his cramped limbs, and his eyes opened upon oppressive green twilight. He found himself sprawled upon frozen ground, still numb with that tingling paralysis which had robbed him of consciousness.
Groping desperately for recollection, he found a disturbing conviction that the gap in his consciousness had contained something un-thinkably hideous – something that his mind had sealed away, to preserve its sanity.
After a moment, however, the sickening fact of his own failure came back. Despair swept away that other disquieting half-memory, and he sank back for a time in a crushed and hopeless apathy, until the increasing sound of the rockets became too loud to be ignored. Gasping in a great breath of that icy air, he sat up stiffly.
He was bewildered to find himself at the very brink of an appalling chasm. The flat and barren face of Neptune broke, not a dozen feet from where he had lain, into a dreadful pit of greenish darkness. He stood up to look into it, and found only misty emptiness. It seemed to have no farther walls, nor floor. He swayed back from it, giddily.
The scrape of a foot jarred his nerves. He spun apprehensively, and then grinned with a shaken relief when he found his two bodyguards behind him, safely back from the rim of the inexplicable pit, staring up at a vague blue flickering in the cloudy dark above.
“Aye!” boomed Hal Samdu. “It’s a ship.”
“And time we were rescued!” gasped Giles Habibula. “Dear life knows we’ve been waiting long enough, dying in this wicked cold.”
“Giles!” Bob Star called anxiously. “How did we get here? And what’s this pit?”
“Ah, lad!” The fat man came waddling toward him, flinching visibly from the nearness of that dreadful precipice, yet beaming with a surprised relief. “We thought you’d never wake, before you died of cold.”
The gigantic strength of Hal Samdu swept him to his feet. Clinging weakly to the two men, he felt Giles Habibula’s sob of gladness.
“A long time we waited, lad. Mortal long – ”
“The pit?” He peered at it blankly, as Giles Habibula dragged him apprehensively back from the brink. “Where are we?”
“That’s where the prison was.” The old soldier’s voice was a thin rasp of dread. “After the raiders had taken the prisoner away, a red light shone down from the sky, where their invisible craft must have been. Beneath it, the walls crumbled into nothing. The very ground turned into red fire, and sank away. Ah, lad, that fearful pit is all that’s left of the prison and the garrison and the Legion cruisers that were lying inside the wall. I don’t understand – ”
“So he got away?”
Bob Star turned heavily back toward that strange chasm, feeling sick enough to throw himself into it. He had failed the Legion, and the consequences numbed his mind. Nothing mattered now. Dull, incurious, his eyes lifted to that fitful shifting glare of rocket jets burning through the clouds.
“It’s landing near!” Giles Habibula was wheezing gratefully. “The Cometeers escaped with the prisoner, and all the rest are dead, but we at least are saved.”
“Tell me,” Bob Star whispered urgently. “How did we get away?”
“We didn’t, lad,” Giles Habibula answered. “The prisoner spared our lives – I don’t quite know why. He told us he was really the great rebel, Orco – but I suppose you knew that.”
“I did,” Bob Star nodded bleakly. “My duty here was to kill him, if there was danger of his escape.” In spite of himself, he sobbed. “But I – I couldn’t do it.”
“Hal and I were waiting for you in the corridor outside.” Generously, the old man seemed not to see his bitter tears. “Of a sudden, my poor old nerves were shocked by a frightful alarm. Gongs were ringing, and men running half-naked to their stations.
“Most of them never got there. They fell, lad, struck down by things they never saw. And a greenish mist dimmed my own old eyes. My ailing body failed me. I went down helpless with the rest – perhaps a bit before the rest, for safety’s precious sake.
“Yet for a time I clung to my dim old wits, when Hal and all the rest seemed to know nothing. I heard the clatter of locks, and saw those great doors turning. Then I could hear some sort of fearsome creatures passing through – things I couldn’t see.
“Presently the prisoner Orco came walking out of his cell, speaking and making gestures to what seemed to be just empty air. He was answered by uncanny hoots and booms of sound, fit to freeze your blood. And your own body came after him, lad, floating – carried by something I felt grateful not to see.
