The cometeers, p.1
The Cometeers, page 1
part #2 of Legion Series
Table of Contents
Jack Williamson
Chapter 1 The Prisoner of Phobos
Chapter 2 The Keeper of the Peace
Chapter 3 The Fulcrum and the Force
Chapter 4 The Man Called Merrin
Chapter 5 The Honor of the Legion
Chapter 6 The Girl in the Wall
Chapter 7 The Beast of the Mists
Chapter 8 Death on Neptune
Chapter 9 The Field of the Comet
Chapter 10 The Cometeer
Chapter 11 Murdered Asteroid
Chapter 12 Out of the Wall
Chapter 13 Fuel for the Comet
Chapter 14 Oreo’s Voice
Chapter 15 The Cattle and the Herdsmen
Chapter 16 John Star’s Son
Chapter 17 The Human Rocket
Chapter 18 At the Empty Box
Chapter 19 The Man Who Broke
THE COMETEERS
Jack Williamson
The Cometeers is a collection of two science-fiction novels by the American writer Jack Williamson. It was first published by Fantasy Press in 1950 in an edition of 3,162 copies. The novels were originally serialized in the magazine Astounding in 1936 and 1939, and later released as individual paperbacks by Pyramid Books.
Chapter 1
The Prisoner of Phobos
Phobos spun on the time of Earth – for the ancient conquerors of that moonlet of Mars had adjusted its rotation to suit their imperial convenience. They had clad its dead stone with living green, and wrapped it in artificial air, and ruled the planets like captive islands from its palaces. But their proud space navies had been beaten and forgotten long before these middle years of the thirtieth century. All the human islands around the sun were free again, and the youngest heir to the tarnished memories of that lost empire was a restless prisoner in the humbled Purple Hall.
Night was fading now into an ominous dawn, as the long crescent of Mars came up like a blood-rusted scimitar before the sun. Beneath its reddish light, a glass door slid open and he came out of the towering central pylon into the wide roof-garden on the western wing.
A slight young man, he wore the green of the Legion of Space, without any mark of rank or service decoration. With a frown of trouble on his boyish face, he paused to search the dark sky westward. Another man in green burst out of the door behind him.
“Bob Star! Where – ah, lad, there you are!” The older soldier of space was short and bald and fat, his tunic patched with the emblems of a long career but now unbuttoned in his haste. “Can’t you wait a moment for poor old Giles Habibula?”
“Sorry, Giles.” Bob Star turned quickly back, his thin, sunburned face warmed with a smile of amused affection for his panting bodyguard. “I tried to slip away, but only for a glance at the sky. Must you follow every step I take?”
“You know I must,” the fat man puffed. “Hal and I have your father’s orders, to guard your life every instant with our own. And the great John Star is an officer who expects obedience.”
“The great John Star!” A momentary bitterness edged the young man’s voice, before he saw the other’s outraged loyalty. “I suppose my father’s really great.” He nodded soberly. “I know he’s the hero of a terrible war and the owner of Phobos and my mother’s husband.
“But why must he have me guarded like a criminal?”
“Please, lad!” Giles Habibula came waddling anxiously to his side, through the transplanted shrubbery that made the garden a fragrant bit of the far-off Earth. “Perhaps your father’s sterner than old Giles would be, but he’s only trying to make a soldier of you. And you know why you must be guarded.”
“For my own safety.” His trim shoulder lifted impatiently. “So my father says. But I’m a graduate of the Legion Academy, with honors enough. I’ve been taught how to fight. Why can’t he trust me to defend my own life, like everybody else?”
“But the stake is more than your life, lad.” Giles Habibula looked quickly about the empty walks, and drew him cautiously farther from the door. “And your danger more than John Star’s doing. It’s no secret to Hal and me that you have been named by the Council to receive your mother’s trust.”
Apprehension thinned Bob Star’s brown face.
“You mean – AKKA?” His voice dropped with a wondering awe when he spoke of the mighty secret known by that brief symbol. The most precious possession of the united human planets, it was a weapon of most desperate resort, a power so awesome that each legal keeper of it was sworn to reveal it only to the next.
“That’s your appointed duty, lad,” the old man was breathing solemnly. “The noblest destiny a man can dream of – to be sole custodian of that great weapon, as your precious mother is. It was the order of the Council that you be guarded, from the day you were chosen. Hal and I are proud to serve you. Why fret about it?”
“But I’m not keeping any secret now,” he protested restlessly. “None except the fact that my mother is to give me AKKA when her doctors say it’s no longer safe with her – a day that I hope won’t come for another twenty years and more. Must I stay a prisoner all the time I wait?”
“Perhaps the orders seem a trifle strict.” The old man’s bald head bobbed sympathetically. “But why fume about it? If we’re confined to Phobos, it’s still a precious scrap of paradise. We’ve all the comforts of the greatest palace in the System. To say nothing of the privilege of a noble cellar filled with famous vintages. Tell me, what’s so mortal bad about it?”
“Nothing, really.” Bob Star’s ringers lifted nervously to touch a scar on his forehead, a pale triangular ridge that didn’t tan. “I know it’s a tremendous honor to be chosen keeper of AKKA, even though I didn’t want it. But I couldn’t sleep last night, and I suppose I got to brooding.”
“Your head?” Giles Habibula had seen his ringers on the scar. “Is that the trouble, lad? Is that old concussion causing pain again?”
He dropped his hand self-consciously, his face drawn stern against the old man’s sympathy. That throbbing pain had not come back – but only because it had never really ceased. The nature and the consequences of that old injury were secrets of his own, however, guarded as stubbornly as he meant to guard the weapon called AKKA. His lips tightened silently.
“If it’s just a mood, I know the cure for that!” Giles Habibula beamed at him hopefully. “A platter of ham and steak and eggs, with hot brown bread, and a pot of coffee to wash them down. And then perhaps an apple pie. You got up too mortal early, dragging a poor old soldier out of his bed without a blessed bite to eat. Let’s go back to breakfast!”
“Later, Giles.” Bob Star spoke absently, peered at the dark sky again. “But first I want to look for something.”
“Whatever it is, we’ll never find it on an empty belly.” The old man was peering with a sudden dismay at the grim lines of strain, which made that searching face seem for a moment prematurely old. “But what’s the matter, lad? You’re too young to look so grave.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Bob Star kept looking at the sky. “I don’t quite know why. But my windows were open, and while I was lying there I happened to see something among the stars.”
“Yes, lad?” The wheezy voice of Giles Habibula seemed curiously apprehensive. “And what was that?”
“Just a little greenish fleck,” Bob Star said slowly. “In Virgo, near Vindemiatrix. I don’t quite know why, but it got on my nerves. It went out of sight, when Mars began to rise. I don’t know what it was, but I’m going to have a look at it, with the telescope yonder.”
He started on toward the shining dome of the small observatory he had set up at the end of the garden – so that he could rove the stars with its electronic screens and his own restless mind, in spite of his imprisonment.
“Wait, lad!” The fat man’s voice was sharper. “You wouldn’t drag a poor old soldier of the Legion out of his blessed sleep in the middle of the night, just to look at a star?”
“But it isn’t any ordinary star.” He swung back to Giles Habibula, with a frown of disturbed perplexity. “Because I know it wasn’t there a few nights ago – I happened to be searching that same sector of the sky for an asteroid that seems to have strayed off the charts. It couldn’t be a nova – not with that strange, pale green color!”
“Forget it, lad,” the old Legionnaire whined persuasively. “Any star can have a wicked look, to a man without his breakfast.”
“I don’t know what to think.” He shook his head uneasily. “The object got to haunting me, while I lay there watching it. It got to seeming like an eye, staring back. It made me – afraid.” He shivered, in the thin wind across the roof. “I don’t know why, but I am really afraid.”
“Afraid?” Giles Habibula gave the brightening sky a hurried, fishy glance. “I don’t see anything to fear. And we’re no cowards, lad. Neither you nor I. Not with the proper victuals in us – ”
“Perhaps it’s a comet.” Still frowning, Bob Star swung back toward the observatory. “It looked like one – it was a short streak of that queer, misty green, instead of the point a star would show.”
He shrugged uncomfortably.
“But then any comet should have been detected and reported long ago, by the big observatories. It hasn’t been – I’ve been reading all the astrophysical reports, with nothing else to do! I can’t imagine what it is, but I’m going to have a look.”
“Don’t, lad!” The wheezy voice sharpened, with a puzzling urgency. “Let’s not meddle with fate.”
“How’s that?” He pee
“I’ve seen trouble – and I don’t like it.” Giles Habibula nodded unhappily. “I know we’ve had a peaceful time this last year, since Hal and I came back with you from Earth. Ah, a happy time, with little to do but fill our guts and sleep. But I’ve lived through things to chill your blood.”
Bob Star backed away, watching him anxiously.
“I’ve known the mortal times some men call adventure,” he went on dolefully. “I was with your father, along with Commander Kalam and Hal Samdu, twenty years and more ago, when we went out to the Runaway Star, to fight the wicked Medusae for your dear mother’s life and her precious secret.”
“I know,” Bob Star nodded. “The four of you were the heroes who rescued my mother’s weapon and saved the human planets. But what has that to do with this fleck of green mist in the sky?”
“Only that I’ve had enough,” the old man said. “Listen, lad, to a word of kind advice. Heroism is damned uncomfortable. Let’s forget this monstrous comet. It might have waited until my poor old bones were laid to rest – instead of coming to upset my last days with such frightful talk.”
He shook his head forebodingly.
“Poor old Giles! He had only sat down, with a bottle of wine in his trembling fingers, ready to stretch his legs before the fire and doze away into the last blessed sleep, when this fearful comet came, to start him awake with the threat of another stellar war. Ah, in dear life’s name – ”
“Stellar war!” Bob Star seized the old man’s pudgy arm. “Then the danger isn’t just imagination?” His hard fingers tightened. “And you knew about that green comet – how long ago?”
The old man squirmed and shook his head.
“No, no, lad!” he muttered hastily. “There’s nothing at all to worry about, not here on Phobos. You just dragged me out of sleep too mortal sudden. My poor old wits are still fogged and groggy. You must pay no heed, lad, to the babblings of a battle-shaken veteran of the Legion.”
“What about the comet?”
“Please, lad! I know nothing. In life’s name – ”
“It’s too late, Giles.” His fingers sank deeper. “You’ve already talked too much. If you don’t want to tell me what this is all about – and why it’s being kept from me – I can ask some awkward questions.”
“Then stop it, lad!” the old man moaned. “You needn’t shake me like a dying rat.”
Waiting breathlessly, Bob Star released his arm.
“A whisper in the Legion. I’ve no secrets of the Council, lad. And it was your own father who ordered us to keep it from you. You won’t let on that Giles breathed a word about it?”
“My own father!” Bitterness heightened Bob Star’s anxiety. “He thinks I’m a weakling and a coward.”
“Not so, lad,” muttered Giles Habibula. “He was just afraid the worry of it, and the mortal shock, might be too much for you.”
“He doesn’t trust me,” Bob Star whispered. “But tell me about this comet – if that’s what it is.”
“I’ve your promise, lad, not to tell him?”
“I promise,” Bob Star said. “Go on.”
Cautiously, the old soldier drew him across the grass, into the shelter of a clump of white-flowering frangipani. He glanced uneasily about the great roof, and up at the mighty central tower of the Purple Hall, which was already ablaze in the sunlight above them.
“The fearful thing was first seen ten weeks ago.” His nasal voice sank to a hissing whisper. “Picked up by the great free-space observatory at Contra-Saturn Station. It was plunging toward the Solar System, with a velocity that threw the astronomers into fits.”
He caught apprehensively at Bob Star’s arm.
“But you’ll remember, lad? You’ll not give poor old Giles away, for the stupid blunder of his tongue? Your father’s a stern man. Even though he and I are comrades of that great voyage to the Runaway Star. – You’ll remember?”
“I keep my word,” Bob Star said. “But what’s so alarming about this comet?”
“It’s like no other,” the old man wheezed. “It’s no frail thing of pebbles and ionized gas, and it’s larger than any other comet ever was. The astronomers don’t know what it is. But it’s twelve million miles long, lad – imagine that! And it has a thousand times the mass of Earth. It can’t be any member of the System, they say. A strange body, driving out of the black gulf of space amid the stars.”
Bob Star had drawn back dazedly.
“I see,” he whispered huskily. “And what else about it?”
“The astronomers are tearing out their hair, lad. So your father told us. Because the thing has upset all their calculations. Its motion is all wrong. When the pull of the sun should have begun to increase its speed – it stopped!”
The old man’s shifty, red-rimmed eyes looked quickly out across the garden, and up at the dark sky, and hastily back at Bob Star again. It shook him to see that Giles Habibula was frightened.
“What stopped it?”
“Nobody in the System knows.” The rusty voice dropped lower. “Now it’s just hanging there. Five billion miles out – far beyond Pluto! That isn’t the motion of any kind of comet, Bob. A space ship might stop that way – if you can imagine a space ship twelve million miles long!”
“What else?” Bob Star stood taut with a mixture of dread and excitement. “What’s happened since?”
“That’s all I know – except that the Council is alarmed. You can’t blame ‘em! That’s why your father was called to Earth, to meet with them at the Green Hall. They’ve ordered a censorship on any news about the comet – as if the people can’t be hurt by a military secret!”
“I wonder what they’re planning?”
“That’s top secret, but I know the talk of the Legion.” The old man turned to glance furtively behind him again. “I suppose you’ve heard of the Invincible?”
“The new battleship?”
“The greatest ship the System ever built.” Giles Habibula beamed with a momentary pride. “A thousand feet long, and armed with a vortex gun – the great new weapon that won our war with Stephen Orco. A thing almost as dreadful as your mother’s secret device.”
“I know,” Bob Star whispered impatiently. “But what about it?”
“I’ve no high secrets, lad,” the old voice rasped. “All I know is the talk of the Legion. But I hear the Invincible is to carry some sort of expedition out to discover what’s inside that green cloud – to operate the comet like a ship!”
Fat fingers tugged again at Bob Star’s sleeve.
“You’ll remember, lad?” Giles Habibula begged. “You won’t tell your father?”
Bob Star stood very straight in that undecorated uniform, his dark head uncovered to the cold and distant sun rising now beneath the fading scimitar of Mars. The fingers of his right hand were tracing, as they often did, the triangular scar on his forehead. His tanned face was bleakly set.
“Don’t worry, Giles,” he said quietly. “I won’t tell.”
Abruptly, then, he exploded: “So my father told you to keep it from me? He’s afraid I couldn’t stand the shock! Why doesn’t he order you to rock me to sleep in your lap?”
Chapter 2
The Keeper of the Peace
Bob Star hurried on again toward the observatory dome. Giles Habibula limped hastily after him, peering at the dark sky and starting at every rustle of the wind in the shrubbery, as if his fishy eyes had already seen some unpleasant visitant descending from the comet to the roof.
Outside the little dome, Bob Star paused. He stood at the end of the roof, beside a low parapet of purple glass. Far beneath lay Phobos – a moonlet so tiny and so rugged that it seemed like a solitary mountain peak beneath the palace, floating alone in space, detached from any world at all. Yet it was green with transplanted forests, and spangled with artificial lakes.
He could remember when it had been large enough, and lovely to him, a dazzling triumph of the planetary engineers, its narrow valleys filled with all the adventure he could seek. But that was in his boyhood, before he went away to the Legion Academy. It was just a prison to him now.
Giles Habibula sat down on a bench in the sun. He fumbled in the pockets of his unbuttoned uniform and found a little empty flask, with a graduated scale along the side. He held it up to the sunlight, and his eyes dwelt gloomily upon a single lonely drop of the wine he loved.
