II
As the door of the little pilot room clicked open behind me I half turned from my position at the controls, to see my two companions enter. And as the Arcturian and Capellan stepped over to my side I nodded toward the broad fore-window.
"Two more hours and we'll be there," I said.
Side by side we three gazed ahead. About us once more there stretched the utter blackness of the great void, ablaze with its jeweled suns. Far behind shone the brilliant white star that was Canopus, and to our right the great twin suns of Castor and Pollux, and above and beyond them the yellow spark that was the sun of my own little solar system. On each side and behind us hung the splendid starry canopy, but ahead it was blotted out by a single vast circle of glowing light that filled the heavens before us, titanic, immeasurable, the mighty nebula that was our goal.
For more than ten days we had watched the vast globe of flaming gas largening across the heavens as we raced on toward it, in the heat-resistant cruiser that had been furnished us by the Council. Days they were in which our generators had hummed always at their highest power, propelling our craft forward through space with the swiftness of thought, almost-long, changeless days in which the alternate watches in the pilot room and the occasional inspection of the throbbing generators had formed our only occupations.
On and on and on we had flashed, past sun after sun, star system after star system. Many times we had swerved from our course as our meteorometers warned us of vast meteor swarms ahead, and more than once we had veered to avoid some thundering dark star which our charts showed near us, but always the prow of our craft had swung back toward the great nebula. Ever onward toward it we had raced, day after day, watching its glowing sphere widen across the heavens, until now at last we were drawing within sight of our journey's end, and were flashing over the last few billions of miles that separated us from our goal.
And now, as we drew thus nearer toward the nebula's fiery mass, we saw it for the first time in all its true grandeur. A vast sphere of glowing light, of incandescent gases, it flamed before us like some inconceivably titanic sun, reaching from horizon to horizon, stunning in its very magnitude. Up and outward from the great fiery globe there soared vast tongues of flaming gas, mighty prominences of incalculable length, leaping out from the gigantic spinning sphere. For the sphere, the nebula, was spinning. We saw that, now, and could mark the turning of its vast surface by the position of those leaping tongues, and though that turning seemed slow to our eyes by reason of the nebula's very vastness, we knew that in reality it was whirling at a terrific rate.
For a long time there was silence in the little pilot room while we three gazed ahead, the glowing light from the vast nebula before us beating in through the broad window and illuminating all about us in its glare. At last Sar Than, beside me, spoke.
"One sees now why no interstellar ship has ever dared to approach the nebula," he said, his eyes on the colossal sea of flame before us.
I nodded at the Arcturian's comment. "Only our own ship would dare to come as close as we are now," I told him. "The temperature outside is hundreds of degrees, now." And I pointed toward a dial that recorded the outside heat.