Instantly, spurred to greater swiftness by our desperate situation,
our half-dozen cruisers were slanting sharply down toward one of those
revolving disk-worlds. The surface of that world leapt up with terrific
speed toward us as we shot recklessly downward, and I sighted cities
of pits and streets and mechanisms like that of the central world upon
it, cities though that did not cover all its surface as in the central
world, but were scattered about it, the rest of the disk-world's
surface being a tumbled mass of mighty mountains and chasmed valleys,
all of barren dark rock. It was down toward one of these tremendous
chasms, near the disk-world's outer edge, that we were heading, every
feature of that world's surface lying plain beneath us in the strange
white light that bathed all these revolving worlds. Downward into that
awful chasm our cruisers shot, and as they did so I glimpsed, high
above, a swarm of tiny dark cube-shapes that had halted their pursuit
of us, were circling about and dropping lower as though to discover our
whereabouts!
Our lives depended on finding some place of hiding in this
tremendous-walled chasm, I knew, and as we arrowed down into its
depths, white-lit by the same strange illumination, I gazed swiftly
about for some place of concealment. A moment the search seemed
hopeless, there being nothing but the chasm's narrow floor of barren
rock, its towering jagged rock sides, and then as we shot along its
length I sighted a great crack or crevice in one of them, a long,
crack-like opening that was large enough to admit our cruisers, and
behind which could be glimpsed the dark depths of some great cavernous
hollow in the rock.
"Through that crack!" I ordered swiftly, saw Jurt Tul's cruiser move
quickly toward it, scraping against the crack's jagged edges as it
pushed through into the dark cavern behind. Another of our cruisers
followed, and then the rest, one by one, until my own was scraping
inside, just as I saw the cube-ships high above dropping toward us,
splitting into divisions of a dozen ships each which were slanting down
over all the surface of this world in search of us, one of them heading
straight toward the great chasm!
As it slanted down toward us I gazed about me, saw that our six
cruisers were hanging in a dark, cavernous abyss that seemed to extend
far down into the depths of this disk-world. A rocky shelf just inside
the crack-opening, though, seemed large enough for us to rest our
ships upon; so instantly we brought them to rest there, cutting off
the generators whose humming might betray us. Then, as our space-doors
opened with a slight inward hiss from the higher-pressure air of the
disk's atmosphere, I stepped quickly out, found Jurt Tul and the other
cruiser captains beside me, and then we had all suddenly crouched down
inside the great crack's edge as a score of the great cube-ships shot
down into the white-lit chasm outside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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