I threw the illusion off and let my irons carry me back and forth in a crazy kind of jig. The magnetics had to be guided by my muscles and my will. It was twist and turn, go limp and brace hard, relax and edge forward.
Suddenly the ship lurched, giving off a blinding flare. I knew it was just a stress we’d hit—one of those little pockets in space where the diffuse matter of the void is sucked dry by energies that don’t show up on the instruments.
Ships pass through stresses fast. But when the flare vanished I was dangling head downwards from the hull, my right knee attached to solid metal, the rest of me hugging empty space.
Furiously I slammed my left knee upward, twisted my body forward, and got a firm grip on the hull again with my wrist irons. It was a contortionist feat which brought the blood rushing to my ears. When my head stopped spinning I was staring into the face of the girl I’d risked my neck to save in an inferno of ice and flame.
We were so close our helmets almost touched. But she wasn’t looking at me. Six feet from my swaying knees she was making frantic gestures with her magneto-wrench, her face a twisting mask of horror. Her body was twisting too and she seemed to be fighting off something I couldn’t see!
Frantic with alarm, I strained forward and threw my right arm about her.
At least, I thought I did! But my iron-weighted wrist seemed to pass right through her! It whipped through emptiness to strike the hull with an impact that sent a stab of pain darting up my arm to my shoulder. The pain was agonizing for an instant; then it fell away.
At the same instant I saw the light. It was faint at first, a pale spectral glow that haloed her helmet and lapped in concentric waves about her knees. It wasn’t a flame whorl. It gave off iridescent glints and grew swiftly brighter, turning from pale blue to dazzling azure. Then it became a weaving funnel of light that spurted from the hull with a low humming sound.
The humming was unearthly. It penetrated my helmet and became a shrill inward keening with a quality hard to define. Imagine a butterfly of sound struggling fiercely to escape from a sonic chrysalis. It was a little like that, a kind of shrill fluttering on the tonal plane.
The light did not remain attached to the hull. It shot up into the void and became a vertical shaft of downsweeping radiance. From its summit pulsing ripples ascended, giving it the aspect of a waterfall. Then it became a prism, flashing with all the colors of the spectrum.
A man may awaken from a nightmare, stare for an instant into the darkness and try to rationalize his fears. But this was no nightmare! As I stared up the iridescence was replaced by a leaf-screen effect shot through with crimson filaments. Shadows appeared amidst the ripples, straight and jagged lines of some tenuous substance that seemed to mold itself into a pattern.
It may have been imagination. But for the barest instant as I stared at the incredible shape of radiance a face seemed to look out at me. A fat face, bloated, toadlike, supported by a shadowy neck that swelled out beneath it like the hood of a rearing cobra!
Suddenly my scalp crawled and my helmet seemed to contract, pressing against my skull with a deadly firmness. An electrolube!
I knew instinctively that the flame shape was an electrolube—a devouring entity of the void which snaked through deep space close to Saturn’s orbit, a whiplash shape of pure force with a hellish affinity for life, its negative charge seeking a positive charge with which to unite!
It was itself alive, the ultimate life form, sentient and polarized, an energy eater that sucked nourishment from electrical impulses.
And there was just enough positive electricity in the human body to give the horror the power to destroy by slashing down in swift, flesh-destroying stabs that could cut through a spacesuit like a knife through jelly!
Flesh and blood had no chance against it.
For one awful instant I looked straight into the eyes of a girl I couldn’t save, an instant as long as a lifetime to the poor fool who loved her! No, I’m not raving! Do you think I’d have crawled out into the everlasting night of space if I hadn’t known there could be no other woman for me?
She didn’t wait for the horror to slice down. She jerked her knees, tore her wrists free and shut her eyes. Then she was gone. She didn’t even move her lips to say goodbye. Space was her bridegroom. It took her and she was gone.
I looked away. Not caring how soon death came, knowing I’d be with her if I just stayed with the ship.
I waited for the anguish to hit me. I waited for a full minute. Two. I shut my eyes as she had done.
When I opened them the electrolube had vanished. And when I looked down, the void had grown brighter. Gone was the great ringed disk of Saturn.
Just little frosty stars glittered far-off, mocking. And another planet that was mottled pink and yellow. A ringless planet, swimming in a murky haze, with eleven little moons spinning around it—eight on one side, three on the other. One of the moons was red.
Jupiter is bigger than Saturn, bigger than a thousand Earths. And I was moving away from it on a droning ship’s hull, a tiny fleck of matter of no importance in that awful sweep of space. But when I dragged myself back through the gravity panel into the ship my brain was bursting with a despair so vast it seemed to dwarf the vastness of space.
Pete was standing just inside the panel, holding something furry
