Angry, flaming prominences reached out to snare them—and then the thing was gone.
White, exploding fire half-blinded them—and it had vanished like a punctured bubble.
John Star’s baffling sickness ended.
Space was black once more behind them, and soon his dazzled eyes could see the belted splendor of Orion.
The song of the geodynes came back, and the ship answered to her controls.
John Star mopped weakly at his face.
“Never felt—such a thing!” he whispered. “Space itself—dropped from beneath us!”
“A sort of vortex of disintegration, I imagine,” Jay Kalam commented softly.
“Some such thing was mentioned in the secret reports of the Ulnar Expedition, that were sent out to Aladoree at the fort on Mars.
Only a hint—they were careful not to tell her much.
But there was some reference to an energy vortex weapon—a frightful thing that warped the space-coordinates, making all matter unstable, growing from the energy of the atoms it annihilated, and creating an attraction to draw more matter in.
A kind of pseudo-sun!”
John Star nodded, shaken.
“That must be it,” he agreed.
“The distortion of space must have made the geodynes go dead.”
He caught a long, uneasy breath.
“We can’t fight them with the proton gun—not when they start throwing suns!”
“No,” Jay Kalam said quietly.
“I see only one thing to do—drive straight into the nebula.”
“Into that storm!”
John Star blinked.
“The ship couldn’t live a minute, there.”
“A minute is a long time, John,” Jay Kalam told him gently.
“They’ve fired another shot.”
“Another———”
His dry throat seized his voice.
“Turn straight in,” Jay Kalam said.
“I don’t think they’ll follow.”
For a moment his mind rebelled.
He stood frozen at the controls, staring at the angry banners of the nebular storm.
One sick instant— and then he had mastered himself.
He accepted the danger, and turned the Purple Dream into that appalling cloud of dim green fire and darkness.
Death grew behind them.
Again a milky ball came from the belly of the black spider-ship, and swelled into a pseudo-sun of devouring atomic flame.
Again the cruiser pitched and spun, with geodynes dead, helpless in that greedy grasp.
Again John Star was ill.
But the abrupt turn had saved them.
That hurtling globe of expanding opalescence missed them, too narrowly, and exploded far beyond them.
The released geodynes pealed out again, and the ship sprang ahead—into the nearest angry arm of the nebula. Into fury and enigma.
John Star had listened to the theories.
All positive-entropy processes should be suspended or reversed, the theorists said, in the inverse-inflexure of the nebular counter-spaces.
That meant that power-tubes could yield no power, and geodynes could give no thrust.
It meant that rockets couldn’t fire.
It meant that clocks and chronometers would run backwards—and that human machines, very likely, would stop altogether.
That was what the theoretical astrophysicists said—but none of them had ever been inside a nebula, to observe the birth of matter.
Only two or three daring spacemen had ever ventured on nebular explorations, into a smaller counter-space lying on the route to Proxima, and they had never emerged.
John Star caught his breath again and tried to nerve himself to meet emergency.
The repulsion fields of the meteor deflector would serve to protect the hull from the nebular drift—if the masses were not too large, too numerous, or coming too fast.
For the rest, the life of the ship depended on his skill.
The Purple Dream, with his quick fingers on the keys, sought a path through the spinning fringe of spiral arms.