If it was really some unheard-of and recurring force or some tremendous ether-disturbance that had swept the luckless ships into the cloud, we should be able to determine its nature and source with these aids.
From the instrument room's window Jhul Din and I watched the great cloud largen as we neared it. It seemed soon like a colossal black curtain across the universe, blotting half the galaxy's suns from sight, stretching across billions of miles. What mysteries did that vast and enigmatic region of lightlessness contain?
At last Korus Kan's voice came down through the order-phone from the pilot room. 'We're within two million miles of the cloud's edge,' he reported. 'What orders?'
'Turn right and coast at a hundred light-speeds along its edge,' I told him. 'Jhul Din and I will start our observations, and I'll let you know when to change course or speed.'
He assented briefly, and in the next moment we saw through the window that the gigantic black curtain of the cloud was sliding sidewise as our cruiser turned in space to coast along its edge. At once Jhul Din and I began our work. Bending over the dials of the recording-instruments, the Spican and I made quick readings as the ship moved on.
All ether-conditions outside the cruiser seemed normal, however, with no strong currents or maelstroms anywhere near us. Nor were our other instruments more enlightening, for none registered any unusual force. For more than an hour, while Korus Kan held the cruiser in a steady course along the cloud's edge, we kept to our watch of the dials, but with no greater result.
I turned from the instruments to the window, shaking my head. 'I'm afraid it's useless, Jhul Din,' I said. 'It never was but a slender chance that we might find anything this way, and I'm afraid it has failed.'
He looked thoughtfully with me toward the vast black wall of darkness. 'Yet it's our one chance to learn anything,' he said. 'It may be that on the cloud's other side we could discover something.'
'We'll have to try it, but I don't place much faith in it,' I told him. 'Whatever it is about the cloud has caused those-'
With stunning force I was hurled slantwise across the instrument room to strike in one of its corners, Jhul Din flung with me. The next instant saw the room's walls spinning madly around us and rattling us inside them like peas in a box. There were hoarse cries from the generator rooms and a wild uproar through all the cruiser as with awful speed and force it was whirled over and over.
Bruised and half dazed, I retained enough presence of mind to clutch at the rail of the pilot room stair as I was thrown against it, and as Jhul Din was flung past me a moment later I grasped and held his arm. Together we struggled up into the pilot room, where we glimpsed Korus Kan clinging to the wheel-standard as the room gyrated about him.
'The cloud!' he cried. 'It's the force they told us of-it's drawing us into the cloud!'
'Into the cloud!'
The cold of outside space seemed about us in the fear that for a moment held us, for as we looked from the windows of the whirling pilot room we saw instantly that the Antarian was right. Our cruiser was hurtling at tremendous speed straight toward the vast region of darkness we had been coasting.
'Turn on full power!' I cried. 'Try to bring the ship out of this, Korus Kan!'
'I can't!' he shouted back. 'I've got every generator on full but the cruiser doesn't obey its wheel! It's some colossal magnet or magnetic force inside the cloud that's drawing us!'
With every instant the tremendous wall of blackness, as sharply defined as though material, was looming closer before our whirling ship. While Korus Kan worked frantically with the controls, and while the cries of our astounded crew came up to us from beneath, I seized the distance-phone, in the hope of flashing word at least to others in the galaxy of the nature of the force that had seized us. But the distance-phone was going dead, affected by the magnetic force that was drawing us to doom!
By then the great cloud was an appalling sight ahead of us, a vast maw of darkness into which our cruiser was racing at tremendous velocity. The ship's whirling had subsided somewhat and I yelled to Korus Kan to make a last trial of its power. He strained the generators to the breaking-point in the next moment, but it was useless, for nothing could escape the relentless grip of the power that was drawing us on.
Another moment and the blackness was walling the firmament directly before our plunging ship. Something made me turn round at that moment to glance back toward the galaxy's shining suns as though for a last look, and then even as I turned round again we were plunged into a darkness to which the darkest night would have been as noonday, an utter blackness in which no faintest ray of light existed!
I groped in the darkness for the switch of the cruiser's inside lights but though it clicked beneath my fingers there came no answering illumination. Light could not exist in this terrible region! And the quivering of the cruiser about us told us that still at immense speed we were being drawn in toward the cosmic cloud's heart.
On and on we rushed through that shrouding night, Jhul Din and Korus Kan and I bracing ourselves in the pilot room with our hands upon each other's shoulders, facing ahead as though to look through this utter blackness which no eye could pierce. I think now that in those terrible moments the three of us were but waiting in tacit silence for the end. Even were the cruiser to free itself of the deadly force that gripped it we could never now win out of this lightless region in which we would wander blindly.
Still on toward the mighty cloud's heart raced the ship, and to me it seemed that we must be very near its center. A tense expectation of the end held all of us now. But abruptly we cried out together as there came a mounting, hissing sound from outside the cruiser. Our craft was rushing now through air, through an atmosphere!
At the same moment we were aware that it was slowing its tremendous speed, that the mighty magnetic force that had drawn us inward appeared to have vanished. The stunning wonder of the two things occupied us for the moment to the exclusion of all else. Was there a world then here at the cosmic cloud's heart, through whose atmosphere our ship was now moving?
Suddenly my heart stood still as there came a slight jar against our cruiser's side, followed by a succession of flopping sounds upon the ship's top. There was silence for a brief instant while we listened tensely in the utter darkness of the pilot room, and then came a clang of metal against the cruiser's top, and the hiss of some strange force.
'It's some other ship outside!' I cried. 'And they're trying to get in-they're boarding us!'
'The top space-door!' Jhul Din shouted. 'They're getting in there!' For the clang of the door opening came to our ears at that moment and a flood of cold air from outside rushed through the cruiser.
'Up to the space-door, then!' I yelled. 'Hold it against them, whoever they are!'
As we cried out we were bursting out of the pilot room, bumping against walls and doors in the unrelieved darkness, rushing toward the corridor into which that upper space-door opened. I heard the shouts of the crew as they too blindly hastened upward, and then as I burst into the corridor I sought I collided squarely in the darkness with something. Something that was tall and bulky and that felt like cold flesh to my touch. Instantly two great flap-like limbs or arms from it were grasping me.
I struck out in the dark with sudden frenzied horror, but as I knocked the unearthly thing from me others were about me, pouring down into the corridor from the space-door above, from outside the ship. They were all about us, in groups, scores, gripping me and Korus Kan and Jhul Din and all our crew, while we struck out blindly against them.
I have fought the dread serpent-creatures in the hall of the living dead, and I have had a part in the tremendous combat of three universes, but never yet did I take part in a more terrible struggle than that one. For it was a struggle in a darkness so absolute that we could have no slightest glimpse of the creatures we fought, knowing by touch only that they were things such as we had never come into contact with before.
They were calling in flute-like tones to one another as their powerful flap-arms caught and held us, tones oddly incongruous with the wild uproar of the battle. They seemed to move as easily in the utter darkness as we might do in light, and this fact gave them a tremendous advantage over us. Because of that our wild struggle had in moments been quelled, and as I was held tightly by two of the things I heard the calls of my friends to me and realized that all of us had been overpowered. These creatures of darkness had captured our ship!
Still holding us, they herded us toward one end of the corridor, and then released us. Amazed, I took a step through the darkness toward one of the corridor's doors. But in an instant I had halted, for through the darkness a buzzing sound came to me and at the same time fiery, tearing pain ran through every nerve in my body. I staggered back, and the buzzing ceasing, the pain ended. Jhul Din and Korus Kan, who had thought to escape also in the
