He nodded, then pointed out that his cruiser had been damaged somewhat
in the battle over the central world. So that it might not delay us we
transferred his crew from it to the others, Jurt Tul entering my own
cruiser with me, while the damaged one we left there on the cavern's
shelf. Then, after we had closed our space-doors, our cruisers moved
gently out of the narrow opening, rising swiftly up over the disk-world
from the chasm's depths. That disk-world's surface lay beneath us, now,
illumined by the coma's far crimson glow alone, a lurid luminescence
that picked out streaks and veins of metal here and there in the jagged
rock. It was plain, indeed, that these worlds were meteoric in nature,
and had been formed and set spinning in this orderly fashion by the
comet-creatures themselves.
For the time, though, we heeded not these things, intent on the scene
ahead as our five cruisers shot silently through the lurid dusk toward
the central world. Far away, now and then, against the coma's baleful
glow, we caught sight of cube-ships moving still restlessly about
in search of us, and once a party of these seemed to take up our
course, to follow us. These, though, veered away in the dusk behind
us, and then in a moment more we had passed above that ring of outer
disk-worlds, and Jurt Tul and I, gazing forward from the control room,
could make out the great, motionless mass of the central world beneath
us, the world that was our goal. No light gleamed upon its darkened
surface, lying in a weird picture there in the coma's crimson dusk. As
we shot down toward it I saw vaguely in that dusk the great, massed
machines here and there, the smooth streets, the enigmatic pits about
them, and then the great clearing at the flat world's center.
"That clearing!" I whispered to Jurt Tul. "It was near it that Gor
Han's and Najus Nar's ships fell--we'll land near it."
Our cruisers now were arrowing smoothly down toward one of the
broader streets some distance from the clearing, since we could see
now that on all the world below there moved only an occasional dark
liquid-creature, the throngs we had seen before having unaccountably
disappeared. Here and there above it moved a cube-ship, but none of
these glimpsed us through the dusk, and in a moment more our cruisers
had landed gently upon one of the smooth streets. There Jurt Tul and
I swiftly stepped forth, for we had decided that we two alone could
explore the comet-city more silently than a larger party. At once the
cruisers swept back to wait for us in the dusk above, ready to make
an attempt at escape from the comet should we be discovered. Then the
amphibian and I moved swiftly along that silent street toward the great
central plaza.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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