The old man nodded solemnly.
“What we learned points a way to safety—possibly even for us.
But I’d expected that dark gateway to be closed long ago.”
Dread shadowed his haggard eyes.
“So long as it is open, we’re in desperate danger!”
He caught my arm with a quick yellow claw.
“Let’s get to the control center—fast.
I want another look—if there is time!
I’m afraid that we have been betrayed by that anomaly in time!”
11 ‘The Mother of Machines!’
We retreated to the control drum, shielded in the core of the ice asteroid.
I helped Star from the cable stage into the slowly spinning rim—and stopped with a gasp of dismay when I saw the projected electronic chart on the round south wall.
That monstrous creature had devoured nearly all the chart.
Its ragged purple legs reached down to us and up to the curve of the drum overhead.
The bright green circle was deep inside its swollen belly.
“It looks—dreadful!”
Lilith’s tense fingers clutched my arm.
“What does it mean?”
“The computer integrates our instrument readings into that picture of the anomaly,” I told her.
“The web’s the magnetic field.
The legs are gravitic vortices—like the one that caught us.
The belly is the region where the anomalous effects are so intense we get no readings.
That’s where the invaders have opened their gateway—”
“Captain,” Ken Star broke in sharply, “let’s try the telescope.
Our flight was blind—it’s more luck than astrogation that got us back to Nowhere Near.
I’d like to see what’s going on behind us.”
“We can try,” I said.
“But our radar and laser gear are dead now, and the telescope requires a source of light—”
“Try it.” Urgency crackled in his thin old voice.
“I think there’ll be light.”
One soaring bound carried me across the drum to the console that controlled the telescope.
We all stood watching the north wall.
The huge round screen was suddenly fringed with wavering points of light—the dimmed and shifting images of stars beyond the anomaly.
All the center remained black, empty, ominous.
“There’s the funnel, sir,” I told Ken Star.
“Without a light, we can’t pick up the machines.”
“Wait!”
Ken Star was breathless with expectance.
“There’ll be light.”
Light came.
A thin pale feather floated from the rim of the funnel, flowed toward its center.
Another streaked to meet it.
Slow meteors grew, converging there.
“Debris their micro-missile blasted off this asteroid,” Star said.
“On the flight here we came through the cloud.
It should give us light enough to locate those machines.”
For a moment I stood numb.
My imagination was too vivid.
Those converging points and plumes were the stuff of our own asteroid, falling ahead of us into that unimaginable chasm.
We were too close behind.