He swung the dials. I felt my senses reel with a weird shock. Brenda gave a little gasp. There was a momentary quiver of all the ship; a momentary current-hum. And then silence.
My head cleared; the shock was passed. I gripped the arms of my chair and stared.
A glow like an aura of green radiance suffused the control room. A green glow of unreality throughout all the little ship. I could see it out on the forepeak triangle—the black-garbed figures like wraiths out there in a luminous green gloom. The glassite bull's-eye portes seemed now to have a green film on them. The stars outside were shut away. The transparent glassite dome was spread with the same dull-green opaqueness now. And then I saw, here in the turret walls, in the dome and in the center of each of the bull's-eyes, little holes through which a tiny segment of the starfield still was apparent—windows like dull little eyes puncturing our barrage of invisibility so that we could see outward through them.
Here in the control room the dull radience shone upon Jerome's grinning, triumphant face; it was tinted ghastly, putty-colored by the strange light. And the light glistened on his eyeballs, glowing like phosphorescence—like the eyes of an animal in a hunter's torchlight at night.
Everyone here, the same. And I saw old Professor Carson's face—the face of a dead man. His expression was stamped with his mixed emotions. This, his science of which he had been so proud, perverted now into murderous, ghastly warfare by the villainous Jerome.
Then Jerome moved to his space-flight controls; through the tiny windows in the barrage I could see that our ship was swinging, heading for the oncoming patrolship. Only three thousand miles apart. They would be upon each other in a few minutes.
Jerome's footsteps as he moved across the room faintly sounded on the metal floor-grid. Toneless footsteps in this eerie radiance. Unreal—they might have been tinkling bells, or harsh thuds. All timbre had gone from them so that they had lost their identity completely.
"Not long now, Fanning," Jerome said. "You'll see that ship go to its death." Ghastly dead voice. Every overtone had gone from it. It could have been a man's voice, or a woman's. The voice of a dead thing in a hollow tomb.
"Weird—" I muttered. My own voice the same. And Brenda's, as she murmured something in horror. All dead, indistinguishable one from the other.