"Bastards!" He could see them now, closer, breaking away from the strands and coming at him like miniature suns. He felt them probing the mechanized brain. "One-nine three-nine!" And the unreal minds all functioned in a different key. He managed to fire three burst from the left wing before his fingers turned to lizards and were gone. "AAHH!" Another shock, stronger, and he could see again. He was closer still, the web becoming an expanding grid pocked with dark and geometric holes. His ships crossed and interwove, fired a massive burst. The globes hovered and sometimes blinded him with light, but either could not or would not attack the ships. Their shields were up, but how much that mattered..... Then his fleet was gone, as if it had never been, and the globes receded. A harder jolt, but somehow he knew this was no illusion. All false images faded. He was himself, without pain, in his own vessel. And the grid was still larger, the growing blackness like wet and physical night behind it. His hands were back on the console and he fired seven bursts, at the racing globes or at the shafts themselves. But each time he fired into nothingness: the lines of brilliance were no longer there. Above, to the side, but not there. And this too was no illusion. He hurled his rage at nothing and no one. Suddenly a huge black hexagon was before him. Fear. His mind began to signal reverse thrust, and only a supreme effort of will overrode it. The blackness he headed toward..... Why did it terrify him so? It was as Fear itself. And suddenly the looming shaft above him appeared not as a barrier, but as the strand of a protective net which covered a great abyss, a hole in living Space. And he was falling through. "No!" He could not turn back now! This was why he had come. He would destroy them. Somehow! This had to be the key. But they no longer seemed an enemy and this silent, screaming void was no friend. Was it yet too late..... "NO!" He was inside. * It was cold in that place, through the ship and through the celluloid, and the last thing he saw as he looked back through the monitor was a tightening circle of black, like a swirl of inky cloud, enveloping the Guardians' web. Then all was dark, but for a sickly and sporadic flashing of the console. He felt a kind of dull dread, a physical weakness, but not yet fear. He had pierced all barriers, and stood at the heart of the nightmare. Only he could not remember why he had come. No, he remembered. But it did not seem like much of a reason. "Guardians!" His rage would not fire in that place, and the screaming hurt his throat. As the silence hurt his ears.