Within the nebula

by Edmond Hamilton

My only memory now of that mad plunge downward is of the pilot room spinning about me, and of the whistling roar of winds outside caused by the speed of our fall. The shock of our collision had apparently silenced our generators, and it was moments before I could struggle up to the controls and make an effort to start them. I jerked open the switches and there came a hum of power from beneath; but the next moment with a jarring, grinding shock our cruiser had met the great pit's floor, flinging us once more to the floor.

For a moment we lay motionless there, and in that moment I became aware of sounds outside, soft rustling sounds that were hardly audible, as of soft-footed creatures moving about. The second shock had again silenced the vibration-mechanism, which I had started the moment before our crash, but I had no doubt that it was only that last-minute action on my part that had slowed our fall enough to save our ship and ourselves from annihilation. Now, staggering to my feet, I reached for the switch of the pilot room's little emergency door, sending it sliding back, admitting a rush of warm, fresh air, and then with my two companions behind me stared dazedly forth.

Our battered cruiser was resting now on the great pit's floor, a vast circular plain of smooth metal five miles in diameter, enclosed on all sides by vertical cliffs of gleaming metal that loomed for miles above us. A dusky twilight reigned here at the great shaft's bottom, but we saw now that that bottom was covered with countless great machines, enigmatic, shining mechanisms that covered the pit's floor completely except for a round clearing at its center, at the edge of which our cruiser rested. From each of the massed machines around us ran a slender tube-connection, and all of these tubes, thousands in number, combined to form a thick black metal cable which led into a huge object at the clearing's center. This was a giant squat cylinder of metal, its height no more than fifty feet but its diameter a full thousand, into the side of which the thick black cable led and whose upper surface shone with a vast brilliant white light that half dispelled the shadows here at the vast pit's bottom. It was from this brilliant upper surface of the cylinder that there sprang upward the great livid ray, a flickering beam of pale light that stabbed straight up toward the glowing fires of the nebula far above.

It was not on the great cylinder or on the massed machines around us, though, that our eyes first rested, but on the shapes, the creatures, who had gathered about our cruiser and stood before us. They were creatures of surpassing strangeness and horror, even to ourselves, unlike in form as we were. Each of them was simply a shapeless mass of plastic white flesh, several feet in thickness, a formless thing of pale flesh without limbs or features of any kind, the only distinguishing mark being a round black spot on the body or mass of each. A dozen or more of them had gathered before us. A dozen shapeless masses of flesh resting on the smooth metal floor there, each with the black spot on his body turned up toward us like some strange eye, which, we knew instinctively, it in reality was.

As we watched them in horror, we saw one of them suddenly move toward us across the smooth metal. A limbless mass of flesh, he glided across the level floor as a snake might glide, the flesh of him flexing and twisting to bear him smoothly forward. Just beneath us he stopped, and there was a moment of tense silence while the whole scene impressed itself indelibly on my brain—the vast, metal-walled pit, the great ghostly ray that clove up through its shadowy dusk toward the nebula far above, the weird white masses of flesh before us. Then up from the creature below us there shot a long, slender arm, an arm that formed itself out of the flesh of his—body—like the pseudopod of a jellyfish, reaching swiftly upward toward us.

That sight was enough to break the spell of horror that had held us, and with a strangled cry I fell back from the door, reached toward the controls to send our ship slanting up out of this place of horror. But as I did so there came a shout from my two companions, and I whirled around to see a half-dozen pseudopod arms reach in through the open door, and then by that grip six or more of the weird creatures had drawn themselves up into the pilot room, and were upon us.

I felt cold, boneless arms twine swiftly around my neck and body, struck out in blind rage against the twisting masses of flesh that held me, and then felt my arms gripped also, felt myself being carried toward the door. The next moment I had been swung smoothly down to the metal floor below and released there, standing panting with my two companions while our strange captors surveyed us. Several of them held in pseudopod arms little square boxes of metal which they held toward us, and one of them, as if for an object lesson, turned his toward a little pile of metal bars not far away, and touched a switch in its handle. Instantly a narrow little jet of what resembled thick blue smoke sprang out of the thing toward the pile of bars, and as it touched them I saw them instantly crumbling and disintegrating like sugar in water, disappearing entirely in a moment. The meaning of the action was plain enough, and with a half-dozen of the deadly things trained full upon us we gave up all thoughts of a dash back to the cruiser.

Now the foremost of the creatures seemed to undergo a series of swift changes in shape, his plastic body twisting and changing from one strange form to another with inconceivable rapidity. After a moment of this protean changing his body settled back into its former shapeless mass, but as it did so three of the creatures behind him came forward toward us, as though in answer to a silent command. I was later to learn, what I half guessed at the moment, that it was by these swift changes in bodily shape that the creatures communicated with each other, each such change, however slight, carrying to them as much meaning as a change of accent in spoken speech does to us.

The three that had come forward each held in a pseudopod arm one of the deadly box-weapons, and now they placed themselves around us, one in front and the other two behind us. Then they motioned eloquently toward the left, and after a moment's hesitation we set off in that direction, around the clearing's edge. Past the looming machines we went, my own eyes intent on the huge cylinder in the clearing beside us, from which arose the great ray of impenetrable force into which our ship had crashed. Through the twilight that reigned about us I saw that only a handful of these nebula-creatures were to be seen on all the pit's floor, and wondered momentarily at the smallness of their numbers. Then my speculations were driven from my mind as our guards suddenly halted us, several hundred feet around the clearing's edge from our cruiser.

Before us there yawned a round, dark opening in the smooth floor, a small, shaftlike pit some ten feet in diameter, its sides disappearing down into a dense darkness. As we stared, the guard before us glided to the shaft's edge and suddenly swung himself over that edge, disappearing from view. And as we stepped closer we saw that he was lowering himself down the shaft's smooth metal wall by means of metal pegs inset every few feet in that wall, dropping from peg to peg in smooth, effortless descent. Now our two remaining guards raised their weapons significantly, motioning toward the shaft. Choice of action there was none, so after a moment's involuntary hesitation I stepped to the edge and grasped the highest peg, swinging myself over the edge and down until I had found a foot-hold on a lower peg, then shifting my grasp to swing down again in the same manner. After me came Jor Dahat, and after him the plant-man Sar Than, who swung easily down by grasping the pegs with all of his four limbs. Then the two guards were swinging down after him, and we were dropping steadily down the line of pegs into the rayless darkness.