Then, at a range of only feet instead of the usual "point-blank" range of hundreds of miles, the tremendous secondaries of the Dauntless cut loose. At such a ridiculous range as that—why, the screens themselves kept anything farther away from them than that ship was—they couldn't miss. Nor did they; but neither did they hit. Those ravening beams went through and through the tenuous fabrication which should have been a vessel, but they struck nothing whatever. They went past—entirely harmlessly past—both the ship itself and the wraithlike but unforgettable figures which Kinnison recognized at a glance as Overlords of Delgon. His heart sank with a thud. He knew when he had had enough; and this was altogether too much.
"Go free!" he rasped. "Give 'er the oof!"
Energy poured into and through the great Bergenholm, but nothing happened; ship and contents remained inert. Not exactly inert, either, for the men were beginning to feel a new and unique sensation.
Energy raved from the driving jets, but still nothing happened. There was none of the thrust, none of the reaction of an inert start; there was none of the lashing, quivering awareness of speed which affects every mind, however hardened to free flight, in the instant of change from rest to a motion many times faster than that of light.
"Armor! Thought-screens! Emergency stations all!" Since they could not run away from whatever it was that was coming, they would face it.
And something was happening now, there was no doubt of that. Kinnison had been seasick and airsick and spacesick. Also, since cadets must learn to be able to do without artificial gravity, pseudo-inertia, and those other refinements which make space liners so comfortable, he had known the nausea and the queasily terrifying endless-fall sensations of weightlessness, as well as the even worse outrages of the sensibilities incident to inertialessness in its crudest, most basic applications. He thought that he was familiar with all the untoward sensations of every mode of travel known to science. This, however, was something entirely new.
He felt as though he were being compressed; not as a whole, but atom by atom. He was being twisted—cork-screwed in a monstrously obscure fashion which permitted him neither to move from his place nor to remain where he was. He hung there, poised, for hours—or was it for a thousandth of a second? At the same time he felt a painless, but revolting transformation progress in a series of waves throughout his entire body; a rearrangement, a writhing, crawling distortion, an incomprehensibly impossible extrusion of each ultimate corpuscle of his substance in an unknowable and non-existent direction!
As slowly—or as rapidly—as the transformation had waxed, it waned. He was again free to move. As far as he could tell, everything was almost as before. The Dauntless was about the same; so was the almost-invisible ship attached to her so closely. There was, however, a difference. The air seemed thick—familiar objects were seen blurrily, dimly—distorted—outside the ship there was nothing except a vague blur of grayness—no stars, no constellations.
A wave of thought came beating into his brain. He had to leave the Dauntless. It was most vitally important to go into that dimly-seen companion vessel without an instant's delay! And even as his mind instinctively reared a barrier, blocking out the intruding thought, he recognized it for what it was—the summons of the Overlords!