Whether the theorists were right or wrong, he knew the ship couldn’t survive in the nebula’s heart.
Nothing stronger than grinding boulders would be needed to destroy them.
Mysterious womb of worlds, or merely a pinch of common cosmic dust, it could also be their grave.
His flying fingers touched the keys, and the cruiser spun and darted through a dance with black and shining death.
It found rifts in the curtains of dust.
It recoiled from green, grasping arms. It swam through rivers of hurtling stones.
It defied the grasp of the nebula, and fought like a thing alive for life.
From some remote distance, John Star heard Jay Kalam’s gentle voice:
“Good work, John!
I don’t think they’ll follow.”
And the Purple Dream threaded onward through the mazes of the nebula.
Walls of green flame were suddenly ahead; the drift lurked in the black dust-clouds, and leaped out with naked fangs of tearing stone.
Hurricane-like, the half-known forces of the cosmic storm battered and tore at the ship—forces akin to the dread vortices of sun-spots, John Star suspected, and even to the deadly drag of the Medusae’s pseudo-suns.
Right or left, up or down, he drove the ship with sure ringers.
The radar and the thermal detectors made a continual, useless clamor, until he shut them off.
Only human skill and quickness could serve them now.
For a moment he thought they were free.
The black ahead was deadly dust no longer, but the frosty dark of open space.
Through that glow of eerie green, he saw the beacon of red Antares—and then the geodynes failed again.
The bright keening of the generators was broken suddenly, with that old, heart-breaking vibration.
The precious thrust was lost.
A black and jagged mass of rock—a nascent world, perhaps—came at them suddenly.
John Star’s fingers dropped on the keys, but the sick ship failed to answer.
That black-fanged rock came on through the screens.
It struck the hull with a clang that reverberated like the very knell of doom.
Then there was a silence.
John Star listened.
He couldn’t hear the geodynes—but there was no hiss and roar of ak escaping.
He knew the staunch hull had held.
Then the ship began to spin.
The bright beacon of Antares was suddenly gone, and the rift in the nebula closed.
The same wind of force that had hurled the boulder had caught them now.
It dragged them back, toward the mysterious heart of the nebula.
John Star tried the dead controls again, and stared fearfully at the chronometer—though he knew that his human mechanism would surely be stopped, quite permanently, before the anomalous forces of the counter-space set time to running backward.
“Giles!”
It was Jay Kalam, queerly calm, speaking into the ship’s telephone. “We must have power, Giles!”
And Giles Habibula’s voice came back from the speaker on the bulkhead, plaintive and abstracted:
“For sweet life’s sake, don’t bother me now.
For poor old Giles is ill, Jay.
His head can’t stand this wicked spinning—and his precious geodynes never acted so before!
Let him die in peace, Jay.”
That mad wind of energy swept them on.
John Star frantically studied his dials and gauges, and failed to analyze it.
Neither magnetic nor gravitic, it must be something of the nebula’s own.
Here at the unknown borderland of space and counter-space, he thought, even such familiar terms as magnetism and gravitation could have no certain meaning.
He watched the chronometer again, waiting fearfully for it to turn backward and knowing he would be dead before that could happen.
There was nothing else to do.
“Ah, my poor old head,” came the faint and weary plaint of Giles Habibula.
“Deadly ill, and spinning like a silly top.
Ah, poor old Giles is sick, sick, sick———”