As it slanted down toward us I gazed about me, saw that our six cruisers were hanging in a dark, cavernous abyss that seemed to extend far down into the depths of this disk-world. A rocky shelf just inside the crack-opening, though, seemed large enough for us to rest our ships upon; so instantly we brought them to rest there, cutting off the generators whose humming might betray us. Then, as our space-doors opened with a slight inward hiss from the higher-pressure air of the disk's atmosphere, I stepped quickly out, found Jurt Tul and the other cruiser captains beside me, and then we had all suddenly crouched down inside the great crack's edge as a score of the great cube-ships shot down into the white-lit chasm outside.
Peering out from the cavern's dark depths we saw those cubes hanging there, then moving slowly along the chasm's length as though in search of us. Down its length they disappeared and we breathed easier for a moment; then they reappeared, coming to rest on the chasm's floor directly beneath the opening in which we crouched, scarce a half-hundred feet below us. Tensely we watched, saw the doors were opening in those cubes' sides, creatures emerging, the comet-creatures of these strange worlds. And at sight of those creatures even our tense situation could not suppress our gasps. For they were-liquid-creatures! Creatures whose bodies were liquid instead of solid, creatures that were each but a pool of thick black liquid, flowing viscously about, in each of which pools floated two round, white blank disks, great white pupilless eyes.
We saw them flowing forth from out their cubes, saw some whose viscous bodies held what seemed tools or weapons, saw the floating eyes turned this way and that about the chasm, as though in search of us. Then a score of the strange creatures did an incomprehensible thing; they flowed together into a single liquid mass, a great black pool in which floated all their eyes, their liquid bodies mingling together! A moment they remained thus, then had separated, each from the others, and were returning to their cubes.
"Conversing!" whispered Jurt Tul beside me. "It's their method of conversing, of exchanging thoughts-to mingle their liquid bodies one with another!"
I knew the amphibian was right, and shuddered involuntarily at the thing we had seen. The cubes' doors had closed now, and the cubes were lifting upward from the chasm's floor. One, more suspicious apparently than the rest, hovered a moment outside the crack within which we crouched, and we shrank back, suddenly tense, but after a moment's inspection it too had driven up after the others, which passed from sight high above, searching slowly across the disk-world's surface in a strange formation as though following some discussed plan. We breathed easier, then, standing erect, and I turned quickly to Jurt Tul.
"Our only chance is to get out of the comet and wait for the five thousand Patrol cruisers that were to come after us," I told him. "But we can't leave the comet with Gor Han and Najus Nar prisoned in it!"
The great amphibian shook his head. "We could venture back to the comet-city on the central world to attempt to find them," he said, "but in this brilliant white light we'd be seen and destroyed at once."
I was silent, for I knew that it was so, and broodingly I considered that light, whose white illumination filled all the great chasm outside, beating faintly even into the cavern, yet seeming to have no visible source whatever. And then, even as I gazed upon it, that light died! It seemed to gray, to darken, and then had vanished altogether, within a moment, while at the same moment there beat faintly through the air from far away a great clanging note like that of a giant gong. The chasm outside, the world and worlds about us, lay now in dusk, their only illumination the lurid, dark crimson light of the comet's glowing coma, a red dusk that gave to the barren rocky world about us an inconceivably weird appearance.
"That gong!" Jurt Tul was saying. "You heard it? It sounded when the light died-it means that these comet-creatures maintain and regulate their own day and night!"
"That white light," I said; "you mean that it's made by them, turned off for their night?"