“Back! Back!” Bell said.

Both Murphy and he jettisoned the RDX Comtac boxes from their tethers and the boxes drifted away from them, immediately sucked into the vortex. Once they were pulled in, they particulated into brilliant eruptions of matter. The vortex atomized them and would probably put them back together on the other side…wherever that might be.

The thrusters were working, edging them back, but even at full bore it wasn’t quite enough. Bell could see by the spicules of silt around him, like a great storm of pollen grains, that they were still being drawn in. The thrusters couldn’t put out enough force to cancel the suction of the spinning field. It was like swimming against a riptide. They were not being pulled in quickly, but slowly, very slowly like ants caught in running tree sap.

It was at this time, that Bell became aware of a great, booming vibration that was rising in intensity, shaking both Murphy and he with each resonating thud. Though he could not hear what it was, only feel the vibrations, each thud was like the beat of some immense heart. It pounded through the suit, made the column of the water jar with each beat.

He was facing away from the vortex now, squeezing every drop of power from the thrusters. Murphy had turned around to look. Bell caught sight of his face behind his view plate…it was agonized, terrified. He was screaming out of primal terror.

Don’t look! Dear God, don’t turn and look…

Murphy was yanked from Bell’s side, spinning end over end like a man caught in a free fall, sucked into a vacuum, pulled into the vortex and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He screamed himself hoarse, but it was pointless.

In the center of the whirlpool, there was a steadily growing silver disk that shimmered and rippled. It looked like the surface of a mirror or maybe a window. And through it, the Old Ones. Not one or two, but a hundred. A thousand. Ten thousand. Like a swarm of glossy gray-black beetles taking wing, they filled that window which looked into some dead-end of space, a place so distant that it probably wasn’t even calculable by conventional mathematics. The Old Ones filled that window, distorted and fluttering, more pressing in all the time.

And then the image went black and that blackness split right open.