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I shook my head slowly. I had seen instantly the phenomena he had pointed out. Using again the most understandable terminology, to our right, and somewhat above us, nearer by far than any of the charted bodies, was something which registered on our charts, as a dim and formless haze of pinkish light.

“Now the television, sir,” said Kincaide gravely.

* * * * *

I bent over the huge, hooded disk, so unlike the brilliantly illuminated instruments of to-day, and studied the scene reflected there.

Centered in the field was a group of thousands of strange things, moving swiftly toward the ship. In shape they were not unlike crescents, with the horns blunted, and pushed inward, towards each other. They glowed with a reddish radiance which seemed to have its center in the thickest portion of the crescents–and, despite their appearance, they gave me, somehow, an uncanny impression that they were in some strange way, alive! While they remained in a more or less compact group, their relative positions changed from time to time, not aimlessly as would insensate bodies drifting thus through the black void of space, but with a sort of intelligent direction.

“What do you make of them, sir?” asked Kincaide, his eyes on may face. “Can you place them?”

“No,” I admitted, still staring with a fixed fascination at the strange scene in the television disk. “Perhaps this is what we’ve been searching for. Please call Mr. Correy and Mr. Hendricks, and ask them to report here immediately.”

Kincaide hastened to obey the order, while I watched the strange things in the field of the television disk, trying to ascertain their nature. They were not solid bodies, for even as I viewed them, one was superimposed upon another, and I could see the second quite distinctly through the substance of the first. Nor were they rigid, for now and again one of the crescent arms would move searchingly, almost like a thick, clumsy tentacle. There was something restless, hungry, in the movement of the sharp arms of the things, that sent a chill trickling down my spine.

Correy and Hendricks arrived together; their curiosity evident.

“I believe, gentlemen,” I said, “that we’re about to find out the reason why two ships already have disappeared in this vicinity. Look first at the charts, and then here.”

* * * * *

They bent, for a moment, over the charts, and then stared down into the television disk. Correy was first to speak.

“What are they?” he gasped. “Are they … alive?”

“That is what we don’t know. I believe they are, after a fashion. And, if you’ll observe, they are headed directly towards us at a speed which must be at least as great as our own. Is that correct, Mr. Kincaide?”

Kincaide nodded, and began some hasty figuring, taking his readings from the finely ruled lines which divided the charts into little measured squares, and checking speeds with the chronometers set into the wall of the room.

“But I don’t understand the way in which they register on our navigating charts, sir,” said Hendricks slowly. Hendricks, my youthful third officer, had an inquiring, almost scientific mind. I have often said he was the closest approach to a scientist I have ever seen in the person of an action-loving man. “They’re a blur of light on the charts–all out of proportion to their actual size. They must be something more than material bodies, or less.”

“They’re coming towards us,” commented Correy grimly, still bent over the disk, “as though they knew what they were doing, and meant business.”

“Yes,” nodded Kincaide, picking up the paper upon which he had been figuring. “This is just a rule-of-thumb estimate, but if they continue on their present course at their present speed, and we do likewise, they’ll be upon us in about an hour and a quarter–less, if anything.”