Its hypnotic glare brought him foreboding thoughts of Aladoree, imprisoned on its terror-haunted planet.
He seemed to see her clear, honest gray eyes, horror-distended, and filmed with soul-searing fear.
A cold and helpless wrath accumulated in him.
He started when Jay Kalam spoke:
“Look!
Ahead of us—a green shadow!”
Even then his low, restrained voice was tense with dread of the cosmic unknown.
Ahead of them, the tele-periscopes showed that ominous and eerie shadow, swiftly growing.
It shone with the strange dim green of ionized nebular gases, and the dark spreading wings of it blotted out the stars of Ophiuchus, and slowly grew to hide the Serpent and even the Scorpion.
John Star stepped up the magnification of the ‘scopes, until he could see the ugly, crawling motion of its vast writhing streams, and the angry currents of strange matter and stranger energies boiling within it.
“An uncharted nebula,” he whispered at last.
“We had better turn away.”
Star-gazing nomads of the Earth, from the beginning, had wondered at those dark clouds against the firmament.
Star-roving no-mads of space, more recently, had sometimes perished hi them.
Even yet, however, they were little-known, and all prudent spacemen kept well away from their vast maelstroms of fire and cosmic fury.
Back at the Legion Academy, John Star had listened to a renowned astrophysicist lecturing learnedly on “Intranebular Dynamics.”
He knew the fine-spun theories of counter-space, of inverse curvature, of pseudo-gravitation and negative entropy.
The nebulae, according to the theories, were the wombs of planets and suns and even of future galaxies; the second law of thermodynamics was somehow circumvented in their anomalous counter-spaces, and radiation trapped hi their mysterious depths somehow re-integrated into matter; their final awesome destiny was to re-wind the run-down universe itself.
So that famous astrophysicist believed—but he had never ventured near the dark, supernal fury of such a storm in space.
John Star gulped, and his voice came faint with awe.
“We’re running too near—I’ll change our course.”
“No,” Jay Kalam protested quietly.
“Drive on toward it.”
“Yes?”
Wondering, taut with mounting dread, he obeyed.
The mass ahead tripped the gravity detectors.
They had to drop below the speed of light, so that their search beams could guard them from collision.
And that strange cloud grew.
Utterly insignificant it may have been, in the scale of cosmic space, so tiny that the System’s astronomers had never discovered or charted it.
The vast and little-known forces of it could make no threat to the System itself, for the inverse inflection of the counter-spaces was held to cause repulsion from the gravity-fields of suns.
On the galactic scale, it was the merest fleck of curious dust.
On the human scale, however, it was big enough—and deadly.
Enormously, its dark and dimly shining arms twisted out across the stars ahead.
The ‘scopes began to show the terrible detail of it: black dust-clouds, hurtling streams of jagged meteoric fragments, dark banners of thin gases, all whipped with the raging winds of half-guessed cosmic forces, angrily aglow with the eerie green of ionization.
John Star stood rigid with dread, and he felt a chill of icy sweat.
But he kept their course on toward it, until they were flashing along no more than a thousand miles from the side of a darkly burning greenish streamer, which seemed to reach out for them like a kind of monstrous pseudopod.
“If it caught us———” His dry throat stuck, and he had to swallow.
“Those meteor-streams—hurtling boulders!
Those whirlpools of shining gas!
The forces inside it—unknown!”
He wiped sweat off his set, white face.
“I don’t think we’d last five seconds.”
But Jay Kalam told him, gently:
“Steer a little closer.”
“Eh?” John Star muttered, hoarsely.
“Why?”
Silently, Jay Kalam pointed at the red forgotten spark on the telltale screen, which marked the position of the black ship behind them.
It was visibly creeping up, to close the distance which had been fixed so long.
John Star caught his breath.
“So they’re trying to overtake us, now?”