“Captain!” Star raised his voice.
“Before the light is gone—”
Though my fingers were stiff and clumsy at the console, I found the greenish image of the invader stationed north of the anomaly.
It was moving, drifting southward.
As the light increased, we picked up three other faint greenish shadows, the other invaders, all converging in that black abyss.
“That object!” Star’s voice lifted sharply.
“Coming to meet them —can you get a better image?”
“Not without a better light.”
With the low power we had to use in that poor light, those enormous fighting machines were tiny greenish flecks.
At first I could see nothing else.
Then I made out a vague blur emerging from the dark ahead of them.
In the glow of a new plume of fire, it was suddenly clear.
I heard Lilith gasp.
“A machine?” she breathed.
“A ship!”
“The mother of all machines!” old Habibula croaked from the doorway.
“It has followed us back from that foreign universe!”
The thing was made of seven unequal spheres, partly fused together.
Roughly spindle-shaped, thick at the center, it tapered toward both pointed ends.
Three curved rods or tubes made a tight cage that bound the spheres.
I shivered with awe at its strangeness— and its enormous size.
“It must be big!”
Dazed, I was trying to imagine just how big it must be.
If those gray-green motes flying to meet it were machines a hundred times the size of a Legion cruiser, I thought it must be another hundred times larger.
“Mortal big!” croaked old Habibula.
“It’s the monstrous mother ship!”
Unbelievingly, I turned to Ken Star.
“Is it really—a ship?”
“Space fort might be a better term,” Star said.
“It’s a good ten miles along those—let’s call ‘em decks—from nose to tail.
The middle globe must be two miles through—and it’s filled with tilings you can’t imagine.”
“Do you mean—?”
He nodded a brisk answer to that half-spoken question.
“We were aboard.”
He tugged at his neat white beard.
“Long enough at least for this to grow.”
“Years!” puffed old Habibula.
“Mortal years of fear and famine!”
He had left us on the way from the lock to the drum, and now I saw that he had slipped away to raid his private hoard.
His tattered pockets bulged, and he clutched an open bottle of the rare wine of Earth in each baby-hand.
“What does it mean?”
Staring at the growing image of that enormous, alien spindle-shape, I felt a chill of puzzled dread. Nothing about it told me anything. I swung blankly back to Ken Star.
“What did you discover?”
“Wait, Captain.”
He lifted a thin yellow claw.
“I want to see what it does.”
Moving with an old spaceman’s cautious rhythm, Habibula waddled across the curve of the drum to a table.
Carefully, he planted the bottles of wine.
From his bulging pockets he unloaded clinking tins of caviar.
The rest of us stood watching the green electronic shadow of that titanic thing.