Deceleration ceased; the men felt again the wonted homeliness and comfort of normal pseudoinertia. Simultaneously the gray smear of the visiplates faded away into commonplace areas of jetty black, pierced the brilliantly dimensionless varicolored points of light which were the familiar stars of their own familiar space.
But were they familiar? Was that our galaxy, or anything like it? They were not. It was not. Kinnison stared into his plate, aghast.
He would not have been surprised to have emerged into three-dimensional space anywhere within the Second Galaxy. In that case, he would have seen a Milky Way; and from its shape, apparent size, and texture he could have oriented himself fairly closely in a few minutes. But the Dauntless was not within any lenticular galaxy—nowhere was there any sign of a Milky Way!
He would not have been really surprised to have found himself and his ship out in open intergalactic space. In that case he would have seen a great deal of dead-black emptiness, blotched with a hundred or so lenticular bodies which were in fact galaxies. Orientation would then have been more difficult; but, with the aid of the Patrol charts, it could have been accomplished. But here there were no galaxies—no nebulae of any kind!
XVIII.
Here, upon the background of a blackness so intense as to be obviously barren of nebular material, there lay a multitude of blazingly resplendent stars—and nothing except stars. A few hundred were of a visual magnitude of about minus three. Approximately the same number were of minus two or thereabouts, and so on down; but there did not seem to be a star or other celestial object in that starkly incredible sky of an apparent magnitude greater than about plus four.
"What do you make of this, Sir Austin?" Kinnison asked, quietly. "It's got me stopped like a traffic light."