A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the switches with wild abandon....

The sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing rays. No torpedoes flashed. The Cleopatra was alone, floating in star-flecked emptiness.

There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an alien, icy disdain.

The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!

He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this unknown universe and whispering in awe: "We're the aliens here...."

Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her eyes. "I came up through the ventral blister," she said, "Bayne is down there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes and the whole hull of the ship is glowing!"

Cob and Strykalski rushed back to the port, straining to see the back-curving plates of the hull. Ivy was right. The metal, and to a lesser extent, even the leaded glassteel of the port was covered with a dim, dancing witchfire. It was as though the ship were being bombarded by a continuous shower of microscopic fire bombs.

Whitley found refuge in his favorite expression. "Ye gods and little catfish!"

Strike turned to Ivy. "What do you think it is?"

"I ... I don't know. Matter itself might be different ... here."

Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him, stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind, the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human beings been so frighteningly apart from their kind. He felt rejected, scorned and lost.

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