The hidden panel to the back of the house was open. Erik burst through it.
The transmitter was on, and its electrical aura hovered ominously around the door of the transmission room. In the hallway across from that door, Birkala was struggling to his feet.
Erik seized Birkala in time to prevent him from hurling himself into the blackness of the activated room.
"Spira!" gasped Birkala. "She was pulled in there!"
With the strength of a giant, Erik hurled Birkala the length of the corridor.
"Get out!" he roared. "Quickly!"
Erik plunged into the holocaust of hostile blackness.
The room was endless, infinite. It was all space and all beyond space, and there was no light there for human eyes to see.
There was an alien presence in this nothingness, a vampire presence that clutched a pathetic, limp figure light-years away, and reached out toward Erik with its hungry essence.
Erik stood straight in the midst of nothing, his head thrown back, his yellow hair lifting on the wind that blows between the galaxies. The questing essence touched him and explored him, blindly unaware of humanity's challenge to its elemental insistence.