Gradually, as we two stood in silence with our great craft speeding on, I became aware that during the last few minutes the air inside the pilot room had become perceptibly warmer, and that its warmth was still increasing. I glanced at the dial that registered the output of our heat-generators, but it was steady at its accustomed position; yet with each moment the warmth was increasing, until within a few minutes more the heat about us had become decidedly uncomfortable. Korus Kan, too, had noticed it, and had now swung backward the control of the heat-generators; yet still the warmth increased, the heated air in the pilot room rapidly becoming unbearable. I turned to the Antarian, fully alarmed now, but as I did so the door snapped open and Jhul Din burst up into the pilot room.
"What's happening to the ship?" he cried. "Its inner walls are getting almost too hot to touch!"
In stunned surprize we gazed at each other, our heating-mechanisms turned completely off now, yet the inside-temperature dial's arrow was still moving steadily forward! The thing was beyond all reason, we knew, and for an instant we stood in amazement, the heat increasing still about us. Then suddenly Jhul Din pointed upward toward the massed dials above the controls, his arm quivering.
"Look!" he cried. "The outside-temperature dial!"
Swiftly we raised our own eyes toward it, the dial upon which was shown the temperature outside the ship. It should have shown absolute zero, we knew, as always in the infinite cold of empty space. But now it did not, and our eyes widened as we stared at it, in utter astonishment and fear. For it registered a temperature of thousands of degrees in the empty void about us!
"Heat!" I cried. "Heat in empty outer space! It's unthinkable!"
Unthinkable it was; yet, even as we stood and stared, the arrow on the outside-temperature was still creeping steadily forward, showing a swiftly increasing heat outside, while the air inside had become all but unbreathable, parching to the lungs. At the same moment a faint light began to appear about us, a dim-red glow that was intensifying with each moment that we raced onward, and as we wheeled toward the windows we saw, in the blackness of space before us, a great, faintly glowing region of red light ahead, stretching across the heaven before us. Ever stronger that crimson glow was growing as we raced on, the heat about us mounting with it, and from beneath came the cries of fear of our crew as they too glimpsed the awful region of heat and light through which we now were racing.
I knew that not much longer could the heat about us increase thus if our ship and ourselves were to survive, yet steadily the arrows on the temperature-dials were moving forward, and as more and more of the awful heat outside penetrated through the insulation of our heat-resistant walls I felt my brain turning dizzily, saw big Jhul Din stagger and sway against the wall, and saw Korus Kan, the heat penetrating through his metal body even more than through our own, slumping sidewise across the controls as he was overcome by it, only half conscious. I sprang to his side, despite my own dizziness and parching throat and lungs, grasped the controls and held our ship straight onward, since all about us the vast glow of crimson light and heat stretched, encircling us and beating upon us as we flashed onward. No flame there was, nor incandescent gas, nor solid burning matter of any kind, nothing but a titanic region of brilliant crimson light, without visible source of any kind, glowing with terrific heat there in the emptiness of outer space.
The glow about us was becoming more brilliant with each moment that we raced on, and as the heat outside and inside increased still more I saw Jhul Din fling open the pilot room's door in a vain search for cooler air; heard from beneath a rumbling, ominous thumping and cracking, as our heat-seared walls began to warp in the terrible temperature to which they were being subjected. Far ahead in the awful region of heat and light through which we were speeding I glimpsed now a deeper spot of crimson light in the great red glow, and as we raced on toward it I saw that it was the center of all the great outpouring of red light and of heat, since it was all but blinding in its brilliance, while our dials showed a temperature mounting each moment that we neared it.