"What is it?"

"I... I'm not sure... It's like light, but it streams like water, I... I can feel it pinching my skin a little under my glove..." An unsure voice inside a bubble helmet answered to an inquiry coming via comlink. A man's hand, covered with a white gauntlet, was fumbling purple ether that formed tiny turbulent flows and glowed strange light. The set of fingers moved back and forth in that radiance, observing, assuring, marveling.

"It... it doesn't seem dangerous."

"Can you feel any heat, coldness, relevant?"

"Heh, well craters, I don't think I could feel those things through a vacuum-resistant space suit quite well unless was walking in a macula." The manly voice turned amused.

"Blast, you're right, Buzz!" The person with the space mitten received a little guffaw through the com channel. "But do you think it would be safe to dive in?"

"Hmm... not sure." Lightyear crumpled his black brows. "This tickling is a bit strange."

"It can due to the small energy discharges that are emitted from the floating hmm... thing. Sorry, but the physicians have not yet picked up a word for that phenomenon." A female tone crackled there now instead of Zeb Nebula's gruff old sonus. However, the Commander's one was soon heard in the form of a painful yelp.

"Aah-ouch! Auuugh! Craters!"   

"Ay'noh! No! Don't pull his moustache!" the female spoke again, although with a scolding emphasis. "I'm sorry, Commander, she's just impossible. Now, Ay'noh, this is the last time Mommy mentions about this."

"What's happening there?" Buzz gave a chuckle, "Mrs. Darkmatter? What are you folks doing there? Wasn't this supposed to be a strict, Alliance-supervised operation, as you told me?"

"Who ever gets rid of the gang that nowadays buzzes around you, Buzz? Your whole family is here, watching how the first entering is done. Although your Father is not on the best mood. He's sulking in the corner and you know why", Zeb sneered.

"Daddy is still mad because he couldn't come with us?" Buzz raised his brows. Although, if he had been in the same situation, he would have probably needed a round, padded room for his volcano eruption. The journey to the dark side had unfortunately left its grooves in Buzz Lightyear. Although tha-grydda had healed him up almost wholly, his temper had turned rasher, and he occasionally got same kind of huffs as Zurg. Neither had Z. Z. Lightyear been such a blusterer in his youth, as he was nowadays. It was the dark side, it vandalized badly its offerings, withering away the seeds and sprouts of patience and empathy. The poor one who ended up glued in its cobwebs, was forced to release his anger, and muffle everything else under it. Well, this feature that had also attacked Buzz, unfortunately gave him currently a spice of less nicer aspects. Yet, he tried to keep up patience. But of course the main thing was, that he had escaped the dark dungeons of evilness. Indeed the reformation had not been a piece of impedance for neither of them, but the randomness of fortune had given once some tail-wind.

"But wasn't Senator Ämpäri supposed to be there with you?" the Captain had shifted the topic. "And didn't he before all order that umm... no unauthorized persons can be present?"

Zeb's strain turned a bit uneasy, as if he was trying to hide something behind his tongue. This time namely Lightyear could not see his face; he was palpating with his employer through the ranger uniform's inner radio link. Buzz needed his hands elsewhere, and what idea would there have been attempting to use wrist communicator in vacuum? In any case, the Commander was now playing some mumble game back at Star Command.

"He... he is not here. Senator Ämpäri got a... an unexpected, quick illness. He couldn't come. So now I'm the only one to say who are authorized persons." Indeed, the old man's conscience played a trombone waltz in a false note. Yesterday evening, when he had been on an official dinner at one of Capital Planet's fine restaurants, he had made his revenge on Senator Ämpäri. Into this event were gathered politicians and other Alliance's important officers. Nonetheless, after being mocked, being threatened with a payoff and being made a real dummy in front of Madame President, Nebula had deceitfully smuggled a bottle of castor oil into the incident. Without noticing, the old, crafty ranger had crept in the kitchen, and spilled almost the whole portion of that nasty liquid to compensate the gravy of this Senator's banquet. And with a good appetite, Ämpäri had munched the delicious canard en vin, and almost licked the plate for conclusion. It must have tasted truly awesome... Zeb Nebula knew very well that plotting avenge might lead to the dark side, as fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Although he had the whole day endeavored to bask with an innocent face, the little inner remainder did not shut up.

Nevertheless, at the moment he was leading the entering operation inside the mysterious portal. He supervised the mission at Star Command, a flock of LGM's as his assistants taking care of all the research machinery. As it was mentioned, there were external persons present. At least with that nickname could be called Ay'noh Darkmatter, whom Zarah had kept in her arms while standing quite close to Zeb. It had been a temptation too beguiling for the wee lass to stretch her arm and take a good grip of that long, grey, interesting moustache of the old man. This little episode explained his sudden groans.

And then there were the other invaders. Warp had been banished in the corner to read a magazine. He had caused already two small mushroom clouds while he without permission had started to 'scrutinize' some of the LGM's chemistry implements. And then there was Zurg sitting in another alcove. He kept all the time a low snarl on, browns wrinkled and his whole big appearance moping. And peace was not in sight. When Zarah had left her daughter march a bit on the floor, the scion was after a few seconds teasing some LGM's. The girl noticed that the antennas in their heads were even more intriguing than whiskers or hair. For her age, Ay'noh was more grown than plain humans in relevant time of life. As some human toddlers took their initial steps only around the first year, this girl with her strange DNA-combination was full in action and running around the control central. Until this day not a soul knew what on Tellus was crammed in Warp's cells. So it could not be determined clearly what race the minor Darkmatter was actually. Nevertheless, whatever her chromosome tangle then was, she was going to get a stern lecture from her mother, as she was spotted clinging from one LGM's antenna.

At the porter of the blazing purple space eye was hovering Team Lightyear with a couple of other rangers. Commander Nebula was not yet absolutely sure, whether to give the behest to worm inside that bizarre hole or not. Actually, a little probe droid had been sent in already in order to shake hands artificially with the possible life forms that would be creeping behind that violet, turbulent warp. But as the monitoring results had achieved Star Command, they had given only something blurry and white back. Nebula had concluded that the rusty LGM wreck was ultimately broken, and was now sucking the syllables of the depart call. What would be behind there? He was sending his finest and bravest rangers to enter the mouth of that dragon? Or... was it so that something or someone behind there had made smithereens out of the inside-sent widget? Unanswered questions were fighting to get out of everybody's throats. But as the minds were confused, the sentences did not gush out so easily.

"Sir, do you copy? Should we go in?" Buzz' unsure query reached Zeb.

"I... I don't really know. But Mr. Ämpäri will probably put both of us to work in the kilometer factory, if we won't go through this operation."

"I'm ready to go, Sir! To infinity and beyond! Although my ranger instinct..."

"Yes, Buzz, that's what I mean. Your ranger instinct. But I think you have to go to infinity and beyond."

"Do we step in?"

"Yes."

Biting lightly his lower lip, Lightyear decided to take the action in his hands. His psyche was very foggy concerning the leap into unknown. Where was the probe droid? What would that energy sphere cause to his frail cell structure? Robots were always robots, they could go through almost everything. That had been seen in the case of XR. The sarcastic android was rebuilt and rebuilt already maybe a trillion times.

"Alright, troops! Let's go." The man still waved his hand to Mira and others. "To infinity and beyond!"

"Aw, cap! Can't you ever get rid of that cliché? I think that was the first linguistic expression I ever learned and I have to listen to it to infinity and beyond?" XR muttered.

"Now don't complain there, we are commanded to go!" ex-Zenith barked.       

Dressed in especially durable terillium suits, the rest of the team floated closer the radiating orb. The leading captain gave a common signal, and all of them activated their jetpacks. Lasers ready for safety, they vanished into the obscurity. A dive into the dark waters had begun.

Sweat flooded along the neck of Nebula, as he in vain tried to get an answer to his repeated inquiries. At least twenty minutes had passed, and none of the in-vanished group members had given a pip. Back at Star Command HQ, every intelligent being had gathered at the same monitor where the Commander was standing.

"Where did you doom poor Buzzy Boy to go? Quasars! I shall go after him right now!" And so Warp had to try to hinder the yelling and bellowing Zurg not to rush out in space without a vacuum-persistent uniform.

"Coming, Team Lightyear? This is Commander Nebula speaking! Coming, ranger Lightyear? Coming, ranger Nova?" the desperate Zeb spattered his calls.

"Quasars! What could've happened there? The stupid knickknacks of those green satellite transmitters keeps spitting out that white snowstorm, but nothing else!" Darkmatter bawled as well.

"Buzzy boy, are you there?" Zurg snatched the microphone from Nebula's hand, shrieking in it. "Quasars, you shall answer now! Aggh, quasars! The darkness has swallowed them all! The whirlpools of evilness have devoured my flesh and blood! Grraaghh! Uaargghhh!" Zora began to freak out.

"Dad? What are you roaring there?" suddenly a crackling reply came through the amplifier.

"It's Buzz!" Nearly everyone in the control room rushed back at the monitoring console, some of them hitting their sculls against each other's ones. The people over there had been a bit scattered for a few seconds ago, due to various reasons.

"Ouch, ouch!"

"Usch!" some pain cries were heard. But when Zeb had survived from the minimal concussions, he took the link back.

"Buzz! Thank goodness you're all right! We couldn't get the transmissions to work at all! What's going on there? Where are you? Tell me everything!" the old commander shed his words like a fountain would have belched out water.

"Calm down, Sir!" Lightyear gave a chuckle. "We're all in condition. And actually, we don't have much to tell."

"W-What do you mean?" a puff followed.

"Umm Sir, it's a bit peculiar here." Mira spoke now instead, "It's... it's nothing here. Completely nothing."

Now Nebula went perplexed. What was this talk? Of course there was supposed to be something. If B.L.U.F.F. X-1014 was a gate to other worlds, of course there needed to be a world behind it.

"How would we describe this..." Nova began again, "It's just white. Like a big, white room that continues and continues. There's no horizon or anything, nothing but this white emptiness."

"It's like... an empty dimension", Buzz announced.

"Hmh... but of course there has to be something. Are you walking on something?" Zeb pouted.

"No, nothing. We're just floating here. Just like ranger Nova said, this is like a big white room with no walls or floor or ceiling. Plain white."

Back at Star Command Zurg had begun his sulking again. Certainly, he was happy to hear that his son was all right, but the fact that the eternity beyond there was not purple, was a big drawback to him.

"So the probe droid is not a landfill jar after all, eh?" Darkmatter watched again the little screen showing the visual transmission coming from that extraneous dimension.

"Oh, by the way, can you reach the robot we sent in?" Zeb uttered to the comlink.

"I'm right here, pop! Ready to come out and keep a press conference about our successful mission! I have even waxed my metallic suit to be representative!" XR's line came through.

"No, not you!" Nebula snorted, "The other robot."

"Sure, Sir! It's right here, hovering a few meters away from us", someone else spoke.

"Alright, troops! You can come out... by the way, can you come out? Oh craters, if that is not possible, I..." Nebula abruptly began to rip his whiskers. Again another detail that no one had thought about. How to come out.

"Sure, Sir! I believe it's possible, alright." Buzz tried to soothe the panicky ranger through the open channel. "The portal is visible here as a big purple circle, and we just step back through it."

"Craters. Then come back immediately and take the droid with you."

"What? Were you going to leave me here originally? Aargh! Waaa!" XR's stupidities were there again bothering Nebula.

"Well of my point of view, you could very well spend the rest of your days there", came a bark back.

Thus the group of valiant space rangers bobbed up from the mysteries, leaving the whiteness behind and entering again the familiar galaxy.      

-------------------------

A few weeks went by irritatingly slowly. New expeditions into the great white open were made, with no remarkable results. Even star cruisers were sent in, and hundreds of kilometers were combed through. Nothing else but that continuous whiteness was found. No radiation was around (except some very weak cosmic radiation), no formations of normal matter, antimatter, or even dark matter were discovered. The scientists built a theory that the gate indeed opened up a warp into something, but it could not somehow provide an output to the normal four-dimensional space. It was as if someone had unlocked a door into a corridor that leaded to a cul-de-sac.

And Commander Nebula had his worries making his chest feel like filled with big granite stones. The LGM's had not invented any means to shut down B.L.U.F.F. X-1014.  They had tried new energy blastings, and nothing. The stubborn hexagon only ate the energy it was given, and started glowing even more flaring. Acrimonious vid-phone sessions were gone through with Zeb and Senator Ämpäri. The disappointed politician wanted profits. And when there was nothing to pass him, he became snappier and more brusque as the minutes jogged forwards. In addition, guarding and watching constantly the space finding required quite much Star Command's resources. Star Cruisers and rangers would have needed elsewhere ensuring Alliance's peace. There were the Raenoks, the Gargantians, the Trade World smugglers and gangsters, Lord Angstrom and his rebels, a zillion of other targets to keep an eye on. Although the greatest foe of the Galactic Alliance had fallen -namely Zurg's Empire- there were always casting defects in the long intergalactic iron bar.

------

It was a serene day at Star Command HQ. The shimmering honeycomb had become an every-day issue for the space rangers, and they did not quite much care about it any more. Buzz and his team had their coffee break time. He and a flock of his chums were sitting at the common cafeteria, sipping at their drinks and having little snacks. Although when talking about Booster, it could not be talked about 'little snacks'. He had some kind of gigantic doughnut, which was almost the size of a car tire. The Jo-Adian happily dipped it in his bucket-sized coffee cup every other minute.

"You know what, big guy? You're gonna get stuck forever in the launch tubes, if you won't quit munching that stuff. Munch munch Munchapper." XR drummed fed-up his fingers to the surface of the diner table.

"Umm... Buzz? I was popping in your office and getting some archive files when your father called." Mira took a gulp of her drink and turned to Lightyear.

"What did he have to say? Wasn't he supposed to be in Trade World arranging the concert of Bonk Bonk Clonk Emcees? They should come to The Black Hole this weekend..."

"Yeah, but he asked me to tell you that he came back. He said he was going to Warp's place, Darkmatter has some guests visiting Capital Planet. Some Mrs. Adlene and other folks. Don't remember the names. Oh yeah, and umm... your father told to ask if you had found yourself a... umm... girlfriend." Nova went ill at ease after uttering the last letters.

As a result, Buzz went crimson red. He breathed rapidly in and out, and apparently was about to burst. "Oh, craters, AGAIN? Why does he have to start hollering about my private things to EVERYONE? Why can't he just leave that topic alone?"

"Hey, cap, why won't you let me help, I..." XR took a wide smile. However, he was interrupted as something peculiar happened utterly unexpectedly. In a bolt, all the lamps of the cafeteria powered out. It would have become pitch black, unless the phosphorescence of the Star Command uniforms had not provided faint illumination.

"What's going on?" Mira glanced around.

"Hmm... maybe they just have a power failure here", Buzz replied, but still stood up. So had all the other persons in the diner also quit their ruminating and began to stir around the room.

"But that's nearly impossible that Star Command's power would go out just like this. They got a huge amount of spare crystallic fusion generators, and nowadays even landanah energy generators in the machinery room!" the Princess pointed out.

"Apparently someone has not paid the electricity bill, then." XR tried to be funny, getting the usual eye rolls as his prize.

"This is starting to be too odd. Let's go to check out what happens elsewhere." Lightyear stomped towards the entrance. The mecha took a floodlight out of his inners and made the headway clearer with it.

Indeed, everything was not right now. Fifteen minutes had passed. The corridors of Star Command were also dark, and it indicated that even the elevators to the lower floors did not work.

"Ack, do we really have to use such stone-aged technology as stairs?" XR beefed when the team had to find somehow their steps to Commander Nebula's office.

"Now blast, don't complain there. Be happy that even you do work." Buzz exhaled annoyed. "This is definitely odd. If it was only a little power cut, all the functions should be back in shape already."

Suddenly Buzz' wrist communicator beeped angrily. "Hmm... at least this is OK." However, the ranger was a bit astonished seeing Warp's face in the little screen instead of Nebula's one. Usually this blue friend did not contact him this way, but only under the emergency situations.

"Hey, Lightweight! Have you guys blown up an atom bomb up there or what?" the alien snorted via the comlink.

"What? I truly hope you're not kidding now, Darkmatter. I..."

"Woul' I be calling your left arm if I would only want to say hello? Hello, anyone home? We got it tricky here on Capital Planet. The much I can see forwards from my garden, everything's black until the horizon. Folks are cursing on the streets 'cause their Rolls-Royces won't work. What have you folks done there, unplugged the big electric plug?"

"What... what do you mean? You mean the powers are off there too?" Lightyear's hackles rose up.

"Too and too. Only some of my tootsie's widgets work. And of course the torch crystals. But that's it, kaput. Wonder how this channel is open. So woul' ya tell me what you folks have been goofing up there?"

"Nothing! The powers are off here, too! We're just entering Nebula's office..."

But that ended Buzz' statement. The target of discussion came himself to them, limping out of the darkness. It could be read from his old face, that his mind was under heavy confuse and dubiousness.

"Buzz! Sweet mother of Venus, good that I found you! Blast, why are you keeping your com channel in the use of something else?"

"Uh, sorry, Sir! I didn't notice the parallel link was trying to get a multiconnection. I'm talking to Warp, he says everything seems to be out of power on his district on Capital Planet."

"Well blast, guess what? Folks up there on the launch bay cannot get a single star cruiser work. Nothing works! What the blazars and their zippers is going on here? What is sucking the powers even out of space ships?"

Right at the moment, everyone startled to the hollo of Mira. She came running from behind a corner, flinging with her arms. She had an aghast expression making her eyes as wide as washbasins. "Everyone! Come to see this!"

"What is it, ranger?" Buzz and Zeb yelped in unison.

"Here! I noticed some strange glow coming from the side corridor and decided to take a look what it is." Mira rushed ahead of everyone, and leaded them to the passage that went along the hull of Star Command's big base. It had windows on the other wall giving a view of the surrounding planets and suns. Nevertheless, now the whole hallway was bathing in purple light. And this phenomenon was coming from outside.

"Look! Look at the gate!" the Princess panted.

"Oh, Craters..." Buzz had the time to gasp. The hexagon floating there in the silent space fulminated like an erupting volcano. It had grown wider than it had been before, and the abyss inside it looked deeper than ever. But the light it emitted, was maybe a million times more powerful than the usual beams. The eerie purple ether filled the whole near space, while the portal raved as if fierce demons would have possessed it.

...to be continued...