From time to time Nisa woke up, transmitted a reassuring message to the watcher on Tantra and dozed off again. The hurricane was blowing itself out and the earth tremors had ceased. The “nothing,” or, more correctly, the “something” might appear now. The observers on the turrets took VP, vigilance pills, to liven up a tired nervous system.
“That other spaceship bothers me,” confessed Nisa, “I should so much like to know who they are, where they came from and how they got here.”
“So would I,” answered Erg Noor, “only it’s obvious how they got here. Stories of the iron stars and their planet traps have long been circulating round the Great Circle. In the more densely inhabited parts of the Galaxy, where ships have been making frequent trips for a long time already, there are planet graveyards of lost spaceships. Many ships, especially the earlier types, got stuck to those planets and many hair-raising stories are told about them, stories that are almost legend today, the legends of the arduous conquest of the Cosmos. Perhaps there are older spaceships on this planet that belong to more ancient days, although the meeting of three ships in our sparsely populated part of the Galaxy is an extraordinary event. So far not a single iron star was known to exist in the vicinity of the Sun, we have discovered the first.”
“Do you intend to investigate the disc ship?” asked the biologist.
“Most certainly! Could a scientist ever forgive himself if he let such an opportunity go? We don’t know of any disc spaceships in regions neighbouring on our solar system. This must be a ship from a great distance that has, perhaps, been wandering about the Galaxy for several thousand years after the death of the crew or after some irreparable damage. Many transmissions round the Great Circle may become comprehensible to us when we get whatever material there is in the disc ship. It has a very queer form, it’s a disc-shaped spiral, the ribs on its exterior are very convex. As soon as we have transferred the cargo from Parus we’ll start on that ship but at present we cannot take a single person away from work.”
“It took us only a few hours to investigate Parus.” “I have examined the disc ship through a stereotele-scope. It is sealed tight, not a single opening is to be seen anywhere. It is very difficult to penetrate into any Cosmic ship that is reliably protected against forces that are many times stronger than our terrestrial elements. Just try and get into Tantra, through her armour of metal with a reorganized internal crystal structure, through the borason plating — it would be a task equal to the siege of a fortress. It’s still more difficult to deal with an alien ship, the principles of whose structure are unknown to us. But we’ll make an attempt to find out what it is!”
“When are we going to examine what we’ve found in Parus?” asked Nisa. “There should be some staggeringly interesting observations made in those marvellous worlds mentioned in the message.”
The telephone transmitted the commander’s good-natured laugh.
“I’ve been dreaming of Vega since childhood and am more impatient than any of you. But we’ll have plenty of time for that on the way home. The first thing we have to do is get out of this darkness, out of this inferno, as they used to say in the old days. The Parus explorers did not make any landings otherwise we should have found the things they brought from those worlds in the collection rooms of the ship. You remember that despite the thorough search we made we found only films, measurements, lists of surveys, air tests and containers of explosive dust.”
Erg Noor stopped talking and listened. Even the sensitive microphones did not register the slightest breath of wind — the storm was over. A scraping, rustling sound came through the ground from outside and was echoed by the walls of the turret.
The commander raised his hand and Nisa, who understood him without words, extinguished the light. The darkness seemed as dense inside the turret, warmed up with infrared rays, as if it were standing in black liquid on the bed of an ocean. Flashes of brown light showed through the transparent hood of silicoborum. The watchers clearly saw the lights burn up and for a second form tiny stars with dark-red or dark-green rays; they would go out and then appear again. These little stars stretched out in lines that wavered and bent into circles and figures of eight, and slid soundlessly over the smooth diamond-hard surface of the hood. The people in the turret felt a strange, acute pain in their eyes and a sharp pain along the bigger nerves of the body as though the short rays of the brown stars were stabbing the nerve stems like needles.
“Nisa,” whispered Erg Noor, “turn the regulator on to ‘full’ and switch on the light suddenly.”
The turret was lit up with a bright, bluish terrestrial light. The people were blinded by it and could see nothing, or practically nothing. Eon and Nisa managed to see — or did they imagine it? — that the darkness on the right-hand side of the turret did not disappear immediately but remained for a moment as a flattened condensation of gloom with tentacles attached. The “something” instantaneously withdrew its tentacles and sprang back into the wall of darkness that the light had pushed farther from the turret.
“Perhaps those are phantoms?” suggested Nisa, “phantom condensations of darkness around a charge of some sort of energy, like our fire balls, and not a form of life at all. If everything here is black why shouldn’t the lightning be black, too?”
“That’s all very poetical, Nisa,” objected Erg Noor, “but hardly likely. In the first place the ‘something’ was obviously attacking, was after our living flesh. It or its brethren annihilated the people from Parus. If it’s organized and stable, if it can move in the desired direction, if it can accumulate and discharge some form of energy, then, of course, there can be no question of an atmospheric phantom. It’s something created from living matter and it’s trying to devour us!”
The biologist supported the commander’s conclusion.
“It seems to me that here, on this planet of darkness, it’s dark for us alone because our eyes arc not sensitive to the infrared rays of the heat end of the spectrum; but the other end of the spectrum, the yellow and blue rays, should affect these creatures very strongly. Its reaction is so swift that the crew of Parus could not see anything when they illuminated the site of the attack and if they did see anything it was already too late and they were unable to tell anybody.”
“Let’s repeat the experiment, even if the approach of that thing is unpleasant.”
Nisa switched off the light and again the three observers sat in profound darkness awaiting the approach of the denizens of the world of darkness.
“What is it armed with? Why is its approach felt through the hood and the spacesuit?” asked the biologist aloud. “Is it some new form of energy?”
“There are few forms of energy and this is most likely electromagnetic. There is no doubt that countless modifications of this form of energy exist. This being has a weapon that affects our nervous system. You can imagine what it would be like if those feelers were to touch the unprotected body!”
Erg Noor flinched and Nisa Greet shuddered inwardly as they noticed the line of brown lights rapidly approaching from three sides.
“There isn’t just one being!” exclaimed Eon, softly. “Perhaps we ought not let them touch the hood.”
“You’re right. Let each of us turn his back on the light and look in one direction only. Nisa, switch on!”
On this occasion each of the observers noted some details that could be combined to give a general impression of creatures like huge flat jelly-fish, floating low over the ground with a dense fringe waving in the air below them. Some of the feelers were short when compared with the dimensions of the creature and could not have been more than a yard long. The acute-angled corners of the rhomboid body each had two feelers of much greater length. At the base of the feelers the biologist noticed huge bladders that glowed inside and seemed to be transmitting the star-like flashes along them.