Beyond the doorway was a short passage and at the end of it a door of metal, small and heavily barred. The bars had been lifted, and the door stood open an inch or two. Above it was an inscription in the ancient changeless High Martian characters, which Carse read with practiced ease.
The doom of Rhiannon, dealt unto him forever by the Quiru who are lords of space and time!
Carse pushed the metal door aside and stepped through. And then he stood quite still, looking.
Beyond the door was a great stone chamber as large as the one behind him.
But in this room there was only one thing.
It was a great bubble of darkness. A big, brooding sphere of quivering blackness, through which shot little coruscating particles of brilliance like falling stars seen from another world. And from this weird bubble of throbbing darkness the lamplight recoiled, afraid.
Something—awe, superstition or some purely physical force—sent a cold tingling shock racing through Carse’s body. He felt his hair rising and his flesh seemed to draw away from his bones. He tried to speak and could not, his throat knotted with anxiety and tension.
“This is the thing I told you of,” whispered Penkawr. “This is the thing I told you I saw.”
Carse hardly heard him. A conjecture so vast that he could not grasp it shook his brain. The scholar’s ecstasy was upon him, the ecstasy of discovery that is akin to madness.
This brooding bubble of darkness—it was strangely like the darkness of those lank black spots far out in the galaxy which some scientists have dreamed are holes in the continuum itself, windows into the infinite outside our universe!