The cosmic cloud
"_Drawn back--and they're crashing--crashing!_"
For we but glimpsed the thousands of mighty ships growing greater above
us with terrific speed, whirling back broad-side in utter confusion
and broken masses, when with a prolonged roar of thundering crashes
they were smashing into the surface of the mighty magnet-world that
had drawn them back! The planet's surface shook and rolled beneath the
gigantic simultaneous concussion of those vast swarms of vessels that
it had drawn back with awful force toward it, and as we were flung from
our feet the world seemed riven by the vast metal masses crashing at
terrible speed into it, none striking the roof on which we were only by
grace of that fact that none had been directly over us.
For a terrible moment the giant thunder-roll of the crashing ships
split the air about us, and then as it lessened, the swaying of the
building beneath us subsided and we staggered to our feet.
Around us lay a world of annihilation and death, its surface, save
for an unharmed building here and there like our own, but one vast
plain of wreckage! The wreckage of the thousands of ships that would
have spread horror and death over all the galaxy; the wreckage that
held the dead and broken hordes of all the eyeless creatures; the
wreckage that marked the annihilation of their race and of all their
tremendous plans! And that annihilation had been brought on them at
the last by their own work, by the control that made of their world a
colossal magnet to draw all ships toward it. They had used it to draw
the galaxy's ships into the cloud, into their world's atmosphere to be
captured, but at the last it had been used to draw those ships with all
their hordes inside them back to this world, to crash into it and into
annihilation!
For moments Jhul Din and Korus Kan and Zat Zanat and I stared at
that scene of terrific death, and then, flinging open the great
magnet-control again, we were climbing into the waiting cruiser,
slamming its space-door shut. As we gained its pilot room I grasped the
wheel and controls, and as the generators throbbed beneath my touch I
shot the ship upward from that world of awful death and into the violet
glow over it, heading at mounting speed out and toward the violet
lightpoints that were the galaxy's stars. The glasses fell from our
tired eyes as we swayed there, and again the absolute darkness of the
great cloud was upon us; but I did not stop to replace them but held
the racing cruiser steady on its course at a speed terrific.
Out through the darkness of the cloud we were rushing almost in
moments, so great was our speed; for soon we shot abruptly out of its
stygian lightlessness into clear space once more, into clear view of
the galaxy's familiar stars. Even then, though, I did not slow our
racing ship, but with Jhul Din and Korus Kan and Zat Zanat slumped
beside me kept the cruiser racing straight onward--straight away from
the vast blackness diminishing in the heavens behind us, straight away
from the cosmic cloud which its people of darkness had thought to leave
but which would hold them now in silence and in death forever.