Ten planets they found circling the mighty star.
Three of the planets would be directly habitable for man. But on none did they find the great cities they had expected to see. They only saw strange globes of lambent fire darting about. From planet to planet they went, the red glow lighting a great sphere twenty feet in diameter, but for a hundred feet about it the air glowed purple under the ionizing force of some strange radiance. When they moved, they were shooting comets, with brilliantly glowing heads of red and long tails of blue. But they seemed to live on all the planets. Even in the blazing minor star they lived, darting in and coming out of its flames as unconcernedly as a Solarian ship would dart in or out of an atmosphere. Could it be that those men had spoken the truth? It seemed incredible—impossible—but these men had learned millions of years ago that nothing is impossible, and were ready to credit anything if they had reason to believe it so.
For two days those great ships wheeled above the planets, deep in space, undetected. Then one of the glowing Force beings passed close—a scant ten thousand miles away, and through the electroscope, and by means of the electronic activity meters, by spectroscope and pyrometer, by all the complex instruments of their age, they studied him. And the result was conclusive. They were living, sentient beings—Force creatures, conscious pools of titanic energies, forces so great they lived by, that no material body could serve them, and their limbs were the forces that nature had given them. Those forces, which man had spent thousands of years in discovering, a kind nature had given these beings. But in return she seemed to have decided that they needed no brains, for they possess no intelligence. Had man waited another billion years, there might have been intelligence developed in these strange creatures. What an intelligence it would have been—an intelligence based on forces of atomic nature!
But they too had been discovered. In some strange way the creature had sensed them, and sent a call to his friends, for across all the system they could see the strange creatures racing at a velocity that could not be much short of that of light, for while the men were material, and as such could not travel at that speed, the force beings, by their very natures akin to light, could very probably attain to that motion.
The battle was on. At first the force beings hung in a sphere, a three-dimensional cordon, about the ships, then suddenly their lambent red glowed more strongly, and the screens in the far-off laboratory went dark. They had in some way prevented the transmission of further messages. The men at once formed the ships in a great tube, with the one scanner ship in the center, and then one by one they dropped out and were sent across the void—back to the Sun.
Then one of the watching creatures darted forward, toward one of the great ships hanging there in space. As he came within range a disintegration ray flashed out, touched him, and was shed from him in great leaping sparks as the energy was met and opposed. A heat ray leaped forth—the creature paid no attention to that, did not even bother to oppose it—only circled closer. A stream of explosive bullets were launched at it, but they affected it no more than the heat ray. It seemed hopeless. And now the creature hung there, and suddenly he underwent a strange change. In the glowing center of his strange force-pool there suddenly appeared a strange nucleus of glowing violet light, a nucleus that spread throughout the twenty-foot sphere of lambent red force. But it was shot through by strange streamers of waving angry red. Then these strange streamers of fiery red seemed to condense to two main streamers that reached out and out—and touched the great ship. There was a blinding flash of red light—and in place of the great ship there floated a slow cloud of fine, fine dust that glowed softly in the light of the blazing sun. Then the strange streamers seemed to contract, to lessen, and with them the strange purple light from the creature. Slowly, gently he floated away. Of the fleet of ten great ships, and the accompanying matter-sender, six ships returned. The rest floated out there in the interplanetary space around Betelguese.
Then these strange streamers of fiery red seemed to condense to two main streamers, reached out and out—touched the great ships.