For a long time the relative positions of the tiny ship and the great black nebula seemed not to change. Then gradually the blazing fringe of stars passed off the screen and the blackness grew and swallowed the whole viewfield, lost its shape, and then finally produced a defined edge outlined against the light of distant suns, and eventually that black coast-like showed the marker-lights of two blue sullen stars.
The Thetis decelerated and felt her way between the beacon suns.
Beyond them was a bay, a bight in that incredible coastline. And now fear really caught the men of the Thetis—a fear much greater than any they might have felt for the deeds of men or the legendary Vorn. This was something absolutely elemental, and it had to do with the terror of darkness and alienage and unhuman might that go back to the beginnings of the race.
None of them had ever been near a black nebula before. They were deathtraps, blind areas where radar was useless, where a ship was helpless to protect herself against drifting stellar debris, where you might ram yourself full on into a drowned dark star before you ever knew it was there. Now they were creeping antlike into the very flanks of the Horsehead. The bay was relatively narrow, and it wound and twisted around great shoulders of blackness, past upflung cliffs of dust that lifted a million miles to crests that blazed with the fires of hidden stars, over crevasses that plunged a million miles to break in a ragged cleft through which stars showed as faint and distant as those of Earth on a cloudy night. Everywhere you looked, up, down, ahead or on both sides, those incredibly vast clouds enclosed you in their eternal blackness, like the shrouding draperies of a funeral couch made ready for some god.
Kwolek shook his head. “For God's sake,” he said. “If the Vorn lived in here, no wonder they found a way to conquer space. They had to!"
The Thetis crept on and on in that nighted cleft, and presently there was light ahead, the blaze of a green sun that touched the looming clouds around it with a lurid glow.
They crept closer and saw a planet.
"That must be it,” said Garcia. “The world of the Vorn."
"If there's anything in the Ktashan legends,” said Harlow. “Anyway, it's the world where Dundonald went, and where Taggart is. We're going to have to be damned careful going in—"
Yrra, who was sitting at the back of the control room, suddenly made a small sound of exhaled breath.
It was a very curious sound, suggesting a fear too great for mere screaming. Harlow's skin turned cold as though from a sluice of ice water. He turned his head. He saw Kwolek and Garcia, both frozen, staring at something still behind him. He saw Yrra. A sickness grew in him, a fatal feeling that something totally beyond human experience as he knew it was already confronting him. He continued to turn, slowly, until he could see.
He was not wrong. From out of the blackness of the Horsehead and the fire of an alien star, silently, with no need for clumsy armor or the sealing of locks, something had come to join them in the ship.
Yrra whispered a word. She whispered it so faintly that under ordinary conditions he might not have heard it, but now it rang in his ears with a sound like the last trump. She said:
"The Vorn!"
CHAPTER V
There was nothing monstrous or terrible about the Vorn as far as looks went — no crude grotesqueries to shock the eye. It hung in the still air of the cabin, a patch of radiance like a star-cloud seen from far off so that the individual points of light are no more than infinitesimal sparks. The Vorn's component motes seemed at first to be motionless and constant, but as Harlow stared he became aware of a rippling, a fluctuation of intensity that was as regular and natural as breathing, and this was the crowning touch that turned his blood to ice. The thing was alive. Creature and force and flame, as the legends said, not human but living, thinking, sensing, watching.
Watching him. This unhuman voyager between the stars, watching him and pondering his fate.
Kwolek had picked up something and was holding it with his arm drawn back for a throw, but he was just holding it. Garcia just sat. His lips were moving, as though he prayed hastily under his breath. Yrra slid very slowly and quietly onto the floor in an attitude of abasement.
Harlow spoke. Some automatic reflex set his tongue in motion, and words came off it, sounding so stiff and ridiculous that he was ashamed, but he could not think of any others. These words came easy, straight out of the Manual. He had said them many times before.
"We belong to the Star Survey. We are on a peaceful mission. We have come to your world—"
Knock it off, Mark!
Harlow knocked it off in midbreath. He stared at Garcia and Kwolek. Neither one of them had opened his mouth.
Yet somebody had spoken. Kwolek started violently. “Who said that?"
"Nobody said anything,” Garcia whispered.
"They did, too. They said, ‘Kwolek, put down that silly lump of iron before you get a cramp in your shoulder'."
"You're crazy,” said Garcia quietly, and seemed to go back to his praying.
"Mark,” said the voice again to Harlow, “I seem very strange and frightening to you but that is only because you don't yet understand the scientific principles that make this changed form of mine possible. My atoms are in different order from that in which you last saw them, but I'm otherwise quite the same. Well, no. Not quite. But near enough so that I can truthfully say that I'm still Dundonald."
"Dundonald," said Harlow, staring at the patch of fluctuating radiance that hovered in the air before him. He added softly, “For God's sake!"
Kwolek and Garcia turned their heads and looked at him. They spoke almost together.
"Dundonald?"
"You heard him,” Harlow muttered.
"They didn't hear me at all,” the voice said to him. “Shake the cobwebs out of your head, man. You can't afford to be stupid now, you haven't the time. This is telepathy, Mark. I'm communicating with you direct because it's the only way I have now. Unfortunately I haven't the energy to communicate with all of you at once. Now listen. I've been waiting for you—"
"What are you talking about?” Garcia said to Harlow. “What do you mean, Dundonald?"
"You better take the time to tell them,” Harlow said to the patch of light. “I doubt if they'll believe me."
He put his hands over his face and trembled quietly for a moment, trying to understand that his quest for Dundonald was ended, that this amorphous cloud of energy-motes was his friend, his drinking companion, the flesh-and-blood Dundonald with the strong hands and ruffled brownish hair and the bright blue eyes that were always looking past the familiar to the distant veiled shadows of the undiscovered.
He could not believe it.
"That doesn't matter,” said Dundonald's thought-voice in his mind. “Just accept it for the time being. What does matter is that Taggart is all ready for you. That ship of his carried heavy armaments. He has them set up, and the moment he catches your ship on his radar the missiles will fly. Then you'll be dead and I'll never get back, so please mind what I say."
"You'll never get back?” repeated Harlow. “Back where?"
"To the old me. Solidity. Taggert has the Converter. It's guarded night and day and I'd be killed on sight if I stepped through. So would any of the Vorn, I suppose, though none of them have for centuries. So—"