We’re going to hit it!”
“I don’t think so.”
Ken Star’s old voice seemed oddly calm.
“They won’t let that happen—whatever they do.”
His hollowed eyes flashed at old Habibula.
“Giles, what do you think?”
“They’re machines.”
Habibula’s pebble-colored eyes blinked uneasily.
“They’re doing what they were built to do.
They hold us no malice at all.
They aren’t wicked like nature or men.
But if they read the movement of the asteroid as a threat to their task, they’ll destroy us instantly.”
“Shall we abandon Nowhere Near?”
I looked anxiously at Ken Star.
“We might get away in your escape rocket, under cover of the station—”
“Too late to think of that.”
His haggard head shook grimly.
“The station wouldn’t give us cover long enough.
The robots would pick up the flare of our rockets, and they’re programmed to shoot any unidentified craft.”
His haunted eyes went back to the dark funnel about to swallow us, to that enormous alien ship waiting in its throat.
Now the ship looked like a single globe, ring-marked and greenish, bright in the fall of fire around it.
“We’ll have to wait,” he muttered huskily.
“We’ll have to see—”
Old Habibula sat staring at the screen, clutching his empty bottle as if it held some promise of escape.
“Tell ‘em how we found that fearful ship,” he gasped.
“Tell ’em how the laser signal flamed out of it, burning red as blood, to call their fleet—that couldn’t answer.
Tell ‘em how we came to the signal, clinging in the precious shadow of a dead and drifting ship.”
Haggard eyes fixed on that black, unthinkable passage before us, on the bright-green image of that monster machine in the ring of falling fire, Ken Star said nothing.
“Tell ‘em how we got aboard,” croaked old Habibula.
“Tell ’em how I found the wave-guide duct.
Tell ‘em how I opened it.
Tell ’em how we had to leave the rocket and climb through that cold steel gut.”
The fall of fire that rimmed that dreadful funnel was spreading out to take us in.
The bright globe of the robot ship was swelling fast ahead.
“Tell ‘em how we hid and schemed and fought to learn the mortal secret of the ship,” old Habibula whined forlornly.
“Tell ’em how we got into the quarters of the vanished master-creatures.
Tell ‘em how the wicked robots hunted us. Tell ’em how we got inside that fearful main computer.”
Lit by that circular torrent of toppling greenish fire, every part of the alien ship looked bright and cold, unbelievably enormous, chillingly strange. I saw things in motion.
Clutching Lilith’s icy hand, I braced myself—for precisely what, I could not guess.
“Tell ‘em how we got away,” whimpered old Habibula.
“Tell ’em how we worked it out.
Tell ‘em how we got back inside our own precious rocket.
Tell ’em how we waited till the mortal robot ship had brought us halfway back from that fearful universe.
Tell ‘em how we pushed off beneath that fan of falling fire.”
Watching the bright-green disk of the alien ship growing wider on the screen, I made a quick computation.
Its apparent diameter had doubled in the last forty seconds.
‘1 hat meant our falling station had covered half the distance to it in the same forty seconds.
We had forty seconds to live—unless something happened.
“Tell ‘em how we got back,” old Habibula rasped.
“Tell ’em how you computed the angle of the sterilizing ray.