Ten minutes from the station, the invaders picked us up.
“Our forward ports began flashing with an intermittent blue fluorescence.
We knew they were tracking us with some kind of black radiation—something that worked in the anomaly.
We kept waiting for a micro-missile or a heat beam.
“I don’t know yet why they didn’t fire.
Maybe they did—maybe our course had already carried us into a space where their missiles couldn’t reach us.
Anyhow, before we were halfway to the center of the anomaly, the stars went out.”
Startled, I recalled the strange last words that miner’s wife had written on the ore-barge which drifted into Nowhere.
“We didn’t feel anything.” Ken Star’s dry old voice was papery and faint, but firmly controlled and carefully intelligent.
“None of the shock or jolt or pain you might expect.
But suddenly we were in another space-time universe—”
“A wicked space!” old Habibula wheezed.
“A dark and fearful universe!”
A glaze of dread had dulled Ken Star’s eyes.
“At first it seemed absolutely dark,” he said.
“Black and empty everywhere.
But then, with the glasses, we did pick up two or three distant galaxies—the nearest must have been a dozen times as far from us as Andromeda is from here.
I thought we had dropped into an empty universe—”
“What did you find there?”
“Mortal danger!”
Old Habibula’s cold-colored eyes peered at me over another open can of caviar.
“Fearful things to freeze the precious breath of life.
Monstrous evil older than the universe.
Ah, it was worse than the worlds of the fearful Cometeers!”
Ken Star had stopped to stare at the telescope screen.
It was darker now.
The infall of debris from the station must have ceased, because we saw no new sparks or plumes of flame drifting ahead of us into that dreadful chasm.
As the last wisps and flecks of incandescence faded, the illuminated image of that unbelievable space fortress faded into darkness.
The screen looked empty, dead.
“But the fearful thing is still out there!” old Habibula croaked hoarsely.
“Waiting for us in the dark.”
Even in the bright-lit drum, I felt a cold tingle at the back of my neck.
“In that other space—” I swung anxiously back to Ken Star. “What did you find?”
“Nothing, for a long time,” he said.
“In that universal darkness, we couldn’t see a thing.
Our radar and laser gear didn’t work at first.
Later, when we had drifted away from the other end of the anomaly, we began to pick up objects—”
“My weapon!” Lilith interrupted him, her face white and desperate.
“Would it work there?”
“I don’t know.”
The droop of Ken Star’s thin shoulders expressed a dull futility.
“Anyhow, they’re on this side now. We’ll have no chance to try it.”
“What were those objects?” Anxiously I urged him on.
“Iron asteroids,” he said.
“Like those you have been observing, Captain, drifting in and out through the anomaly.
A great swarm of them.
When we got the laser going we charted eleven hundred.
“Later, we landed on several of them.
They’re the same queer rocks you have seen.
The same tough alloy.