"Turn on full power!" I cried. "Try to bring the ship out of this, Korus Kan!"
"I can't!" he shouted back. "I've got every generator on full but the cruiser doesn't obey its wheel! It's some colossal magnet or magnetic force inside the cloud that's drawing us!"
With every instant the tremendous wall of blackness, as sharply defined as though material, was looming closer before our whirling ship. While Korus Kan worked frantically with the controls, and while the cries of our astounded crew came up to us from beneath, I seized the distance-phone, in the hope of flashing word at least to others in the galaxy of the nature of the force that had seized us. But the distance-phone was going dead, affected by the magnetic force that was drawing us to doom!
By then the great cloud was an appalling sight ahead of us, a vast maw of darkness into which our cruiser was racing at tremendous velocity. The ship's whirling had subsided somewhat and I yelled to Korus Kan to make a last trial of its power. He strained the generators to the breaking-point in the next moment, but it was useless, for nothing could escape the relentless grip of the power that was drawing us on.
Another moment and the blackness was walling the firmament directly before our plunging ship. Something made me turn round at that moment to glance back toward the galaxy's shining suns as though for a last look, and then even as I turned round again we were plunged into a darkness to which the darkest night would have been as noonday, an utter blackness in which no faintest ray of light existed!
I groped in the darkness for the switch of the cruiser's inside lights but though it clicked beneath my fingers there came no answering illumination. Light could not exist in this terrible region! And the quivering of the cruiser about us told us that still at immense speed we were being drawn in toward the cosmic cloud's heart.
On and on we rushed through that shrouding night, Jhul Din and Korus Kan and I bracing ourselves in the pilot room with our hands upon each other's shoulders, facing ahead as though to look through this utter blackness which no eye could pierce. I think now that in those terrible moments the three of us were but waiting in tacit silence for the end. Even were the cruiser to free itself of the deadly force that gripped it we could never now win out of this lightless region in which we would wander blindly.
Still on toward the mighty cloud's heart raced the ship, and to me it seemed that we must be very near its center. A tense expectation of the end held all of us now. But abruptly we cried out together as there came a mounting, hissing sound from outside the cruiser. Our craft was rushing now through air, through an atmosphere!
At the same moment we were aware that it was slowing its tremendous speed, that the mighty magnetic force that had drawn us inward appeared to have vanished. The stunning wonder of the two things occupied us for the moment to the exclusion of all else. Was there a world then here at the cosmic cloud's heart, through whose atmosphere our ship was now moving?
Suddenly my heart stood still as there came a slight jar against our cruiser's side, followed by a succession of flopping sounds upon the ship's top. There was silence for a brief instant while we listened tensely in the utter darkness of the pilot room, and then came a clang of metal against the cruiser's top, and the hiss of some strange force.