Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 305: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

have kept right on coming. | suppose half a million of them have been killed by arc cannon in the past five or six years. Sometimes the push is so bad from the back that the dead are shoved like a shield right up to and through the wall and the things behind start grabbing soldiers. We lose about two hundred men a week.” “How long has this present battle lasted?” said Gedso. “Seventy-five years. Since the day the Terrestrial Exploration Command moved in here and found the crystals. First we fought them with ranked space tanks. Then with a force field. Then with fire guns. And now with arc cannon. They can be killed, yes. But that never stops them. Their attacks are in greater or lesser ferocity, but are soaced evenly over a period of time. Intense for an Earth week. Slack for an Earth week. Intense for an Earth week. Over and over. This is a Slack period. They have broken through the wall just once, yesterday. They’ve been at this attack for seventy-five years.” “You don’t know what they are, then?” “Nobody knows and nobody ever will,” said Blufore. “Is there anything else peculiar about this place?” asked Gedso. “Peculiar! You must have seen it from the outside. You come through a wall of ink a thousand light-years long and high and three light-years thick. And inside the Black Nebula there are no stars or space as we know it, but gigantic shapes, dark and vague. And the space has force in it which heats a ship scorching hot and knocks it around like a cork in a dynamo. And you come in here through a tunnel to get to a chamber which ts light but has no sun, where the most valuable catalyst ever found lies all over and even sticks from the ceiling. Peculiar! The mystery of this continued, seventy-five-year attack is nothing compared to the bigger mystery.” CORniclooo SS CO