The ship seemed haunted. Men saw, or thought they saw, queer flames in every corner. Captain Wallace wondered if they were all going mad. Only he and Cargyle had yet to see the things. What was worse, things were disappearing—tools, supplies, replacement parts. More hydrogen made its appearance.
The effect of all this on the already teetering crew can be imagined. Captain Wallace left the problem of the mysterious flames to Calvin Markoe, the astrophysicist appointed by the Cranford people, and devoted himself to keeping the crew in hand.
But for the first time Wallace found himself helpless to stem the tide. The crew were too far gone, too fear-harried and space-crazy to know reason or fear punishment. And when corroded-looking holes began appearing in the walls of the ship, the mutiny burst out with all the savageness and fury of madness long suppressed.
Cargyle, the second officer, charged by a yelling, wild-eyed mob of crazy murderers, fought them coldly, shooting with deadly precision. His slow retreat brought him to the little cabin, where his position was almost impregnable, and which he knew connected through the secret passage with the control cabin.
He grinned as he crawled along the passage. What would the mutineers think when they charged the cabin and found it empty? They'd be sure the ship was haunted.
It was black as the Coal-Sack in the low-ceilinged tunnel. When a dim, elusive light began forming ahead of him, he first thought it a trick of his eyes, but as the thing brightened Cargyle halted and stared in amazement. At last he, too, was seeing one of the haunting flames.
In shape the thing did somewhat suggest a flame, but such a flame as never seen before. It was a writhing mozaic of colors that twined and faded one into the other. It curled as he watched, and the gleaming tip bowed slowly until it touched the floor. The thing lay flat, pulsing slowly with a gorgeous display of color.
Cargyle forgot the mutineers, the beleagured officers. In sheer bewilderment he watched the deliberate, enigmatic movements of the thing before him.
In all his wandering through the system he had never seen anything like this. What was it? A phenomenon of space, heretofore unknown, or was it—alive? The tip of the thing, bent to the floor, was moving delicately in small circles, touching and retreating, almost in the manner of a caterpillar on a leaf.
Cargyle was crouched on one knee. Abruptly his foot slipped, the heel coming down hard on the metal floor. The resultant clangor in that narrow tube was deafening. The flame-like entity sprang vibrantly erect. A huge red bubble, swelling, emerged from somewhere within its body and wound upward through vellicating strands of color. The thing paused there, its inner wonder of radiant light in flickering, nervous agitation. The tip, aloft again, twisted and writhed, once forming a superb, faultless spiral of brilliant scarlet.