Within the Nebula

by Hamilton Edmond

"But how near can we go to it?" asked Jor Dahat. "How much heat can our cruiser stand?"

"Some thousands of degrees," I said, answering the plant-man's last question first. "We can venture within a few thousand miles of the nebula's surface without danger, I think. But if we were to go farther, if we were to plunge into its fires, even our ship could not resist the tremendous heat there for long, and would perish in a few minutes. We will be able, though, to skim above the surface without danger."

"You plan to do that, to search above the nebula's surface for the forces that have set it spinning?" asked the Capellan, and I nodded.

"Yes. There may be great ether-currents of some kind there which are responsible for this spin, or perhaps other forces of which we know nothing. If we can only find what is causing it, there will be at least a chance-" And I was silent, gazing thoughtfully toward the far-flung raging fires ahead.

* * *

Now, as our ship raced on toward that mighty ocean of flaming gas, the pointer on the outside-heat dial was creeping steadily forward, though the ship's interior was but slightly warmer, due to the super-insulation of its walls. We were passing into a region of heat, we knew, that would have destroyed any ship but our own, and that thought held us silent as our humming craft raced on. And now the sky before us, a single vast expanse of glowing flame, was creeping downward across our vision as the cruiser's bow swung up. Minutes more, and the whole vast flaming nebula lay stretched beneath us, instead of before us, and then we were dropping smoothly down toward it.

Down we fell, my hand on the control lever gradually decreasing our speed, now moving at a single lightspeed, now at half of that, and still slower and slower, until at last our craft hung motionless a scant thousand miles above the nebula's flaming surface, a tiny atom in size compared to the colossal universe of the fire above which it hovered. For from horizon to horizon beneath us, now, stretched the nebula, in terrible grandeur. Its flaming sea, we saw, was traversed by great waves and currents, currents that met here and there in gigantic fiery maelstroms, while far across its surface we saw, now and then, great leaping prominences of geysers of flaming gas, that towered for an instant to immense heights and then rushed back down into the fiery sea beneath. To us, riding above that burning ocean, it seemed at that moment that in all the universe was only flame and gas, so brain-numbing was the fiery nebula's magnitude.

Hanging there in our little cruiser we stared down at it, the awe we felt reflected in each other's eyes. I saw now by the dial that the temperature about us was truly terrific, over a thousand degrees, and what it might be in the raging fires below I could not guess. But nowhere was there any sign of what might have set the great nebula to spinning, for our instruments recorded no ether-disturbances around the surface, nor any other phenomena which might give us a clue. And, looking down, I think that we all felt, indeed, that nothing was in reality capable of affecting in any way this awesome nebula, the vastest thing in all our universe.

At last I turned to the others. "There's nothing here," I said. "Nothing to show what's caused the nebula's spinning. We must go on, across its surface-"

With the words I reached forward toward the control levers, then abruptly whirled around as there came a sudden cry from Sar Than, at the window.