Free Captain Future 09 - Quest Beyond the Stars (Winter 1942) by Edmond Hamilton

was the urgent knowledge that if by a miracle they could achieve their goal, they would bring back to their peoples a secret that would mean life.
    The Comet was sucked by whirling tides of dust into a dark maelstrom of currents. Curt fought desperately to break free. The hull of the ship was creaking and grinding ominously, and the new reinforcing girders were buckling slightly from the violent stresses.
    “If that drive-ring snaps again, we’re goners!” Otho exclaimed.
    “I’m doing my best to get out of this devil’s eddy,” Curt answered between his teeth.
    A wrenching, cracking sound was followed by the whistling shriek of escaping air, A hull plate had been wrenched open, and the air inside the ship was rapidly hissing out into space.
    “Good thing we put on the space-suits,” Curt thought. “But the ship can’t take this battering much longer.”
    He came to a desperate decision. It was better to risk destruction at once than to remain in the maelstrom, of dust-currents until they were pounded to fragments.
    “Hold tight, all of you,” he gritted. “We’re going to break out of this whirlpool or crack up here and now.”
    He slammed on the full power of the vibration drive. The pressure of that too-great acceleration crushed them for a moment, and the generators back in the cabin roared as though about to break loose from their mountings. Feeling blackness assail his brain, Curt cut the power. They had broken from the maelstrom by that momentary surge.
    “Don’t do that again,” begged Otho. “I think I left my stomach back there.”
    They had escaped the deadly eddy, but currents of dust hardly less dangerous continued to batter them. Racing tides of cosmic dust streamed ceaselessly out from far within the cloud where they had somehow been created!
     
    THEY lurched, plunged, spun, yet always Captain Future kept the Comet heading deeper into the cloud, his eyes glancing each few moments at the quivering needle of the cosmic ray compass. Space had become a roaring obscurity of dust and force, and time had become a meaningless thing as they struggled deeper and deeper into dark enigma.
    “Even if the Birthplace is somewhere in here, how can we approach it or study it under conditions like these?” muttered Grag.
    “There must be some way,” Curt retorted. “Someone once approached and studied it, if that legend of Ber Del is true.”
    The old Vegan shook his head.
    “Someone tried to approach it,” he corrected, “but was stopped by the Watchers. That is the legend.”
    The currents of outstreaming dust were becoming less violent as they penetrated deeper into the cloud. Encouraged, Captain Future drove the Comet steadily onward through the swirling dust.
    The dust grew thinner and thinner until finally they emerged from it into a vast, hazy space. It was a space of billions of miles, filled with a strange sparkling haze through which glowed a few scattered stars.
    Otho exclaimed in disappointment:
    “We’ve got turned around somehow and have come back out of the cloud.”
    Curt’s heart jumped. With a feeling of awe, his eyes travelled around the great vault of hazy space that lay ahead.
    “You’re wrong!” he said. “This space lies inside the cloud.”
    They were silent in stupefied surprise as they perceived what Captain Future’s keen eyes had already grasped. The vast cosmic cloud that covered so many tens of billions of miles of space was hollow. Here at its center was an open area many billions of miles across, containing a half-dozen scattered stars and permeated by that shooting, sparkling haze. The glittering haze appeared to stream out from the remote central region of this interior void, toward the surrounding dust-cloud. And they seemed to feel the impact of those hazy currents as a subtle, yet tangible shock of force through their bodies.
    “But where does the dust that feeds the cloud come from?” cried big Hol Jor bewilderedly.
    “I think I understand a little,”