Edmond Hamilton

“ Across the heavens gleamed the hosts of suns, points of brilliant light in a field of deepest black. Moments we gazed up toward them, and toward three among them that were far distant from each other across the heavens—the magnificent golden splendor of great Capella, to the left, and the fiery red brilliance of Arcturus, to the right, and above us and between them a smaller star of deep yellow, that little spark of light toward which the eyes and hearts of men shall turn until the end of time, though they roam the limits of the universe. ”

“ Ages passed over them while they lived thus in their world's depths, but still the nebula contracted, closed in upon them, in that vast, remorseless cycle that is nature's law throughout the universe. Closer and closer crept its fires toward the metal-sheathed world of the nebula people, until at last they saw that soon those fires would envelop their world and annihilate it, unless they were turned back in some way. ”

“ 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 controls, 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. ”

“ But we have learned too late, now, for in less than twenty hours the nebula's whirling will have reached its critical point, will have sent its vast flaming mass hurtling out across our universe, our Galaxy, in all directions, to carry destruction and death to all the peoples of our suns and worlds! ”

“ And those colossal clouds of flaming gas, flying out through our Galaxy, our universe, will inevitably sweep over and destroy countless thousands of our suns and worlds, annihilating the worlds like midgets in candle-flame, changing the suns into nebulous masses of flaming gas like themselves, smashing gigantically through and across the Galaxy and destroying the gravitational balance of its whirling suns and worlds until in a great chaos of crashing stars and planets our universe ends as a vast, cosmic wreck, our organizations and our civilizations gone forever! ”

“ We have even dared to change the course of suns, to prevent collisions between them that would have annihilated their circling worlds. It might seem, indeed, that we, the massed peoples of the Galaxy, have risen to such power that all things in it are subject to our will, obedient to our commands. But we have not. One thing alone in the Galaxy remains beyond our power to change or alter, one thing beside which all our power and our science are as nothing. And that is the nebula.
"A nebula is the vastest thing in all our universe, and the most mysterious. ”

“ Light and warmth had this world in plenty, therefore, and with time life had risen on it, crude forms asecnding through the channels of evolutionary change into a myriad different species, of which one species, the nebula-creatures we have seen, was the most intelligent. In time they ruled this strange world, wiping out all other species, and climbed to greater and greater science and power with the passage of time, their existence never suspected by any in the universe outside. ”

“ We were very near to the pale beam, now, flashing above the huge pit straight toward it. I had a glimpse of the great pit's perpendicular black metal walls, dropping down for miles into depths inconceivable, of something in those dusky depths that burned like a great white star of light, and then Jor Dahat suddenly uttered a choking cry, flinging an arm out toward the livid ray before us.
"That ray!" he cried. "It's not light—it's force! The nebula—stop the ship!" ”

“ Before and around us glided the great turtle-machines with their burdens, the humming of their operation adding to the medley of sounds about us, only the shapeless nebula-creatures being completely silent. And as we marched on I saw in the great cavern's distant walls doors and corridors leading away to other vast brilliant-lit caverns that I could but vaguely glimpse, extending away in every direction, a great, half-seen vista of mighty white-lit spaces reaching away all about us, stupendous, incredible. ”

“ At last the stillness was broken by the voice of Jor Dahat, who had been gazing moodily toward the wall. "Prisoners, here," he said slowly. "The one place of all places from which there is no escape."
I shook my head. "It seems the end," I admitted, dully. "We can't escape from this place, and if we could there's no time left to do anything, now."
The plant-man nodded, glancing at the time-dial on his wrist. "But twelve hours more," he said, "before the end—before the break-up of the nebula, the cosmic cataclysm that will wreck our universe. ”

“ The whole surface of their world they sheathed with smooth, heat-reflecting metal, and then descended in all their hordes into the countless mighty caverns that honeycombed all their great world, taking up their life again in those cool depths, safe from the nebula's heat. ”

“ I saw the members about me leaning forward, gazing tensely toward the Council Chief, and when he spoke again his words seemed to come to us through that strained silence as though from some remoteness of distance.
"Terrible as this peril is," he was saying, "we must face it. Flight is impossible, for where could we flee? We have but one chance to save ourselves, our universe, and that is to halt the spinning of the great nebula before the few days left us have passed, before this cosmic cataclysm takes place. ”

“ Then the two guards were swinging down after him, and we were dropping steadily down the line of pegs into the rayless darkness.
I think now that of all the journeys in the universe that journey of ours down the shaft was the strangest. Plant-man and human and Arcturian, three different beings from three far-distant stars, we swung down that dizzy ladder into the dark depths of this strange world at the fiery nebula's heart, guarded above and below by formless beings of weirdness unutterable. ”

“ Other dangers, other problems, have faced us in the past, and all these we have overcome, by massing all our knowledge and science, have ruled with more and more power over the inanimate matter of our universe, our Galaxy. We have saved planets and their peoples from extinction, by shifting them from dying old suns to flaming new ones. ”

“ I have summoned you here because there has risen to face us the most vital problem that has yet confronted us in our government of the Galaxy—the greatest and most terrible danger, in fact, that has ever threatened our universe! ”

“ Tensely we crouched in our humming vehicle as it moved smoothly across the cavern, between the rows of great machines, toward the corridor opening in the opposite wall. The thronging nebula-creatures about us paid us no attention whatever, taking us for but one of the scores of turtle-machines that were busy about us. Hearts beating high with our success we glided on toward the dark wall-opening that was our goal. ”

“ In the surface of their metal-covered world they sank a vast, metal-walled pit, and in that pit set massed machines capable of generating an atomic ray of terrific power. From each of the generating-machines led a connection carrying the power produced by it, all these connections combining into the thick cable we saw which leads into the great cylinder-apparatus, generating inside it the mighty ray that stabs up toward the nebula, and into which we crashed. ”

“ For seen thus near, the surface of this mighty planet was as utterly smooth and level as it had seemed from high above, a black, gleaming plain without an inch-high elevation or depression, an inconceivably strange smooth expanse of black metal, that stretched evenly away in every direction to the horizon, smoothly covering this colossal world. ”

“ The next moment we were upon them, our heavy weapons flashing right and left in swift destruction, and when we lowered them only masses of dead flesh lay at our feet. Wildly we looked about, but there seemed no other of the nebula-creatures on all the great pit's floor, nothing but the silent, automatic machines, and the great cylinder of the ray. Now we leapt toward that cylinder, then halted. A half-dozen pseudopod arms were reaching up from the shaft up which we had come, a half-dozen of the creatures pulling themselves up there. ”

“ When the nebula should reach a certain speed of whirl, the nebula-creatures knew, when it should reach the critical point of its spin, it would be whirling so fast that it would not longer be able to hold its mighty mass together, and it would break up, disintegrate, its fiery mass flying off through the Galaxy in all directions. This would remove all danger from the nebula people, who could then live on without fear in their cavern-honeycombed world, using artificial light and heat. ”

“ Beings there were among those thousands from every peopled sun in all the Galaxy's hosts, drawn here like myself each to represent his star in this great Council which ruled our universe. Creatures there were utterly weird and alien in appearance, natives of the whirling worlds of the Galaxy's farthest stars—creatures from Aldebaran, turtle-men of the amphibian races of that star; fur-covered and slow-moving beings from the planets of dying Betelgeuse ”

“ Ranged on the mighty cavern's floor were long rows of machines the purposes of which were beyond our speculation, incredibly intricate masses of great arms and cogs and eccentric wheels all working smoothly with a steady beat-beat-beat of power, and tended by countless numbers of the formless nebula-creatures among them. Some seemed to be ventilating-machines of a sort, with great tubes leading upward through the cavern's ceiling; from others streams of white-hot metal gushed out into molds, cooling instantly into wheels and squares and bars ”

“ A few weeks ago, however, it was discovered by our astronomers that the great flaming sphere of the nebula had begun slowly to revolve, to spin, and that as the days went by it was spinning faster and faster. Through the weeks since then our astronomers have watched it closely, and ever faster it has spun, until now it is revolving at a terrific rate, a rate that is still steadily increasing. And that accelerating spin of the huge nebula must result, inevitably, in the doom of our universe. ”

“ Nearer and nearer we flashed toward it, with Sar Than and Jor Dahat beside me gazing forward, their interest as tense as my own. And now we saw that the pit was of gigantic size, its circular mouth all of five miles in diameter, and that from its center there drove up toward the zenith a flickering beam of pale and ghostlike white light, so pale as hardly to be visible, a livid white ray that stabbed straight up toward the fires of the nebula far above. ”

“ Beneath us lay only a smooth black plain, extending from horizon to horizon, devoid of hill or stream or valley, in so far as we could see, unnaturally smooth and level. And as we dropped nearer, ever nearer, the surprize we felt rapidly intensified, until when at last we hung motionless a hundred feet above the surface of this world exclamations of utter astonishment broke from us. ”

“ We know that the great nebula is growing slowly smaller, that through the eons it contracts to form new blazing stars, but what its constitution may be, what mysteries it may hide, has never been known, since it would be annihilation for any ship to approach too near to its fiery splendor, and all our interstellar traffic has detoured always far around its flaming mass. ”

“ Then we three faced our captors once more, panting and disheveled, while from the dais the great nebula ruler again surveyed us. I looked for instant death as a result of that wild attack upon him, but whether the creature intended to reserve his revenge for later, or whether there was in that cool and alien mind nothing so human as a desire for revenge, he did not order our deaths at that moment. His body spun again in silent speech, and as it ceased a half-dozen of the guards surrounded us and marched us back down the great hall and into the dim-lit corridor outside. ”

“ In this cycle this great nebula followed, but because of its vast size the inner, denser portions had contracted with much greater speed than the outer parts, forming a great solid world, in time, while the outer parts were still but fiery gas. This solid world spun at the center of the great space formerly occupied by the gases that had contracted to form it, and it was warmed and lit eternally by the encircling fires of the nebula all around it, and shut off from the outside universe by those fires. ”

“ Small enough chance there seemed that we could carry it out, and even were we to escape from our well-prison there seemed nothing but death awaiting us farther on, but we were of one mind that it would be better to meet our end thus than wait in the shaft tamely for death. ”