Moving through the rayless opacity as a man in a dream might move, I felt myself guided by the other back to the body of the thing I had slain. We lifted it between us and my companion went a little along the street until he turned into a narrow aperture between two smooth-walled structures. Into this we cast the bulky body, and then crouched down together by it. The other had moved through the darkness as easily as through light, I had found, and my first whispered words as we crouched together were of his ability to do so.
"Here," he answered, "these disks-upon your eyes-"
As he spoke he was taking from somewhere on his person two flat little disks an inch or so across, one of which he fastened upon each of my eyes by means of vacuum-sucked rims. I uttered an involuntary cry of astonishment; for as I looked through those disks of glass, the utter darkness that had been about me since first we had been drawn into the great cloud gave way instantly to a pulsing violet light that illumined all things around me.
I could see clearly the towering walls of the two buildings between which we crouched, the narrow street outside in which I had had my battle, and my companion also. He was, I saw, in truth a tall bat-winged figure with strong beaked face and intelligent dark eyes, and I recognized him at once as one of the bat-folks who inhabit the worlds of the sun Deneb. Deneb! Thought of it brought flashing back to my mind a thing that the Chief had told us before our start, and I seized my companion's arm.
"Zat Zanat!" I cried. "You're Zat Zanat, the scientist of Deneb who went into the cloud years ago to explore it!"
He nodded. "I am Zat Zanat," he acknowledged, "and years it has been, in truth, since I came into this cosmic cloud, this place of darkness and horror unutterable."
"But it's not darkness to you!" I exclaimed, pointing to the two disks which he wore before his own eyes. "With these you can see in this absolute blackness-though I don't know how."
"I can tell you that soon enough," he said, "but you-how comes it that you were roaming this city of the creatures of darkness?"
Swiftly I explained to him how we had been sent to investigate the drawing in of thousands of the galaxy's ships into the cloud, and how having been drawn into it ourselves we had been captured and brought to this city where I had made my escape. He listened intently, nodding once or twice, and when I had finished asked a question.
"You wandered into one of the great masses of captured interstellar ships they are preparing. But did you guess why they drew those ships into the cloud, for what they are preparing them?"