“That might be.”
She nodded helplessly, her icy hand limp in mine. “AKKA works by producing a peculiar distortion of space, in which matter cannot exist.
If the anomaly creates a conflicting distortion—”
Her voice trailed off into desolate silence.
Moving like a stiff machine, she took her useless weapon apart and slipped the ring back on her finger.
That ugly skull caught the red light, with a mocking wink of evil.
I felt her shiver.
We hung to the rail, watching that funnel of darkness swallowing the northward stars.
Though I could not quite see it grow, at every glance it looked larger.
The white point of the incandescent iron asteroid was drifting slowly but visibly toward the center of it, moving in the way we would go.
Old Habibula uttered a wordless, tragic moan.
“Giles, you know machines.” Ken Star’s sudden voice was strained, hoarse, somehow startling.
“Tell us how to stop those machines.”
“My precious life!”
Old Habibula shuddered in the blood-red gloom.
“Maybe I do know machines—I know these are wicked.
I respect machines because they have a purpose I can understand.
These have made their fearful purpose clear.
“Their unknown makers mean no mortal good for us!”
The girl’s cold hand shuddered in mine.
“No hope!” she breathed huskily.
“Nothing we can do—”
“Perhaps—I think there is!”
A quick excitement caught me.
“Commander—Commander Star!”
I stopped to smooth my shaking voice.
“I think there’s something we can try.
A pretty grim and hopeless thing—but better than waiting to follow that burning boulder into Nowhere!”
His haggard eyes peered through the red dusk at me.
“What’s that, Ulnar?”
“I ran a computer analysis on the motions of those rocks,” I said. “Months ago.
The results didn’t make much sense till just now.
But now I think your theory explains them.
I think I know a back door into—into Nowhere!”
Shifting his grip on the cold chrome, he hauled himself toward me.
“Let’s hear about it!”
“We’d observed the way those rocks were moving,” I said. “At the instant of appearance.
At the instant of disappearance.
I fed the data into the computer, to search for common elements.
In the appearing rocks, I found none—they seem to come out with random directions and velocities.
But the rocks that vanished had all been moving up a cone less than one degree across, at nearly the same velocity.”
Lilith’s hand squeezed mine, alive again.
“What I want to do is take a rocket up that cone,” I said.
“If your theory is correct, I think it might come through into the world beyond that bubble—without being sterilized!
I think it might give us a chance for some sort of surprise attack on whatever is beyond.
Not a good chance—but any is better than none!”
He hung gazing at me.
His hollowed eyes caught the instrument lights, and his gaunt head looked shockingly like the skull on Lilith’s ring.
I had to turn away.
“I see no chance at all,” his dull voice rasped.