“More than trying,” Jay Kalam reminded him softly.
“I suppose they’re afraid we’ll try to shake them off, in the edges of the nebula.
Steer a little closer.”
He touched the controls again, with stiff and icy fingers.
The racing ship veered slightly, toward that appalling cloud of dim green fire and darkness.
A cosmic storm, in very truth—for mad winds of unseen force ripped and twisted black dust and glowing gas into shredded streamers and wild vortices and sprawling tentacles that seemed to writhe and whip with elemental fury.
“Steer a little closer,” urged Jay Kalam gently.
“And we’ll soon find out how much they value Commander Ulnar’s life.”
John Star moved the controls again, with numb, unwilling fingers, and then turned a tele-periscope on the black ship behind—for even laggard light from it could overtake them, now that they had slowed.
A colossal thing, strange as the green and wetly heaving monsters that made its crew.
With black rods and vanes and levers jutting in baffling array from the round black hull, it looked like a black spider flying.
The main wings had been somehow retracted, but certain smaller vanes moved slightly, now and again, as it came, as if reacting against some unseen medium to control its flight.
Perhaps, he guessed, it made use of radiation-pressures.
It grew large hi the lenses—dark and strange as the spatial storm ahead.
“They can’t attack!”
John Star gulped to moisten his throat.
“Not if they want to save Commander Ulnar’s life.”
And Jay Kalam murmured softly:
“Try it just a little closer, now.”
John Star touched the helm again—and his heart grew sick.
The bright clean song of the geodynes had been ringing like a peal of living power through the ship; he had almost felt the thrust that sent them ahead. But that song changed.
Suddenly, now, the snarling vibration of unmatched units came back.
Their speed fell off again— and the red spark in the telltale screen came up almost to touch them.
Tense and desperate, John Star guided the sick vessel closer to that stormy wall of dust and green fire and grinding stone, and Jay Kalam watched astern.
He said suddenly:
“I’m afraid the Commander won’t save us, after all.
They’re firing —something!”
Out of the belly of that black spider-ship came a little ball of misty white.
It followed them, more swiftly than the crippled geodynes could take them, and grew as it came.
They watched it in the lenses, frozen with a new wonder and a breathless terror, for it was utterly inexplicable.
A ball of opalescence.
It wasn’t matter, John Star knew—for no material projectile could have overtaken them so swiftly, even crippled and lagging as they were.
It was a swirling globe of milky flame, splendid with rainbow sheens.
It swelled behind them.
It hid the spider-ship.
It covered the belt of bright Orion.
It filled the void behind them like a new star born.
A glowing sun—flung after them!
That was quite fantastic, John Star knew.
But it grew vast hi space, and the hot image of it in the lenses hurt his eyes.
And still it swelled, ever more terribly bright.
And it drew them!
The Purple Dream lurched, rolled toward it.
A sudden dizzy nausea, an intolerable vertigo, overwhelmed John Star.
He staggered, stumbled back from the controls, and clutched a handrail.
He clung to it, sick and trembling, while the ship spun helpless hi the grasp of that pursuing sun.
They fell toward that blinding opalescence.
Grimly, his jaw set against that nausea, John Star fought the spin of the stricken ship, battled his lurching way back to the controls—and found the geodynes utterly dead.
The ship dropped, unchecked.
Tossing seas of white opalescence spread out to drown them, vast as the surface of a very sun.