“Sir,” began Zinin to the commander, and his great
23
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . ..
voice was strangely muffled, “they’re coming … in their ship, like they said they would.”
Phrnnx yanked himself back to reality—if such it still could be called—and joined the others who were now occupied at the fore port.
Below, great masses of puffy white clouds. Brown and green land masses, unchanged. Blue oceans, unchanged.
Except one.
In the middle of the planet’s second ocean, great, impossible masses of thick columnar crystals began to leap upward from the waters. Translucent at first, the chalcedony towers began to pulse with deep inner fires: blue, purple, gold, carmine, and finally a strange, yet familiar silver-gray. The ionosphere, tickled, began to surround the flashing needles with auroras, clothing them in blankets of coruscating radiance.
Following, the planet began to move after the Tpin.
On board the cruiser it was very quiet.
“I see,” whispered Rappan idly, “that they are bringing their moon along also.”
“You get accustomed to something like that,” breathed an engineer. “A moon, I mean.”
Old Alo was making mystic signs with his tentacles. “Egg of the Code, I almost feel sorry for the Yops!”
The crew picked up this thread of awed enthusiasm as they began to relate the impossible sight to their own personal views of the war. In no time the mood of jubilation was back again, stronger than ever. Stimulants were broken out and passed among those who indulged in them. The communicators—excepting one Phrnnx—began to ply the spacewaves with brazen, challenging messages, daring the Yops to locate them.