9 Chapters
It was well called the Dragon's Throat, thought Kirk. Throat of fire, of burning suns, a cosmic blind-alley into danger! You made your decision. You threw a ship, a hundred men, your officers, y…
There was a long moment of complete silence, during which Kirk stared wide-eyed at Tauncer, and Tauncer probed him with a gaze like a scalpel. On Kirk's part, it was a silence of sheer astonishm…
The universe was swallowed up in golden light, in racing, streaming tides of luminous dust. Like an undersea ship of old the Starsong raced with the gleaming currents and burst through denser, darke…
The squadron was out of overdrive, cruising at normal approach velocity. There was a sun ahead in space. Compared to the blazing giants of deep space, it was not much, merely a small yellow star look…
Kirk stood, his dismay and anxiety increasing by the minute. What was he going to do? He said, finally, "We'll have to wait. Ferdias' man is bound to be along soon." "You mea…
Behind Tauncer came an older man, as gray and solid and rough at the edges as an old brick. He could have been an Earthman, and probably was. He was loaded down with a porto, and some other piece of …
Kirk began to laugh. He laughed until tears of rage and desperation stood in his eyes. "Christ," he said, "If Earth agents are all as bright as you are, Joe, God help her." He poi…
At three minutes and fourteen seconds before midnight a small, fast spacecraft with the insigne of the striding warrior on her bows dropped down out of the sky and landed in the brush-grown meadow at…
The sky screamed light, beneath them. The Sun, its atoms ceaselessly riven and then reborn, shrieked raving energy, magnetism, electricity, light, radiant heat, a rage across the heavens, a cosmic st…