Free Destroyer of Worlds by E. C. Tubb Page A

temperature and yet that is what we appear to be looking at.’
    A mystery, another to add to the rest, but the solutions could wait. Maddox’s first responsibility was to the ship and he listened as the reports came in.
    ‘All systems operating. No damage. Vessel at optimum.’ Weight turned in his chair. ‘Stand down from red alert. Commander?’
    ‘Yes. Switch to yellow. What do you make of it, Eric?’
    Manton was already at work at his computer terminal and other apparatus.
    ‘A moment, Carl. Saha, will you please check this analogue with the Computer? Thank you.’ He pursed his lips as the technician handed him the readout. ‘As I suspected. Interesting. Most interesting.’
    Maddox said, tightly, ‘No games, Eric. I want answers’.
    ‘We have passed through the outer wall of force isolating this area from the normal universe. Naturally the parameters are dark because no light is being received — all is being rotated around the circumference of this space. We are, fortunately, travelling on a line which will bisect the sphere on a chord towards its lower region. I say “fortunately” because if we had been travelling in a more direct line towards the centre then a collision with the central mass would have been inevitable.’ Manton made a calculation, then: ‘At our velocity and knowing the relative masses of the two bodies, both would have been totally shattered.’
    The death and devastation the warning had meant?
    ‘And?’
    ‘Be a little patient, Carl. We have, in effect, entered a completely new universe and it will take a little time to learn something about it. After all we have taken two million years to learn about our own and still are ignorant.’
    ‘Please, Eric, no lectures. Can you anticipate any immediate danger?’
    ‘Immediate? No.’
    ‘Conclusions?’
    Manton sighed and shook his head. ‘You ask a hard question, Carl, and I can only give the roughest of answers. Basically we should, if conditions are as we know, merely proceed until eventually we will leave this area as we entered it. Imagine a circle. Imagine an object, the tip of a pen, for example. It moves on a straight line, hits one side of the circle, passes on, crosses the area and leaves the ring on the far side. We are the tip of the pen and this space is the circle.’
    One containing the tremendous representation of a human brain. Maddox glanced at it where it hung in the screens, grotesque, monstrous, and knew himself to be the victim of suggestion and illusion. The thing could not be a human brain. It couldn’t be a brain at all.
    The colour was wrong, a brain would have been grey and streaked with red, not a pulsating green. Claire had planted the suggestion, forming an association with a familiar object, turning a vague similarity into a firm depiction. The dark lines of assumed convolutions must be fissures and valleys, the green that of vegetation, the apparent pulsation a fault in the scanners, the glow —?
    ‘Rose — still no temperature?’
    ‘None that we are registering, Commander.’
    Cold light? It was possible — some insects had the facility of producing a glow by chemical means, but Maddox knew that nothing radiating that brightly could possibly do it without emitting energy of some kind. And that energy would register as heat.
    ‘Check on the complete electromagnetic spectrum. Saha, feed all received data into the Computer for the purpose of constructing a local analogue of our present and extrapolated situation. Anything new as yet, Frank?’
    ‘Findings are being correlated, Commander.’ Weight grew busy with his instruments. ‘Additional data on screens now.’ The image of the glowing central mass shifted and something else took its place. ‘This was behind the main body and has just come into view.’
    It was a ball of something which could have been rock but the surface was rounded, smooth, a dull grey illuminated by the green glow and resembling a polished pebble. A natural satellite