and happen awful fast.”
"I told Ted to warn them away from it," Kingsley said. "I don't think they'd hurt the machine, but they would sure get messed up themselves. They may try to destroy it, and if they do, they're in for a real surprise.
Nothing could do that." He chuckled. "Stilled atomic-whirl and rigid space-curvature," he said. "There's material for you!”
The ship lanced swiftly through space, heading for that wheeling circle of misty light.
"How far away would it be?" Gary asked and Kingsley shook his head.
"Not too far," he said. "No reason for it being too far away.”
They watched it through the vision plate, saw the wheel of light expand, become a great spinning, frosty rim that filled the plate and in its center a black hole like a hub.
Tommy set up a corrective pattern and tripped the firing lever. The cross-hairs on the destination panel bore dead center on the night-black hub.
The wheel of light flared out, the hub became bigger and blacker, a hole in space… as if one were looking through it into space, but into a space where there were no stars.
The light disappeared. Just the black hub remained, filling the vision plate with inky blackness. Then the ship was flooded with that same blackness, a cloying, heavy blackness that seemed pressing in upon them.