It hit him, then--a sudden blazing bolt of power that surged and
seethed through his brain. Dimly, as from afar, he was aware that the
yat-stick package had slipped from his grasp and fallen to the floor,
the truth as to its contents revealed as the plastic covering fell
away. For his own part, a strange paralysis seemed to grip him. He
stood upright, erect as before; yet it was beyond his power to move a
single muscle. Sight and hearing--he still had them, but with vastly
limited acuity. And while his brain still functioned, it seemed to work
slowly, painfully, as if laboring under almost more of a burden than it
could bear.
The captain and Nelva remained within the far periphery of his vision.
Like him, both stayed motionless, frozen in the stance in which the
brain-drain had trapped them.
Now Dane focussed on the visiscreen. Moment by moment, it gave him the
record of the course the robot-directed spaceship followed. Asteroids
loomed, big and small; then disappeared once more.
How long that phase went on, Dane never knew. His sense of time was far
too warped to allow for even a reasonably intelligent estimate.
But finally, the last of the asteroids fell away. Slowly, almost
imperceptibly at first, the great globe of giant Jupiter moved in from
the lower left corner of the screen.
Numbly, Dane watched and wondered. What, if anything, would he find at
Sandoz? Or would the city even be there? No one could say for sure, for
no human had set foot on Callisto in the thirty years since it had been
abandoned to the Kalquoi.
Only then, before he could even glimpse any of the satellites that
swept around Jupiter, a new object flashed onto the visiscreen.
It was close, this one--so close that if he'd had the power, Dane would
have covered his eyes out of sheer panic. Ball-round, the thing at
first looked for all the world like a wandering asteroid or, perhaps, a
giant meteor.
Yet there was a strange sheen about it; a too-perfect symmetry.
For a long moment, it hovered so close that it occupied almost half of
the visiscreen. Then, suddenly, a light blazed from a point close to
its perimeter: a tight cone of blinding radiance that turned the whole
viewing plate white.
The next instant, the visiscreen went dead.
The lights died, too--all save the self-contained, dimly-luminous
emergency radiation lamps. The rhythmic throbbing of the ventilating
system halted also. So did the force drive's heavier beat. A sudden,
incredible feeling of lightness came over Dane. Then his angle of
view changed, and he realized that--unaware--he'd drifted clear of the
floor; was now floating in mid-air. So the artificial gravity was off
too.
A numb horror crept through him in the same instant. In his mind he
cursed himself for a blind, imperceptive fool.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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