our generators had hummed always at their highest power, propelling our craft forward through space with the swiftness of thought, almost-long, changeless days in which the alternate watches in the pilot room and the occasional inspection of the throbbing generators had formed our only occupations.
On and on and on we had flashed, past sun after sun, star system after star system. Many times we had swerved from our course as our meteorometers warned us of vast meteor swarms ahead, and more than once we had veered to avoid some thundering dark star which our charts showed near us, but always the prow of our craft had swung back toward the great nebula. Ever onward toward it we had raced, day after day, watching its glowing sphere widen across the heavens, until now at last we were drawing within sight of our journey's end, and were flashing over the last few billions of miles that separated us from our goal.
And now, as we drew thus nearer toward the nebula's fiery mass, we saw it for the first time in all its true grandeur. A vast sphere of glowing light, of incandescent gases, it flamed before us like some inconceivably titanic sun, reaching from horizon to horizon, stunning in its very magnitude. Up and outward from the great fiery globe there soared vast tongues of flaming gas, mighty prominences of incalculable length, leaping out from the gigantic spinning sphere. For the sphere, the nebula, was spinning. We saw that, now, and could mark the turning of its vast surface by the position of those leaping tongues, and though that turning seemed slow to our eyes by reason of the nebula's very vastness, we knew that in reality it was whirling at a terrific rate.
For a long time there was silence in the little pilot room while we three gazed ahead, the glowing light from the vast nebula before us beating in through the broad window and illuminating all about us in its glare. At last Sar Than, beside me, spoke.
'One sees now why no interstellar ship has ever dared to approach the nebula,' he said, his eyes on the colossal sea of flame before us.
I nodded at the Arcturian's comment. 'Only our own ship would dare to come as close as we are now,' I told him. 'The temperature outside is hundreds of degrees, now.' And I pointed toward a dial that recorded the outside heat.
'But how near can we go to it?' asked Jor Dahat. 'How much heat can our cruiser stand?'
'Some thousands of degrees,' I said, answering the plant-man's last question first. 'We can venture within a few thousand miles of the nebula's surface without danger, I think. But if we were to go farther, if we were to plunge into its fires, even our ship could not resist the tremendous heat there for long, and would perish in a few minutes. We will be able, though, to skim above the surface without danger.'
'You plan to do that, to search above the nebula's surface for the forces that have set it spinning?' asked the Capellan, and I nodded.
'Yes. There may be great ether-currents of some kind there which are responsible for this spin, or perhaps other forces of which we know nothing. If we can only find what is causing it, there will be at least a chance-' And I was silent, gazing thoughtfully toward the far-flung raging fires ahead.
Now, as our ship raced on toward that mighty ocean of flaming gas, the pointer on the outside-heat dial was creeping steadily forward, though the ship's interior was but slightly warmer, due to the super-insulation of its walls. We were passing into a region of heat, we knew, that would have destroyed any ship but our own, and that thought held us silent as our humming craft raced on. And now the sky before us, a single vast expanse of glowing flame, was creeping downward across our vision as the cruiser's bow swung up. Minutes more, and the whole vast flaming nebula lay stretched beneath us, instead of before us, and then we were dropping smoothly down toward it.
Down we fell, my hand on the control lever gradually decreasing our speed, now moving at a single lightspeed, now at half of that, and still slower and slower, until at last our craft hung motionless a scant thousand miles above the nebula's flaming surface, a tiny atom in size compared to the colossal universe of the fire above which it hovered. For from horizon to horizon beneath us, now, stretched the nebula, in terrible grandeur. Its flaming sea, we saw, was traversed by great waves and currents, currents that met here and there in gigantic fiery maelstroms, while far across its surface we saw, now and then, great leaping prominences of geysers of flaming gas, that towered for an instant to immense heights and then rushed back down into the fiery sea beneath. To us, riding above that burning ocean, it seemed at that moment that in all the universe was only flame and gas, so brain-numbing was the fiery nebula's magnitude.
Hanging there in our little cruiser we stared down at it, the awe we felt reflected in each other's eyes. I saw now by the dial that the temperature about us was truly terrific, over a thousand degrees, and what it might be in the raging fires below I could not guess. But nowhere was there any sign of what might have set the great nebula to spinning, for our instruments recorded no ether-disturbances around the surface, nor any other phenomena which might give us a clue. And, looking down, I think that we all felt, indeed, that nothing was in reality capable of affecting in any way this awesome nebula, the vastest thing in all our universe.
At last I turned to the others. 'There's nothing here,' I said. 'Nothing to show what's caused the nebula's spinning. We must go on, across its surface-'
With the words I reached forward toward the control levers, then abruptly whirled around as there came a sudden cry from Sar Than, at the window.
'Look!' cried the Arcturian, pointing down through the window, his eyes staring. 'Below us-look!'
I gazed down, then felt the blood drive from my heart at what I saw. For directly beneath us one of the vast prominences of flaming gas was suddenly shooting up from the nebula's surface, straight toward us, a gigantic tongue of fire beside which our ship was but as a midge beside a great blaze. I shouted, sprang to the control, but even as I laid hands on the levers there was a tremendous rush of blinding flame all about our ship, and then we three had been flung violently into a corner of the pilot room and the cruiser was being whirled blindly about with lightning speed by the vast current of flaming gas that had gripped it.
All about us was the thunderous roaring of the fires that held us, and now as we sprawled helpless on the room's floor I sensed that our ship was falling, plunging down with the downward-sinking geyser of flame that held it. Struggling to gain my feet, while the pilot room spun dizzily about me, I glimpsed through the shifting fires outside the window the nebula's flaming surface, just below us, a raging sea of fiery gas toward which we were dropping plummet-like. Then, as a fresh gyration of the plunging ship flung me once more to the floor, I heard the thundering roar about us suddenly intensified, terrible beyond expression, while now through the window was visible only a single solid mass of blinding flame, and while our cruiser at the same moment rocked and whirled crazily beneath the impetus of a dozen different forces. And as understanding of what had happened flashed across my brain I cried out hoarsely to my two companions.
'The nebula!' I cried. 'The current that held us has sucked us down into the nebula itself!'
All about us now was only one tremendous sheet of fire, whose heat was rapidly penetrating through even our heat-resistant walls and windows. Swiftly the air in the little pilot room was becoming hot, suffocating, and already the walls were burning to the touch. The ship, I knew, could not stand such heat for many minutes more, yet every moment was taking us farther into the nebula's fiery depths, whirling us wildly on with velocity inconceivable. Borne by its mighty interior currents we were sweeping on and on into that universe of flame, its vast fires roaring about us like the thunder of doom, deafening, awful, a cosmic, bellowing clamor that was like the mighty shouting of a universe made vocal.
On and on it roared, about us, and on and on we whirled into the depths of those mighty fires, toward our doom. The air had become stifling, unbreathable, and the walls were beginning to glow dully. Now, with a last effort, I dragged myself from support to support until I had clutched the control levers, opening them to the last notch. Yet though the generators beneath hummed with highest power it was as though they were silent, for in the grip of the nebula's giant fire-currents the cruiser plunged madly on. And as its whirling catapulted me again to the room's corner, where my two companions clung, I felt my lungs scorching with each panting breath, felt my senses leaving me.
Then, through the unconsciousness that was creeping upon me, I heard a grating wrench from somewhere in the cruiser's walls, a loud and ominous cracking, and knew that under the terrific fires around us those walls were already warping, giving way. Another wrenching crack came, and another, sounding loud in my ears above the thunderous roar of the flames about us. In a moment the walls would give completely, and in the rushing fires of the nebula about us we would meet the end. In a moment-
But what was that? The thunderous clamor about us had suddenly dwindled, ceased, and at the same moment our ship had righted itself, was humming serenely on. Slowly I raised my head, then stared in utter
