At my negative his expression grew solemn. "They are preparing those thousands of captured ships, Dur Nal," he said, "for an enterprise that means horror to our galaxy: they are preparing to burst out of the cosmic cloud upon the galaxy in all their numbers and seize our suns and worlds in a conquest of darkness!"
"Of darkness?" I repeated, and he nodded.
"Within hours they leave this world and the cosmic cloud, to pour out into the galaxy, for even as we talk here their great plans are coming to their climax-plans that I have seen them form and carry out in the years I have been here.
"For it is years I have spent on this world of darkness in the great cloud. You have heard how years ago I, Zan Zanat, resolved to do what none ever had done, to explore the cosmic cloud's interior. I knew that light could not exist in it, for its darkness is formed by the meeting of ether-currents which generate etheric vibrations of a frequency that neutralizes all light-vibrations.
"It was my plan to see in the darkness of the cloud by the vibrations beyond light, the ultra-violet vibrations. They were not neutralized, not affected, and I devised certain ray-filter disks or glasses that made the eyes sensitive to the ultra-violet vibrations, and thus showed all things in violet light, since the ultra-violet rays have the same sources as light-rays.
"Equipped with these glasses I and my assistants ventured into the cosmic cloud in our cruiser. Its interior lay in violet light before us, and after cruising in near its center we descried a small planet that hung motionless in it. We landed to explore it and found it inhabited by strange eyeless creatures of darkness who had evolved on it in the ages and who, because they had evolved in utter darkness had no eyes at all but had a hearing so marvelously keen that it served them instead.
"Hardly had we landed on this world when the creatures captured us. They took us before their rulers, who examined us. These eyeless creatures had never imagined that other worlds might lie outside the cloud, nor had they any space-ships. But learning that there were many worlds outside, they began to plan how they might pour out and seize them, for their numbers were cramped on this small world.
"My assistants they slew, but kept me, torturing me with the pain-producing weapons to gain information from me. They saw that they would need thousands of great ships to enable them to pour out on the galaxy, and had not the means of making them soon. They devised, therefore, a way of drawing in the numbers of ships they needed from those coming and going in the galaxy around the cloud.
"This was to increase many times the magnetism of their world. Every world in space is a great magnet with north and south poles, as you know, and they planned to increase the magnetic power of their world thousands of times by a means they knew, which involved the simultaneous electrical charging of both their world's poles.
"They prepared the apparatus at the poles and placed the control of it on the top of the great building of their rulers. When that control was closed the magnetism of this world at the cloud's heart was suddenly intensified thousands of times. Its tremendous power reached out through the cloud and caught great swarms of the interstellar ships passing outside, and drew them swiftly in.