Within the nebula

by Edmond Hamilton

Instead of conducting us back down that corridor toward the giant cavern through which we had come, though, they led us in the opposite direction. A thousand feet or more we were marched, and then the corridor widened, while on either side of us now we made out holes in its floor, round shafts like that down which we had come from above. In the sides of these shafts, though, were no peg ladders, and we saw that the depth of each was only some twenty-five to thirty feet. While we wondered at their purpose our guards suddenly halted us before one of them, and then, taking a flexible little metal ladder from a recess in the wall, lowered it into the metal wall and motioned us to descend. Slowly we clambered down, and when the three of us had reached the well's bottom the ladder was at once drawn up. Then came the rustling sound of the guards above, gliding back down the corridor, except for a single one apparently left to guard us, who moved ceaselessly back and forth above.

Silently we gazed at each other, then about our strange prison cell. Even in the dim half-light of the corridor we could see that it was quite unescapable, its smooth perpendicular walls without projection of any kind. Even the nebula-creatures themselves, for whom these strange cells must have been designed, could not have escaped them, so there was small enough chance of our doing so. Without speaking we slumped to the floor of our well-prison, and for a time there was a dull silence there, broken only by the rustling glide of the single guard above.

At last the stillness was broken by the voice of Jor Dahat, who had been gazing moodily toward the wall. "Prisoners, here," he said slowly. "The one place of all places from which there is no escape."

I shook my head. "It seems the end," I admitted, dully. "We can't escape from this place, and if we could there's no time left to do anything, now."

The plant-man nodded, glancing at the time-dial on his wrist. "But twelve hours more," he said, "before the end—before the break-up of the nebula, the cosmic cataclysm that will wreck our universe. And these things who are our captors, these shapeless nebula-creatures, responsible for that break-up, that cataclysm——"

We stared at him in amazement, and he was silent for a moment, then speaking slowly on. "I know," he said darkly. "There in the hall of the nebula king I learned—what we came to learn. You saw them put those plates upon him and me, saw that apparatus? Well, it is in reality a thought-transmission apparatus, one which can transfer those vibrations of the brain which we call thought, those mind-pictures, from one mind to another. When it was first turned on I felt my senses leaving me, my brain a blank. I stood there, my knowledge, my memories, my ideas, being pumped out of me like water from a well, into the brain of that monstrous ruler there. He must have learned, in those few moments, all of my own knowledge of the universe outside the nebula, all of our own plans in coming to this place. And then, at his order, the machine was reversed, and thoughts, pictures, flowed through it from his brain to mine.

"It must have been from a sheer desire to overawe and terrify me that the creature sent his thoughts into my brain. I know that the moment it was turned on I became conscious of ideas, thoughts, pictures, rushing into my mind, of new knowledge springing whole into my brain. Much there was that was blank and dark, ideas, no doubt, for which my own intelligence had no equivalent; but enough came to me so that I realized at last who and what these creatures were, and what their part was in whirling the nebula on to its break-up, and our doom.

"I knew, with never a doubt, that this great open space at the nebula's heart had been formed because the denser portions of its interior had contracted faster than the outer portions. As you know, all nebulæ contract with the passage of time, their fiery gases condensing to form great blazing stars, the eon-old cycle of stellar evolution, from fiery nebula to flaming sun. In this cycle this great nebula followed, but because of its vast size the inner, denser portions had contracted with much greater speed than the outer parts, forming a great solid world, in time, while the outer parts were still but fiery gas. This solid world spun at the center of the great space formerly occupied by the gases that had contracted to form it, and it was warmed and lit eternally by the encircling fires of the nebula all around it, and shut off from the outside universe by those fires.

"Light and warmth had this world in plenty, therefore, and with time life had risen on it, crude forms asecnding through the channels of evolutionary change into a myriad different species, of which one species, the nebula-creatures we have seen, was the most intelligent. In time they ruled this strange world, wiping out all other species, and climbed to greater and greater science and power with the passage of time, their existence never suspected by any in the universe outside. Back and forth through the Galaxy went the great star-cruisers of the federated suns, but none ever dreamed of the strange race that had grown to power on this world at the fiery nebula's heart.

"But slowly, inexorably, destruction began to creep upon that race. As I have said, all nebulæ contract always, and this one was still doing so, still growing smaller and smaller, its encircling fires closing steadily in upon the spinning world at their heart. Hotter and hotter it became on that world until life was hardly possible on it for the nebula-creatures, accustomed as they were to a milder temperature. They must escape that heat or perish, and since they could not escape to outer space through the prisoning fires around them they did the last thing available, hollowed out vast caverns in the interior of their world and descended into those caverns to live. The whole surface of their world they sheathed with smooth, heat-reflecting metal, and then descended in all their hordes into the countless mighty caverns that honeycombed all their great world, taking up their life again in those cool depths, safe from the nebula's heat.