I straightened from it, panting, then froze with renewed terror. Along the narrow street other steps were approaching me, somewhat lighter steps that were moving carefully as though in investigation, halting now and then. As they came level with me they halted again, and I held my breath. But in the next instant came the sound of the steps coming straight toward me!
With something like a cry of despair on my lips I threw myself forward at the approaching one through the darkness. I knew myself discovered, expected, even as I leaped, the flute-like cry that would bring the hordes in the neighboring streets upon me. But to my utter amazement, my hands grasped not another cold and bulky-bodied creature of darkness but a tall, erect man-like form that was making no resistance to me! I felt short, flat bat-like wings behind that body, felt a man-like head with big-beaked countenance, and then felt two muscular arms grasping my shoulders while a voice whispered tensely in my ear in the tongue of the galaxy.
"Quiet!" it whispered. "Another sound will bring them here from the other street!"
"You-" I stammered. "You're from the galaxy outside-you speak its tongue-but how in this darkness-"
"Not now!" the other warned. "I'll explain in a moment, but now we've got to get out of this street and get this dead thing out before it's discovered. Here-this way-"
Moving through the rayless opacity as a man in a dream might move, I felt myself guided by the other back to the body of the thing I had slain. We lifted it between us and my companion went a little along the street until he turned into a narrow aperture between two smooth-walled structures. Into this we cast the bulky body, and then crouched down together by it. The other had moved through the darkness as easily as through light, I had found, and my first whispered words as we crouched together were of his ability to do so.
"Here," he answered, "these disks-upon your eyes-"
As he spoke he was taking from somewhere on his person two flat little disks an inch or so across, one of which he fastened upon each of my eyes by means of vacuum-sucked rims. I uttered an involuntary cry of astonishment; for as I looked through those disks of glass, the utter darkness that had been about me since first we had been drawn into the great cloud gave way instantly to a pulsing violet light that illumined all things around me.
I could see clearly the towering walls of the two buildings between which we crouched, the narrow street outside in which I had had my battle, and my companion also. He was, I saw, in truth a tall bat-winged figure with strong beaked face and intelligent dark eyes, and I recognized him at once as one of the bat-folks who inhabit the worlds of the sun Deneb. Deneb! Thought of it brought flashing back to my mind a thing that the Chief had told us before our start, and I seized my companion's arm.
"Zat Zanat!" I cried. "You're Zat Zanat, the scientist of Deneb who went into the cloud years ago to explore it!"
He nodded. "I am Zat Zanat," he acknowledged, "and years it has been, in truth, since I came into this cosmic cloud, this place of darkness and horror unutterable."
"But it's not darkness to you!" I exclaimed, pointing to the two disks which he wore before his own eyes. "With these you can see in this absolute blackness-though I don't know how."
"I can tell you that soon enough," he said, "but you-how comes it that you were roaming this city of the creatures of darkness?"
Swiftly I explained to him how we had been sent to investigate the drawing in of thousands of the galaxy's ships into the cloud, and how having been drawn into it ourselves we had been captured and brought to this city where I had made my escape. He listened intently, nodding once or twice, and when I had finished asked a question.
"You wandered into one of the great masses of captured interstellar ships they are preparing. But did you guess why they drew those ships into the cloud, for what they are preparing them?"
At my negative his expression grew solemn. "They are preparing those thousands of captured ships, Dur Nal," he said, "for an enterprise that means horror to our galaxy: they are preparing to burst out of the cosmic cloud upon the galaxy in all their numbers and seize our suns and worlds in a conquest of darkness!"
"Of darkness?" I repeated, and he nodded.
"Within hours they leave this world and the cosmic cloud, to pour out into the galaxy, for even as we talk here their great plans are coming to their climax-plans that I have seen them form and carry out in the years I have been here.
"For it is years I have spent on this world of darkness in the great cloud. You have heard how years ago I, Zan Zanat, resolved to do what none ever had done, to explore the cosmic cloud's interior. I knew that light could not exist in it, for its darkness is formed by the meeting of ether-currents which generate etheric vibrations of a frequency that neutralizes all light-vibrations.
"It was my plan to see in the darkness of the cloud by the vibrations beyond light, the ultra-violet vibrations. They were not neutralized, not affected, and I devised certain ray-filter disks or glasses that made the eyes sensitive to the ultra-violet vibrations, and thus showed all things in violet light, since the ultra-violet rays have the same sources as light-rays.
"Equipped with these glasses I and my assistants ventured into the cosmic cloud in our cruiser. Its interior lay in violet light before us, and after cruising in near its center we descried a small planet that hung motionless in it. We landed to explore it and found it inhabited by strange eyeless creatures of darkness who had evolved on it in the ages and who, because they had evolved in utter darkness had no eyes at all but had a hearing so marvelously keen that it served them instead.
"Hardly had we landed on this world when the creatures captured us. They took us before their rulers, who examined us. These eyeless creatures had never imagined that other worlds might lie outside the cloud, nor had they any space-ships. But learning that there were many worlds outside, they began to plan how they might pour out and seize them, for their numbers were cramped on this small world.
"My assistants they slew, but kept me, torturing me with the pain-producing weapons to gain information from me. They saw that they would need thousands of great ships to enable them to pour out on the galaxy, and had not the means of making them soon. They devised, therefore, a way of drawing in the numbers of ships they needed from those coming and going in the galaxy around the cloud.
"This was to increase many times the magnetism of their world. Every world in space is a great magnet with north and south poles, as you know, and they planned to increase the magnetic power of their world thousands of times by a means they knew, which involved the simultaneous electrical charging of both their world's poles.
"They prepared the apparatus at the poles and placed the control of it on the top of the great building of their rulers. When that control was closed the magnetism of this world at the cloud's heart was suddenly intensified thousands of times. Its tremendous power reached out through the cloud and caught great swarms of the interstellar ships passing outside, and drew them swiftly in.
"Had they left the control closed their world would have drawn in those ships to smash in annihilation against it, but just after the helpless ships were drawn into their world's atmosphere the control was opened and the magnetic grip released. Then while the swarms of ships, helpless in the darkness, were in their atmosphere, their own ships they had constructed in small numbers and which they could operate in space by means of reflected electrical-sound vibrations instead of sight-in these ships they went up and boarded and captured the helpless vessels.