The Project Gutenberg eBook of Outside the universe
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Title: Outside the universe
Author: Edmond Hamilton
Release date: July 11, 2024 [eBook #74020]
Language: English
Original publication: Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1929
Credits: dGreg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE ***
Outside the Universe
By Edmond Hamilton
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales July, August, September, October 1929.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Illustration: "Around we swept in one great lightning curve, and then
were rushing straight back upon the three racing ships."]
_1. The Swarm From Space_
The floor beneath me, slanting swiftly downward, flung me across the
room and against its metal wall as our whole ship suddenly spun crazily
in mid-space. For the moment following I had only a swift vision of
walls and floor and ceiling gyrating insanely about me while I clutched
in vain for some hold upon them, and at the same moment I glimpsed
through the window the other ships of my little squadron plunging
helplessly about behind us. Then as our craft's wild whirling slackened
I stumbled to my feet, out of the room and up the narrow stair outside
it, bursting into the transparent-walled little pilot room where my two
strange lieutenants stood at the ship's controls.
"Korus Kan! Jhul Din!" I exclaimed. "Are you trying to wreck us all?"
The two turned toward me, saluting. Korus Kan, of Antares, was of the
metal-bodied races of that star's countless worlds, his brain and heart
and nervous system and vital organs encased in an upright body of
gleaming metal whose powerful triple arms and triple legs were immune
from all fatigue, and from whose ball-like upper brain-chamber or head
his triangle of three keen eyes looked forth. Jhul Din, too, was as
patently of Spica, of the crustacean peoples of that sun's planets,
with his big, erect body armored in hard black shell, his two mighty
upper arms and two lower legs short and thick and stiff, while from
his shiny black conical head protruded his twin round eyes. Drawn as
the members of our crews were, from every peopled star in the galaxy,
there were yet no stranger or more dissimilar shapes among them than
these two, who confronted me for a moment now in silence before Korus
Kan made answer.
"Sorry, sir," he said; "it was another uncharted ether-current."
"Another!" I repeated, and they nodded.
"This squadron is supposed to have the easiest section of the whole
Interstellar Patrol, out here along the galaxy's edge," said Jhul
Din, "but we're no sooner clear of one cursed current than we're into
another."
"Well, currents or no currents, we'll have to hold our course," I
told them. "The Patrol has to be kept up, even out here." And as
Korus Kan's hands on the controls brought our long, slender ship back
into its proper path I stepped over beside him. Standing between the
Antarian and the Spican and glancing back through our rear telescopic
distance-windows I could make out in a moment the other ships of our
squadron, falling again into formation far behind us. Then I had
turned, and with my two friends was gazing forth into the great vista
of light and darkness that lay before us.
It was toward our left that the light lay, for to the right and in
front and behind us the eye met only blackness, the utter, unimaginable
blackness of outer space. Left of us, though, there stretched along the
ebon heavens a colossal belt of countless brilliant stars, the gathered
suns of our galaxy. A stupendous, disk-like mass of stars, it floated
there in the black void of space like a little island of light, and
hundreds of billions of miles outward from the outermost suns of this
island-universe our little squadron flashed through space, parallel
to its edge. Looking toward the great galaxy from that distance, its
countless thousands of glittering suns seemed merged almost in one
mighty flaming mass; yet even among those thousands there burned out
distinctly the clearer glory of the greater suns, the blue radiance
of Vega, or the yellow splendor of Altair, or the white fire of great
Canopus itself. Here and there among the fiery thousands, too, there
glowed the strange, misty luminescence of the galaxy's mighty comets,
while at the galaxy's edge directly to our left there flamed among the
more loosely scattered stars the great Cancer cluster, a close-packed,
ball-like mass of hundreds of shining suns, gathered together there
like a great hive of swarming stars.
On our right, though, sharply contrasted with the galaxy's far-flung
splendor, there stretched only blackness, the deep, utter blackness of
that titanic void that lies outside our universe. Black, deep black, it
stretched away in unthinkable reaches of eternal emptiness and night.
Far away in that blackness the eye could in time make out, hardly to
be seen, a few faint little patches of misty light, glowing feebly
to our eyes across the mighty gloom of space; faint patches of light
that were, I knew, galaxies of stars, island-universes like our own,
separated from our own by a titanic void of millions of light-years of
space, an immensity of emptiness into which even the swiftest of our
ships could not venture, and beside which the distances between our own
stars seemed tiny and insignificant.
In silence we gazed into that mighty panorama of thronging stars and
cosmic void, standing there together as we three had stood for many an
hour, Antarian and Spican and human. From the ship's hull, stretched
beneath the little pilot room in which we stood, there came dimly
to our ears the strangely differing voices of our crew. Over these
occasional voices, too, there beat unceasingly the deep, droning hum
of the great mechanisms whose tremendously powerful force-vibrations
were propelling us on through space at almost a thousand light-speeds.
Except for these familiar half-heard sounds, though, there was only
silence in the pilot room, and in silence we three gazed as our ship
and the ships behind it flashed on and on. Then, abruptly, Korus Kan
uttered a sharp cry, pointing upward.
"Look!" he cried. "That swarm on the space-chart!"
* * * * *
Startled, our eyes lifted to where the Antarian pointed, toward the
big space-chart on the wall above the window. A great rectangle of
smooth, burnished metal, upon its flat surface were represented all in
the heavens immediately about us. On the chart's left side there shone
scores of little circles of glowing light, extending outward from the
left edge for several inches, representing the outmost suns of the
great galaxy to our left. Inches outward from the outermost of those
glowing circles there moved upon the blank metal, creeping upward in a
course parallel to the galaxy's edge, a formation of a dozen tiny black
dots, the dots that were our squadron of ships, holding to our regular
patrol far out from the galaxy's edge. And inches outward from our
ship-dots, in turn, out in the blank metal at the chart's right, there
moved inward toward us and toward the galaxy a great swarm of other
black dots, a close-massed cluster of thousands of dots there on the
chart that represented, we knew, a mighty swarm of matter moving in out
of the void of outer space toward our ships and toward the galaxy to
our left!
"A swarm of meteors!" I exclaimed. It could be nothing else, I knew,
that was approaching our galaxy out of the unplumbed, awful void. "A
swarm of meteors from outer space! And moving at unthinkable speed!"
"A swarm of meteors from outer space," repeated Korus Kan,
thoughtfully. "It's unprecedented--and yet the space-chart doesn't lie."
I glanced again at the big chart. "The swarm's heading almost straight
toward us," I said, watching the close-massed dots creeping across the
big chart. "But it's traveling at thousands of light-speeds, and must
be caught in an ether-current of inconceivable velocity."
"Its speed seems to be steadily slackening, though," said Jhul Din as
we gazed up at the space-chart in silent awe.
I nodded. "Yes, but it ought to reach us within a few more hours.
We'll halt our ships here until it reaches us, and as it passes we
can ascertain its extent and report to General Patrol Headquarters at
Canopus. They can send out meteor-sweeps then to destroy the swarm
before it can enter the galaxy and menace interstellar navigation."
Even while I spoke Korus Kan had swiftly shifted the levers in his
grasp, quickly reducing our craft's great speed, while the half-score
of ships behind us slowed their own flight at the same moment in answer
to his signal. The humming drone of our great propulsion-vibration
generators waned to a thin whine and then died altogether as our ships
came to a halt, while at the same moment the dozen ship-dots on the
space-chart ceased to move also, hanging motionless on that chart as
we were hanging motionless in space. Inches to the right of them,
though, the close-massed dots of the mighty swarm were still creeping
steadily across the chart, though now their unheard-of speed was fast
slackening. In silent awe we regarded them. Out there in the awful
void beside us, we knew, the great swarm was rushing ever closer
toward us even as those thousands of close-massed dots crept toward our
own ship-dots, and a strange tension held us as we watched them moving
nearer.
To any of our comrades in the Interstellar Patrol it would have seemed
strange enough, no doubt, the tense silence in which we watched the
approach of the swarm, for surely a meteor-swarm more or less was
nothing new to us. We had met with many a one in our patrols inside
the galaxy, and many a time had aided in the work of the great
star-cruising meteor-sweeps which keep free of them the space-lanes
between the galaxy's suns. But this swarm, rushing toward us out of the
mighty depths of outer space, was different. Never in all our history
had any such mighty swarm of matter as this come toward our galaxy from
the unplumbed outer void, and at such a speed as this one. For though
it was moving slower and slower there on the space-chart, the great
swarm was still flashing through space toward the galaxy at more than a
thousand light-speeds, a velocity greater than that of any of our ships.
Silently we watched, there in the pilot room, while the swarm of
close-massed dots crept across the big space-chart, toward the galaxy
and toward the dozen dots that were our ships. Slower and slower still
it was moving, its speed smoothly and steadily decreasing as it swept
in toward the galaxy from outer space. Such a decrease in speed was
strange enough, we knew, but knew too that if the swarm was being borne
on toward us by a terrific ether-current its speed would slacken as the
speed of the current slackened.
The minutes dragged past, forming into an hour, and another, and
another, while we watched and waited there, and steadily still the
swarm crept on toward us, moving on now at a steady velocity of five to
six hundred light-speeds. Our ships hung silent and motionless still
in space, with away to our left the flaming torches of the galaxy's
thronging suns, and to our right the great vault of blackness out of
which that mighty swarm of matter was rushing toward us.
Straight toward us almost it was heading on the space-chart, and now,
as it crept over the last half-inch that separated it on the chart from
our ships, I gave an order that sent our ships and those behind it
slanting steeply upward. In swift, great spirals our squadron climbed,
and within a moment more was hanging thousands of miles higher in
space than before, our prows pointed now toward the galaxy. Tensely
I watched the space-chart and then, just as the great swarm of black
dots reached the dozen dots that were our ships, I uttered a single
word, and instantly our squadron was racing toward the galaxy at a
full five-hundred light-speeds, moving now at the same speed as the
great swarm and hanging thousands of miles above it as it rushed on
through space toward the galaxy. It was the familiar maneuver of the
Interstellar Patrol in reconnoitering a meteor-swarm, to hang above
it and race at the same speed with it through space, but never yet
had we essayed it on such a swarm as this one, moving as it was at an
incredible speed for inanimate matter, and without any signs about it
of the ether-current which we had thought was the reason for that speed.
Now, as our ships hummed swiftly on, I stood with Jhul Din at the
projecting distance-windows, gazing down into the mighty abyss of space
that lay beneath us. Somewhere in that abyss, I knew, the great swarm
was racing on at the same speed as ourselves, but as we gazed tensely
down our eyes met nothing but an impenetrable darkness, the cold, empty
blackness of the infinite void. I turned, signaled with my hand to
Korus Kan at the controls, and then our ship began to drop smoothly
to a lower level as it raced on, following a downward-slanting course
now with the ships of our squadron behind close on our track. Down we
slanted, still racing onward at the same terrific speed, while the
Spican and I searched the darkness beneath with our eyes through the
thick-lensed protecting windows, yet still was nothing visible in the
tenebrous void below. Lower, still lower, our ships slanted, and then
suddenly Jhul Din gave utterance to a short exclamation.
"Down there!" he cried, pointing down through the little window. "Those
shining points--you see them?"
* * * * *
I gazed tensely down in the direction in which he pointed, and for a
time could see nothing still but the infinite unlit blackness. Then
suddenly my eyes too made out a few gleaming little points of light in
the darkness far beneath us, points of light far separated from each
other and driving on through space toward the galaxy far ahead, at
the same speed as ourselves. And now, as our ships slanted still down
over and toward them, they became more and more numerous to my eyes, a
vast, far-flung swarm of fully five thousand gleaming points, spaced a
thousand miles from one another, and racing on through space in a great
triangular or wedge-shaped formation, the triangle's apex toward the
galaxy ahead. The light with which each gleamed made the whole vast
swarm seem like a throng of tiny ghosts of stars, driving through the
void, though I knew that metallic meteors sometimes shone so with light
reflected from the stars.
Never yet, though, had I seen a swarm gathered in such a precise
formation as this one, or one that flashed onward at such vast and
uniform speed. It was like a scene out of some strange dream, lying
there in the black void beneath us, the mighty, silent swarm of
light-points whirling on through space at that awful speed toward the
massed, burning suns of the galaxy far ahead, out of the mysteries of
outer space. Held still silent by the strangeness of it we gazed down
upon it, as our ships slanted lower still. Then, as our squadron drove
down at last to within a few hundred miles of the great swarm, the
nature of those driving points of light became suddenly visible, and we
gasped aloud.
For these were no meteors that drove through space in that mighty swarm
beneath us! These were no fragments of cosmic wreckage out of the
flotsam of smashed worlds and stars! These were mighty, symmetrical
shapes of smooth metal, each an elongated oval in form and with rounded
ends, each a great ship as large or larger than our own! The front
end of each of these great oval ships glowed with white light, the
light-points we had glimpsed from above, since the front end of each
was transparent-walled like our own pilot room, and brilliantly lit
inside. In those white-lit pilot rooms we could half glimpse, as we
flashed along, masses of strange machinery and switches, and stranger
beings that seemed to move about them, apparently directing the course
and speed of their great ships as the whole mighty swarm of them rushed
on through space, toward the galaxy's suns ahead!
"Space-ships!" My exclamation held all the stunned amazement that had
gripped us all. "Space-ships in thousands from the outer void----"
Before I could complete the thought that was flashing across my mind
there was a cry from Jhul Din, beside me, and I wheeled about to find
him pointing downward, gazed swiftly down to see that a score or more
of the great, strange ships beneath were suddenly slanting up toward
us, as we raced along above them. With the swiftness of thought they
flashed up toward us, and I had a lightning vision of the white-lit
pilot rooms at the nose of each, rushing toward us like blurs of
brilliant light. Then, as I shouted aloud, Korus Kan swung the controls
in his grasp with lightning speed, and instantly our ship flashed
sidewise in a twisting turn.
Even as we swerved, though, there leapt from the foremost of the
uprushing craft a pale broad beam of ghostly white light that stabbed
up toward and past us, grazing our ship, and that struck the foremost
of the ships of our squadron behind us. I saw the broad beam strike
that ship squarely, saw it playing on and through it, and for a moment
could see no effect apparent. Then, as the great pale beam played
across the ship in a swift slicing sweep, I saw that as it shone
through that ship's pilot room the figures inside it suddenly vanished!
The next moment the ship had suddenly driven crazily off into space,
whirling blindly away without occupant or crew, all life in it wiped
instantly from existence by that terrible death-beam that had played
through it! Now the attacking ships were leaping up toward us, flashing
up lightning-like with ghostly beams of death whirling and stabbing
about and toward us, and now, over the wild clamor of sudden battle in
the hull beneath, I heard the great cry of Jhul Din, beside me.
"_Space-ships in thousands, and they're attacking us! They've come from
somewhere toward our galaxy--have come out of outer space itself to
attack our universe!_"
_2. Chased Through the Void_
The moment of swift, terrific battle that followed was to me then only
a wild uproar of flashing action and hoarse shouts, as the mighty ships
beneath leapt up toward us. It was only another sudden twisting turn
of our ship by Korus Kan that saved us from annihilation in that wild
first moment of combat, since the score or more of pale, deadly beams
from beneath, stabbing past us as we twisted, struck the ships of our
squadron behind and in another moment had sent half of them reeling
blindly and aimlessly out of sight, driving haphazardly off into space
as the ghostly beams annihilated all the life inside them. Then, as
we raced still through space above the mighty swarm, the score of
attacking ships suddenly divided, a dozen of them driving up toward the
ships behind us while the remainder flashed toward us, their great,
pale rays still stabbing and slicing as they leapt on.
Even as our ship swerved from the pale beams leaping up toward us,
though, I had shouted an order into the tube beside me, and now from
our own craft there stabbed down toward the upward-rushing ships a
half-dozen long, narrow rays of brilliant red light. Four of the ships
below were struck squarely by those brilliant rays, and from our crew
came shouts of triumph as those four vanished in blinding flares of
crimson light. It was the deadly ray of the Interstellar Patrol,
destroying all matter it touched by raising its frequency of vibration,
since matter itself is but a certain frequency vibration of the ether,
and when that frequency is raised to that of light-vibrations the
matter is changed in that moment from solid matter to light.
Even in the moment that the four ships vanished beneath our rays,
though, I had glanced backward and had seen the last of the ships of
our squadron behind vanishing in a wild chaos of whirling death-beam
and crimson ray, since scores of other ships were leaping up to attack
us from the mighty swarm far beneath. Toward us now, it seemed, ships
were flashing from every direction, and I heard the hissing of the
ray-tubes below as our crimson rays burned out to meet them, saw
three more of them flare and vanish, glimpsed a dozen shafts of the
death-beam graze past us as Korus Kan twisted our ship in an erratic,
corkscrew course. Not for moments longer, though, I knew, could we keep
up this wild and unequal battle, since the mass of ships behind that
had annihilated our squadron were now leaping after us. Our only chance
was in flight.
I shouted to Korus Kan, and then, as scores of the ghostly beams
swept through the void toward us, I saw him swerve the control-levers
in his hands sharply sidewise, so that our ship abruptly turned
squarely to the right, away from the great swarm and the attacking
ships about us. It was a maneuver that caught those ships off their
guard, and traveling as we were at the terrific velocity of five
hundred light-speeds, it put millions of miles of space between us
and the great swarm before the attacking ships could realize what we
had done. In a split-second they had vanished from sight about us and
we were again rushing on through black and empty space, turning now
and again heading toward the galaxy's far-flung suns. But, as I gazed
anxiously at the big space-chart, I saw that now the great swarm of
black dots upon it had slanted from their former course and was heading
straight after the single dot that was our ship. By means of their own
space-charts, which I knew they must have, they had discovered our
trick and were in pursuit!
"Let her out to full speed!" I cried to Korus Kan. "They're after us
and our only chance is to get to the galaxy ahead of them!"
Instantly Korus Kan opened wide the power-controls, and with a mounting
humming roar our great ship went rapidly into its highest speed, its
great generators flinging it on through the ether at a thousand times
the velocity of light, propelling it headlong onward toward the galaxy
that lay still far ahead, its mighty disk-like mass of shining suns
stretched across the blackness of space before us. And behind us rushed
the great swarm, too, racing on after us and toward the galaxy still. I
knew that the speed of that mighty swarm of ships must be inconceivably
greater than that of our own, since we ourselves had seen them on our
charts racing in toward the galaxy from outer space with velocity
unthinkable, a velocity which we had thought could only be due to some
great ether-current, and which they had only slackened as they drew
near the galaxy. There was a slender chance, though, that we might yet
escape, and now as we rushed on toward the galaxy in headlong flight I
turned quickly to the speech-projection instrument beside me, pressing
a button in its base. A moment later there came from it a clear,
twanging voice.
"General Patrol Headquarters at Canopus," it announced, and swiftly I
responded.
"Dur Nal, Captain of Patrol Squadron 598-77, speaking," I said. "I
desire to report the discovery of a swarm of some five thousand strange
space-ships which have appeared out of outer space, heading toward the
galaxy. These ships are apparently capable of immense speeds and are
armed with a form of death-beam unfamiliar to us, but extremely deadly
in operation. On discovering these ships we were attacked by them and
all of my squadron except my own ship destroyed. Our own ship is now
being chased inward toward the galaxy, heading in the general direction
of the Cancer cluster, and though the swarm is gradually overhauling us
we may be able to escape. From the size, number and deadly armament of
these alien ships it is apparent that they contemplate a general attack
upon our universe."
There was a moment's pause when I had finished, and then from the
speech-instrument there came the metallic voice again, as calm as
though I had made only a routine report of position and progress.
"Order of Lacq Larus, Chief of the Interstellar Patrol, to Dur Nal. You
will make every effort to elude the pursuing swarm, and if you can do
so will endeavor to draw it into the Cancer cluster. All the cruisers
of the Interstellar Patrol will be assembled inside the cluster as
swiftly as possible, and if you are successful in drawing the pursuing
swarm inside it will be possible for our fleet to fall upon it in an
unexpected attack, and destroy these invaders, whatever their source or
purpose, before they can obtain a foothold in the galaxy. You have the
order?"
"I have the order," I replied, as calmly as possible, and with a word
of acknowledgment the twanging voice ceased.
I wheeled around to Korus Kan and Jhul Din, a flame of excitement
leaping within me. "It's a chance to destroy them all!" I exclaimed.
"If we can hold out until we reach the galaxy--can lead them into that
cluster----"
Their own eyes were afire now as they saw the chance, and now Korus
Kan tightened his grasp on the controls, gazing grimly ahead with
power open to the last notch, while Jhul Din strode swiftly out of the
pilot room and down to the ship's hull beneath, where, in a moment
more, I heard his deep voice booming out orders to the crew as they
labored to wring from our throbbing generators the last ounce of speed.
Yet now, too, looking up at the big space-chart, I saw that the gap
on it between our single little ship-dot and the great swarm of dots
behind was terrifyingly small, a gap of less than a half-inch which
represented no more than a few billion miles of space. And slowly,
steadily, that gap was closing, as the great swarm slowly overhauled
us. With their immense potential speed they could have flashed past
us in a moment, had they so desired, yet I knew too that they dared
not use such terrific speed so near the galaxy, and that even did they
use it we would be able to turn and double before they could slow down
enough to catch us. Their plan, it was obvious, was simply to overhaul
us slowly until they had just reached us, and then sweep down on us
with the death-beams while we strove in vain to escape them.
So at our utmost speed we flashed on through the void toward the
galaxy, a mighty belt of burning suns across the blackness before us,
and toward the close-massed cluster of suns at its edge that shone
among the scattered stars around it like a solid ball of light, while
there rushed after us through space at the same mighty speed the great
swarm of strange craft which we were attempting to lead into that
cluster.
* * * * *
Surely in all time was never so strange a flight, a pursuit, as this
one--a flight inward through the void with unimaginable beings from
the mysteries of infinite outer space as our pursuers, flashing on in
thousands on our track, toward us and toward the galaxy they meant to
attack.
Far ahead in that galaxy, too, I knew, its forces would be preparing
to meet that attack, and from the central sun of Canopus the alarm
would be flashing out across our universe from star to star, from world
to whirling world, flashing in warning from end to end of the galaxy,
to all the stars and worlds and races of the Federated Suns. And even
while that warning flashed, the great star-cruisers of the Interstellar
Patrol would be gathering in answer, would be rushing headlong between
the suns across the galaxy from every quarter of it to mass in force
inside the Cancer cluster. Could we escape the pursuing swarm and
lead it into that cluster it would still be hours, I knew, before we
reached it, even at our tremendous speed, and in those hours all the
fighting-ships of the galaxy would be racing toward the rendezvous
there and massing to meet this mighty invading fleet.
Could we escape? The thought beat monotonously through my brain as I
stood there with Korus Kan, silent as the Antarian as we watched the
great swarm of dots creep closer and closer to us on the space-chart.
On and on our ship was racing, the throbbing generators now making the
whole ship vibrate with their vast power, and visibly the galaxy's
shining suns were largening ahead as we flashed on toward them; yet as
the minutes passed, forming into an hour, and then another, the great
swarm behind crept ever remorselessly closer. Rocking and swaying as
we plunged through great ether-currents, we held still straight toward
the ball of swarming suns that was the Cancer cluster, at the galaxy's
edge ahead; yet still we had covered no more than two-thirds of the
distance that had separated us from it, and now the great swarm was no
more than a few million miles behind, a mere fraction of an inch on the
space-chart.
It was as though our pursuers were but playing with us, so calmly
and steadily did they overtake us, and in despair I turned from the
galaxy's mighty rampart of stars, ahead, to the rear distance-windows.
A moment more, I knew, and the thousands of ships behind would be
drawing into sight in those windows, would be speeding down upon us
even as we sought to flee and would annihilate us with an attack which
we could not hope to escape a second time. Hopelessly I gazed back into
the blackness of space behind, but then wheeled back suddenly as there
came a sudden exclamation from Korus Kan. He had swerved our flying
ship's course a little and was pointing up toward the space-chart now,
his strange eyes agleam with excitement.
"If we can make it, it's a chance to throw them off our track,"
he exclaimed, and as I gazed up toward the space-chart I suddenly
understood.
On that chart our single ship-dot was rushing on toward the glowing
circles of the galaxy's suns, with the mighty swarm of black dots that
were our pursuers close behind, and now I saw that a little ahead
of our own ship-dot there hung stationary on the chart another dot,
one not of black but of red. Instantly I recognized it as one of the
great space-buoys hung in space to mark the positions of the mighty
ether-maelstroms which were the most perilous of all the menaces to
interstellar navigation. Formed by the meeting of vast ether-currents,
these maelstroms had been marked for all space-navigators by placing
near each a special space-ship, or buoy, which automatically
and without crew kept its position, showing as a red dot on all
space-charts to warn passing ships of the maelstrom's position. The
great maelstrom ahead, I knew, was one of the mightiest of all in and
around our galaxy, and now as our ship sped straight through space
toward it I saw Korus Kan's plan and caught my breath with sudden hope.
"We'll head straight toward the maelstrom, and then swerve aside just
before we reach it," he was saying. "The swarm behind can have no
knowledge of its existence, and if they run into it before they can
change their course it'll delay them, at least."
Tensely I watched now as our ship raced on, the humming roar of its
generators rising a half-pitch still higher as Jhul Din, beneath, drove
the crew to their last strength to win another light-speed. A scant
few million miles ahead the great maelstrom lay, marked only by the
red dot on the chart, and as we sped straight on toward that dot our
ship already was rocking and bucking as we drove through the mighty
ether-currents whose meeting formed the maelstrom. Braced against the
room's wall we stood, eyes straining ahead through the darkness and
against the glare of the galaxy's suns in the distance, and then, as I
turned to glance back, I saw that behind us now there gleamed in the
blackness points of shining light, points that were swiftly largening
and nearing us, countless in number and driving through space straight
on our track. With each fleeting moment they were flashing nearer
toward us, and now were so near that through the distance-window I
could plainly make out their white-lit pilot rooms as they drove after
us. A moment more, I knew, would see them close enough to loose the
death-beams upon us, but at that moment there was a half-breathed
exclamation from Korus Kan, and I turned swiftly about.
He was gripping the controls tensely, gazing forward into the blackness
that lay between us and the galaxy, and even as I turned I saw that
our ship-dot had flashed past the red danger-dot on the space-chart.
Instantly then Korus Kan twisted the controls sharply to the left,
and immediately our craft was flashing off in a great curve from the
path it had been following, veering suddenly toward the left while the
great swarm just behind us raced still for the moment straight ahead.
Then, before they could swerve aside to follow us, I had a single
flashing glimpse through the window of the whole mighty swarm suddenly
disintegrating, shattering, the thousands of ships that made it up
suddenly whirling away in all directions in blind chaos of aimless
movement as they rushed straight into the mighty ether-maelstrom into
which we had led them. Then they had vanished, whirling blindly about,
as we flashed on out of sight, our own craft swaying wildly as we drove
on through the great currents about the maelstrom. On the space-chart,
though, I saw the great swarm's pursuit for the moment had ceased,
the myriad dots that made it up milling aimlessly about in the mighty
maelstrom's grip while our single ship-dot raced straight on.
"A chance!" I cried, as our ship flashed on toward the galaxy's suns.
"A chance yet--if we can get to the Cancer cluster before them!"
* * * * *
Now our cruiser was again flashing on at its very highest speed,
straight toward that cluster, while behind us the great swarm whirled
chaotically about. Before us the galaxy's suns were burning out in
waxing splendor as we shot through space toward them, the cluster of
closer-packed suns that was our goal changing now from a ball of solid
light into a ball-like mass of thronging, flaming stars as we drew
nearer it. But as Jhul Din came back into the pilot room from beneath,
as we three contemplated the space-chart and then the great wall of
suns in the blackness ahead, our faces set again after our brief
triumph, for we knew that billions of miles of space lay still between
us and those suns. And now, too, we saw on the chart that the great
swarm of ships behind had escaped from the maelstrom's grip at last
and was racing after us once more in swift pursuit, a hundred of their
ships in the van now of that pursuit with the main body of the swarm
behind.
"It's the last stretch!" I exclaimed, as we gazed tensely at the chart
and into the void ahead. "Unless we get to the Cancer cluster ahead of
them now it's the end."
Our ship was leaping forward still at its uttermost speed, its strained
generators functioning nobly, but the great swarm behind was again
picking up speed itself, the hundred ships massed together a few
million miles ahead of the main swarm hardly more than an inch behind
our own ship-dot on the space-chart. On--on--straight toward the
fiery mass of the Cancer cluster we fled, while behind us, in cruel
repetition of the first part of this wild chase the pursuing ships
slowly cut down the gap between us, the hundred foremost ones leaping
every moment closer toward us, while behind them the main swarm came
on more deliberately. Ahead now the galaxy filled the heavens before
us, myriads of burning stars that gemmed the infinite night with
their flaming brilliance, but of all in the stupendous scene around
and before us we had eyes only for the thronging suns of the Cancer
cluster, and for the space-chart above us.
On--on--the minutes of that mad onward flight were passing each like an
eternity as we leapt forward, tensely braced there in the pilot room,
peering forward, with behind us the hundred pursuing ships close on our
track, remorselessly overtaking us, with behind them the great swarm of
thousands of ships that were driving to attack our universe. Ahead of
us, I knew, there somewhere in the flaming cluster of suns before us,
the cruisers of the great Interstellar Patrol, the war-ships of our
universe, would be gathering and massing to meet that great invading
fleet, but unless we could escape and lead it into the cluster where
they waited they would have no chance for a surprize attack. Before
us by now the great cluster lay in waxing, flaming splendor, only a
scant few billion miles ahead, its thronging, gathered suns burning out
in supreme glory amid the galaxy's looser-swarming suns, but now the
hundred foremost ships of the mighty swarm behind were almost upon us.
Even as I turned, now, toward the distance-window behind me, I heard
a deep exclamation from Jhul Din, who had turned to gaze back also,
and as I too gazed through that window a chill seemed to creep through
my very blood, for light-points were showing there in the blackness
behind, and drawing swiftly nearer. It was the hundred foremost ships!
Ever closer they were racing toward us, overtaking us again with every
moment, while far behind them the main swarm raced on after them.
With each passing moment the light-points behind were broadening,
brightening, as the ships came closer, but now the great cluster
ahead loomed full before us, its myriads of flaming, thundering suns
drenching all in our pilot room in their fierce, terrific glare.
Straight ahead of us, at the mighty cluster's outmost edge, flamed a
great double star among all the other thronging stars that made it up,
two giant white suns separated only by a comparatively narrow gap. And
straight toward that narrow gap our fleeing ship was heading!
Behind us now the hundred long oval ships were drawing into plain
sight, their white-lit pilot rooms giving us brief glimpses inside of
massed machinery and slender beings we could but half-glimpse that
moved inside. From the foremost of those ships, now, there stabbed out
toward us the broad, pale, ghostly beam of death, but as yet the gap
between us was too wide for the beam to bridge, and we flashed onward
still, the gleaming shapes of our pursuers leaping still closer. Before
us now the whole firmament seemed a wild chaos of gigantic suns, as we
raced straight in toward the mighty cluster, with ahead the narrow gap
that separated the two giant white suns toward which we were heading.
Jhul Din gripped my shoulder, pointed ahead, shouted to me over the
roar of our generators. "Unless we slacken speed we'll never make it
through that gap without driving into one of the suns," he cried.
I shook my head. "It's death either way!" I yelled to him. "Our only
chance is to drive between them at full speed!"
Now before us the whole heavens seemed a single vast sheet of boiling
white flame as we drove in toward the two mighty thundering suns, the
gap between them seeming no more than a narrow black cleft at the
terrific velocity at which we were moving. At our topmost speed we
rushed toward that narrow gap, the ships behind still leaping full upon
our track, closing swiftly down upon us now. And now, as Korus Kan
braced himself and held our controls still steady, we were flashing
squarely in between the two gigantic suns. On either side of us they
towered, thundering, boiling upright oceans of devouring, brilliant
white flame, whose awful glare all but blinded us, seeming to fill all
the universe about us with one great mass of raging fires. Out toward
our onward-flashing ship there licked from the great suns on either
side titanic tongues of flame bursting out toward us for millions of
miles, huge prominences that could have licked up worlds like midges,
but straight on between the walling fires our throbbing ship still
flashed.
Now the hundred ships behind, still after us through that hell of light
and flame, were racing down upon us even as we sped between the giant
flaming suns, and now from behind shot shaft upon shaft of the pale
death-beams, hardly to be seen in the awful blinding glare. As the
beams sprang toward us, though, Korus Kan swerved to the left, and for
a moment it seemed that we had swerved from death in one form only to
meet it in another, since at our terrific speed we veered millions of
miles in that moment toward the left gigantic sun. Its boiling fires
were all about us, seemed to encompass us, and then just as it seemed
that we were racing into the mighty glowing corona to our deaths Korus
Kan had swerved our ship backward into the center of the narrow gap.
And now we were reaching that gap's end, were passing from between the
giant suns, and out into more open space inside the great cluster, with
the pursuing ships again leaping forward to loose their deadly beams.
Out from between the two great suns we flashed, before us now the
interior of the mighty cluster, a great swarm of flaming suns that
thronged space all about us, and about many of which swung great
families of planets, dozens of whirling worlds. Even as we shot into
the interior of the great cluster, though, from between the two giant
suns, the hundred pursuing craft had leaped forward upon us with one
great burst of sudden speed, were behind us, on each side, all about
us. It was the end, we knew, and there was an instant of sheer silence
as we waited for that end, waited for the pale beams of death from the
ships about us. But before they could loose those beams there flashed
suddenly upon them from each side other ships, two mighty masses of
ships like our own, that burst suddenly out upon our pursuers from
behind the two great suns between which we had just come. Ships like
our own! Ships long and slender and gleaming! Ships of the Interstellar
Patrol, striking at the vanguard of the invaders in defense of our
universe!
_3. Death-Beam and Crimson Ray_
Even as the great masses of ships on each side leapt out upon our
pursuers, Korus Kan had glimpsed them, and had swung our own ship
instantly around in a great curve. On each side of us, now, were the
thousands of cruisers of the great patrol, and before us were the
hundred ships that had chased us in toward the galaxy through space.
Before those ships could recover from their surprize, before their
occupants could realize the trap into which they had ventured, our
whole vast fleet was leaping upon them from both sides, flashing down
upon the hundred invading craft before they could turn from their
onward flight.
Down with them swooped our own ship now, and we shouted aloud as we
saw from all the swooping ships about us, as from our own, myriad
brilliant shafts of the brilliant red ray flashing down and striking
the enemy ships ahead and below. Within an instant, it seemed, half
those racing ships had flared and vanished in brilliant bursts of
crimson light, while the rest had dipped and turned in a wild effort
to escape. Back toward the two great white suns they raced, seeking to
escape between them into outer space again, to rejoin the oncoming main
swarm of their great fleet, but down before and ahead of them leapt
our Patrol cruisers, the red rays again whirling and cutting in great
circles of death. And now as they vanished one by one beneath those
rays, struggling still through space toward the two great suns, the
death beams of the remaining ships sprang savagely up toward us, and
I saw cruisers here and there in our own fleet driving aimlessly off,
smashing into one another and whirling blindly away as the beams wiped
out all life in them.
But now we were leaping after the fleeing ships between the great
suns again, and as we shot after them through those terrific walls of
flame our rays again took toll of them; so that as we flashed out from
between the two mighty suns and into outer space once more but a scant
half-dozen of them remained, and these leapt instantly forward and out
into the blackness of outer space to rejoin the main body of their
approaching fleet, while we in turn sprang after them in hot pursuit,
though our ships were not capable of the tremendous speeds of those
invading ones.
"Score for us!" cried Jhul Din as our ships flashed on. "We've all but
wiped out those hundred!"
"Wait!" I told him. "The main body of their fleet's coming on toward
us----"
Even as I spoke I saw the ship of Lacq Larus, Chief of the Patrol,
the flag-ship of our fleet, slackening its speed ahead of us, and a
moment later there came from the speech-instrument beside me his clear,
unruffled voice.
"All ships halt and mass in battle formation!" he ordered; and at
once, in answer to that command, our flashing ships slowed and
stopped, forming instantly into three thick, short columns and hanging
motionless in space.
On the space-chart above, now, we could see the mass of thousands
of dots that was our fleet hanging motionless a little out from the
galaxy's edge, and could see, too, a little outward from that mass of
dots, another and equally large mass, that moved slowly in toward us,
the great swarm that was the invading fleet. Already the few fleeing
survivors of our hundred pursuers had raced back into that main swarm,
and now, moving ever more slowly but coming steadily forward, it was
driving through space toward us. The great swarm was moving still in a
triangular formation, the triangle's apex toward us, and now at last,
as we stared forward into the blackness, we made out light-points
ahead, a vast swarm of them in that steady triangular formation, moving
deliberately toward us.
Slowly now those light-points were largening, were changing into great,
gleaming ships as their fleet came on toward us. Ever more slowly it
moved, now at but a fraction of a light-speed, for it was evident that
they, like us, sought no fight-and-run skirmish but a battle to the
finish. At last they had stopped, had halted just out of ray-reach
ahead and were hanging motionless in space like ourselves, facing us.
And then, for a moment, it seemed as though about us was an unbroken
stillness and silence, as the two mighty fleets, numbering each fully
five thousand ships, faced each other there in space.
I think that never in all space and time could there have been a moment
as strange as that one, when the mighty fleet of our galaxy lay prow to
prow with this other mighty fleet from the dark, unguessed mysteries
of outer space. All about us lay the cold, lightless blackness of the
eternal void, with the great galaxy's colossal rampart of flaming suns
stretched across the heavens behind us alone blazing in that blackness,
the great Cancer cluster at its edge, just behind us, flaming with all
the glory of its mass of gathered suns. A single instant that silence
and stillness reigned in the stupendous scene about us, an instant that
to our strained nerves seemed endless, and then a sharp order rang
from the speech-instrument beside me, and as one our great fleet leapt
forward while the opposing fleet sprang to meet us. The battle was on.
I saw the enemy fleet flashing straight toward us, the apex of its
triangle pointed full at our center, and knew instinctively that it
meant to cut us into halves with the great wedge that was itself.
But as it flashed straight toward us and upon us there rang another
order from the instrument at my side, and instantly our three short
columns of ships veered to the right, changing in a moment into one
long column, which instead of meeting the onrushing triangle flashed
along its side. As we shot past thus I had a lightning glimpse of the
masses of countless oval ships racing by, glimpsed too a score or more
of ships at the center of their fleet that seemed not oval but round
and disk-like in shape, and then forgot all else as from all our ships
there burst the brilliant red rays, raking the side of their fleet with
a deadly fire as we flashed past it. Then scores upon scores of their
ships were vanishing in crimson flares of light as those rays found
them, and though their death-beams found our own ships here and there
as we flashed by, the great mass of their ships dared not loose their
beams upon us lest they destroy their own ships, so skilful had been
our maneuver.
Only a moment did it last, that passing of the two fleets with red
ray and death-beam crossing, and then we were past them, were turning
and circling and racing back upon them to deliver another blow. Ahead
we could see the enemy fleet turning and racing back to meet us, with
beyond them the great suns of the galaxy flaming in the blackness of
space, and again we leapt straight toward them there in the abysmal
void; but this time they had anticipated our maneuver and as we swerved
to the right of them their whole great fleet swerved right also, so
that in order to avoid a head-on collision with their fleet we were
forced to swerve still farther to the right, our long column racing
along through space now parallel to the galaxy's edge, with the enemy
ships strung in a similar column between us and the galaxy, racing
along with us through space at the same speed as ourselves, their pale
ghostly beams whirling toward us even as our crimson shafts cut through
the void toward them.
Ships on each side were vanishing, now, some flaring in wild explosions
of red light and disappearing as the scarlet rays found them, others
driving crazily and aimlessly away as the pale beams wiped out in an
instant all the crews inside them. But now we found ourselves at a
disadvantage, for our enemy's gleaming ships could hardly be made out
against the flaring suns of the galaxy, beyond them, while our own
glittering cruisers stood out clearly against the darkness of outer
space. It was an advantage of which they took swift use, for now the
broad pale beams were reaching toward us in increasing numbers as we
flashed along, while our own rays were all but ineffective, since,
blinded as we were by the flaring suns behind the opposing ships, we
could only loose the rays at random.
On still we raced, along the galaxy's edge, the great Cancer cluster
dropping behind us now as we sped on, our two great fleets striking
and grappling with each other even as they flashed on. Black space
and flaming suns, pale ray and red, oval ships and long cruisers,
all mingled and whirled in that wild scene like the features of some
tortured dream, but dream it was none to us, flashing on with our fleet
while in the hull beneath our crew loosed their red rays of death upon
the chance-seen enemy ships that flashed between us and the dazzling
suns. At an order flashed from the Chief's flag-ship our whole fleet
increased to its utmost velocity, striving to pass the enemy fleet
and get between it and the galaxy again, but the immeasurable speed
of these great invaders from outer space defeated our efforts. At the
same speed as ourselves they raced forward, keeping always between us
and the suns, and when we slowed our speed suddenly to fall behind them
they instantly did likewise.
Meanwhile ships all about us were driving aimlessly away, reeling
blindly off into space or smashing into each other, as the pale
death-beams found more and more of them in that mad running fight. Not
for many minutes longer, I knew, could the unequal contest be kept
up. Already we were past the Cancer cluster, still racing along the
galaxy's edge, and then abruptly there came another sharp order from
the instrument beside me. Instantly, in obedience to that order, all
our racing, battling ships slowed, swiftly grouped themselves into a
triangular formation, its apex in turn pointing toward the long line of
the enemy's fleet, between us and the galaxy. Then, before they could
mass their own fleet again, our triangle of mighty cruisers had leapt
straight toward the galaxy, its apex tearing full into the long line of
their ships.
* * * * *
There was a moment of reeling, crashing shock, as our massed fleet
crashed into that line, and all about me in that moment, it seemed,
patrol-cruisers and oval ships were smashing into each other, colliding
and bursting wildly there in mid-space. Then suddenly we were through,
the mass of our fleet ripping through their line by main force; but
now, as we smashed on through, another order sounded and we curved
swiftly about, and still in that close-massed formation rushed back
upon the shattered enemy line of ships. Before they could reform
that broken line, before they could mass again in their own close
formation, we were upon them, and then again our wedge-shaped mass
was driving through them, shattering their disorganized masses still
further and sending scores of them into annihilation now with our red
rays as we flashed through.
"We've won!" shouted Jhul Din, at the window, as our massed fleet again
wheeled and sped back upon the disorganized mass of ships before us.
"We've won! We've broken up their fleet!"
Now, though, we were rushing back to strike another deadly blow, and
before us, I saw, the thousands of the invading ships were still
milling aimlessly there in space, their organization shattered by
the smashing blows we had dealt them. With red rays flashing we sped
upon them again, but now, from the disorganized mass before us, I
saw a score or more of ships rising, flashing upward with immense
speed, ships that were not oval like the rest but flat and round and
disk-like, ships that I had vaguely glimpsed in our first rush on the
enemy fleet and which through all the battle they had kept protected
from us at their fleet's center. Now, with all their terrific speed,
the disk-ships were flashing upward, and even in the instant that we
rushed again upon our enemies they had attained to a great height above
us.
In that instant I gave them but a glance, since again we were darting
upon the mass of oval ships, our own cruiser now toward the rear of
our fleet's formation. But in the next moment, even as we flashed on
in our swift charge, I saw the score of disk-ships hanging high above
suddenly glow and flicker with strange force, the whole great lower
side of their big disks alive with a flickering, rippling, viridescent
light. And at the same moment I saw the ships of our fleet ahead of
us suddenly breaking from their mad charge forward and lifting slowly
upward, saw them twisting and turning and reeling but still moving
steadily up, toward those score of disk-ships high above, as though
pulled upward by a mighty, unseen grip.
"Attraction-ships!" I shouted, as I saw what was happening. "Those
disk-ships above--they're pulling our cruisers up with some magnetic or
electrical attractive force, that affects the metals of our ships but
not of theirs!"
We were still racing forward, at the rear of our fleet, but as I saw
that all the thousands of our cruisers before us, almost, were in the
grip of the attractive forces from above, were being pulled helplessly
upward, I shouted to Korus Kan, and he shifted the controls swiftly
sidewise, sending our cruiser veering away before it came beneath the
disk-ships high above and was pulled up likewise. We had escaped for
the moment, but now from ahead all the disorganized masses of the oval
invading ships had gathered together again and were leaping forward,
springing upon our own helpless masses of cruisers as they were pulled
resistlessly upward. From all about those masses of twisting, turning
cruisers the pale death-beams smote toward them, and only here and
there could a few shafts of the red ray answer them, caught as our
ships were in that tremendous grip.
Swiftly the cruisers of our fleet were being wiped clean of all the
crews inside, as the death-beams swung and circled through them from
all about. But a few score of cruisers at the rear of our fleet, like
ourselves, had managed to escape the relentless grip of the disk-ships
above, and now upon ourselves other masses of the oval ships were
rushing. Wildly we battled there, the hordes of the invading ships
spinning and flashing about us, but swiftly our few score of cruisers
were sent reeling blindly off by the death-beams; and now, looking back
an instant, I saw that the last of our mighty fleet of thousands of
cruisers were being annihilated by the death-beams of the oval ships
that swarmed about them, as they were drawn helplessly upward. We and
a few other cruisers, struggling wildly there against the encircling
masses of the oval ships, were all that remained of the galaxy's once
mighty fleet!
Even as we fought there, with the mad energy of despair, I saw the last
of our companion cruisers whirling away as the death-beams found it,
and realized that except for a few stragglers here and there like our
own ship the great fleet was annihilated, and that our only chance was
in flight. With every moment the oval ships about us were increasing in
number, completely encircling us, now, and it was only by a miracle of
veering, twisting turns by Korus Kan that our ship was able to avoid
the death-beams that reached toward us from all sides. Escape seemed
impossible, so completely were we hemmed in by the circling, striking
ships, and another moment would see our end, I knew; and so I wheeled,
shouted hoarsely to Korus Kan.
"We'll have to break through them!" I shouted. "Give her full speed,
Korus Kan, and head straight in toward the galaxy!"
Instantly he jerked open the power-control to the last notch, and as
our ship leapt forward like a living thing toward the masses of ships
that surrounded us he sent it driving straight toward the galaxy, and
toward a spot where there showed a momentary gap between the ships that
hemmed us in. But a single instant it took us to reach that gap, pale
beams whirling all about us while our own red rays flashed sullenly
forth, but in the instant that we reached it one of the oval ships had
seen our intention and had leapt forward to close the gap. An instant
too late it was to close it completely, but the oval ship's nose,
containing its transparent-walled pilot room, lay across our path as
we reached the gap, and straight into it we crashed!
* * * * *
There was a terrific, rending shock as our great prow tore into the
transparent-walled nose of the enemy ship, and beneath that shock
we saw the whole fore portion of the oval ship crumpling up and
collapsing, reeling away a shattered wreck of metal. Our own cruiser
rocked and swayed crazily at the collision, and for a moment it seemed
that we too were doomed, but the next our battered ship leapt forward,
and in an instant was free of the masses of oval ships that had
encircled us, and was driving now in toward the galaxy's suns, with a
score of the oval ships behind in hot pursuit.
In we drove, speeding now past the great Cancer cluster as we flashed
at our utmost speed into the galaxy, its great ball of gathered suns
flaring in the black heavens to our left as we sped inward. Behind came
our pursuers, racing on close after us; and now, glancing back beyond
them, I saw the whole mighty fleet of the invaders, still fully three
thousand ships in number, moving in toward the galaxy also, toward the
great Cancer cluster, with its swarming suns and thronging worlds,
saw the great fleet slowing, slanting down toward those suns, those
worlds, and knew then that these invaders, having annihilated the
galaxy's fleet, were settling upon the suns and worlds of the Cancer
cluster as a first foothold in our universe, a base from which they
could subdue all that universe. Then their fleet had vanished from our
distance-windows as we fled on, and of the score of our pursuers all
but three had turned back to rejoin that fleet.
The three remaining ships, though, drove straight on our track, and
swiftly were overhauling us, though inside the galaxy they dared not
use all their tremendous speed. Yet remorselessly after us they came,
and I knew that moments more would see our end unless we could escape
them. Directly ahead of us, though, there flamed a small crimson sun,
a dying, planetless star not far inward from the Cancer cluster,
largening each moment before us as we drove on toward it with terrific
speed. As I saw it a last plan flashed through my brain, and I turned
to Korus Kan.
"Head straight toward that sun!" I told him. "It's our only chance--to
get in close and lose them in its corona!"
He nodded grimly, swerving the ship a little, and now straight toward
the red star we raced, Jhul Din and I gazing out with him toward it as
we flashed on, and then behind to where the gleaming three ships of the
invaders drove after us. Swiftly they were overtaking us, two close
behind us and the remaining one a little behind the two, but ahead the
crimson star was filling almost all the heavens, now, a great sea of
fiery red flame that stretched above and beneath us, ahead, as though
occupying all the firmament. Its glare was awful, now, for we were
racing straight in toward the mighty corona of it, the glowing outer
atmosphere of radiant heat about it in which, I knew, no ship, however
heat-resistant, could live for more than a moment. On we raced, our
cruiser creaking and swaying still from the effects of the collision
with the ship we had smashed into, but flashing on with unabated speed.
Behind us, the three gleaming shapes of our pursuers were following
with unslackened speed, too, gradually drawing nearer, the two
foremost of those ships just behind us, now. Another moment and their
death-beams would stab toward us, and though we might destroy one or
even two of them the other would surely destroy us before we could
turn to it, I knew. The heat, too, of the great star before us was
penetrating into our ship, and full before us, not a dozen million
miles ahead, glowed the great corona. On we flashed--on--on--and then,
just as we were about to burst into the terrible, glowing corona, just
as the two ships close behind us sprang closer to stab with their beams
toward us, Korus Kan jerked the controls suddenly back, and instantly
our ship shot upward in a great vertical rush, while beneath, before
they could see and follow our change of course, the two racing oval
ships pursuing us had flashed on and into the mighty glare of the
corona. Then we glimpsed them shriveling, twisting, vanishing, in the
awful heat there, while our own cruiser turned now away from the red
sun.
Beneath we saw the single remaining oval ship turning, too, since it
had been far enough behind the two to change its course in time to
avoid the terrible corona. It seemed to pause, hesitate, and then, as
though satisfied that our ship too had met death in the corona with
its own two companions, it began to flash backward toward the galaxy's
edge, toward the Cancer cluster where the mighty invading fleet had
settled. And now, burning for revenge, our own cruiser was slanting
back with it and down toward it, as it drove on unsuspectingly beneath.
Another moment and we would be above it, would loose our red rays on
it before ever it suspected our existence. I was breathing with relief
at our escape, now, and heard an exulting cry from Jhul Din as he
strode down into the cruiser's hull from the pilot room, to direct the
ray-tubes there, but the next moment all our triumph vanished, for from
our cruiser's hull, toward its battered prow, there came suddenly a
succession of appalling cracks.
Standing suddenly tense we listened, and then, as there came from
beneath a prolonged, cracking roar, I heard shouts of fear from our
crew, and then Jhul Din had burst up into the pilot room from beneath.
"The cruiser's walls are giving!" he cried. "That collision with the
oval ship when we smashed our way out strained and wrenched loose the
whole prow and side-walls--the cruiser can't hold together for five
minutes more!"
There was a stunned silence in the little room then, a silence in which
it seemed that all the disasters that had befallen us were crowding
together upon us, overpowering us. This was the end, I knew. Within
minutes more the walls about us would collapse and in the infinite cold
and emptiness of interstellar space we would meet our deaths. We were
hours away from the nearest friendly planet, with all our companion
ships destroyed. It was the end, and for a moment I bowed to the
inevitable, stood in stunned despair awaiting that end. But then, as
my eyes fell upon the oval ship beneath, toward which our collapsing
cruiser was still slanting downward, I saw that upon its broad metal
back was the round circle of a space-door, like the double space-doors
of our own ship, and as I saw that, all the ancient combativeness that
has carried men out into the remotest of the galaxy's depths surged up
in me, and I wheeled around to the other two.
"Order all our crew down to the cruiser's lower space-door," I cried,
"and have an emergency space-suit issued to each of them!"
They stared at me, strangely, tensely. "What are you going to do?"
asked Jhul Din, at last, and my answer came out in a shout.
"We're going to do what never yet has been done in all the battles
between the stars!" I told him. "_We're going to put our lives on one
last mad chance and board that enemy ship in mid-space!_"
_4. A Struggle Between the Stars_
A moment there was silence in the pilot room, a silence of sheer
surprize, in which my two lieutenants gazed at me in utter amazement,
and then from Jhul Din came a great shout.
"It's a chance!" he cried. "If we can do it we'll escape yet!"
"Down to the space-door at once, then!" I told him. "The ship can't
last for seconds now!"
For even then there had come to our ears another long, cracking roar
as our battered walls gave still farther. Now Jhul Din was racing
down from the pilot room to assemble the crew, and now our cruiser
was slanting still farther down toward the long, gleaming oval ship
beneath. Down we slanted, until our own swaying cruiser hung at a
distance of a score of feet above the enemy ship, which, believing
us destroyed, never dreamed of our presence as we raced on through
space at the same speed as itself. And now Korus Kan hastily set the
automatic controls in the pilot room that would hold our cruiser at
the same speed and course without guiding hand, and then we too hurled
ourselves down the narrow stair, through the big power room where the
great generators were still throbbing on, down through the succession
of compartments in the cruiser's hull until we had reached the long,
low room that lay at its very bottom, and in the floor of which was set
the cruiser's lower space-door.
In the long room all our crew was gathered now, with Jhul Din at their
head, a hundred odd in number, and a strange enough aggregation they
were, drawn as they were from the far-different races of the galaxy's
peopled stars. Octopus-beings from Vega, great plant-men from Capella,
spider-shapes from Mizar--these and a score or more of differing
forms and shapes stood before me, listening in disciplined silence as
I briefly explained our plan. About us the walls were wrenching and
cracking fearfully, but when I had finished those before me raised
a fierce shout, and then each of us was hastily climbing into the
emergency space-suits which were kept always in all interstellar ships
in case outside repairs to it were necessary in mid-space.
A moment more and we all stood attired in the hermetically sealed,
clumsy-looking suits of thick, flexible metal, with head-pieces of
metal in which were transparent vision-plates. As we donned them each
pressed the button which set the little air-generators inside each suit
pouring forth their supply of fresh air and purifying the breathed air;
and then, with a swift glance around that showed each in his suit, I
motioned to Jhul Din and at once the big Spican pressed the stud in the
wall that sent the round space-door in the floor sliding open.
We could not feel through our insulating suits the tremendous cold that
instantly invaded the ship, but we heard plainly the swift, terrific
swish of air about us as it rushed out of the ship into the mighty void
outside. Now, looking down through the open door, we could see a score
of feet beneath the broad metal back of the great oval ship, still
racing on unsuspectingly beneath us. I turned back to the crew about
me, saw that each had gripped one of the metal bars that were to be our
only weapons in this attempt, since the use of rays would destroy the
ship beneath, which was our only hope of life. Then, reaching forth
again to the switch-case on the wall, Jhul Din at my motion threw off
the cruiser's gravity-control, so that the attraction-plates built into
the floor beneath us, which pulled us always downward and enabled us
to walk upright and normally inside the cruiser, no longer pulled us.
Instead, though, we were being pulled down now by the gravitational
force of the racing ship beneath and a step through the open door would
send any of us hurtling down toward that ship.
Now I gave one last glance around, even while the cruiser's walls
cracked terribly again, and then swung myself over the edge of the
opening in the floor, hanging by my hands from it and swinging there in
the infinite void of interstellar space a score of feet above the oval
ship's broad metal back. It seemed, that moment that I swung there,
a time of endless length, and surely never before had any hung thus
between two ships racing on through the void. Then, as another cracking
roar came from the walls about me, I loosed my hold upon the edge and
hurtled down through empty space toward the back of the ship below.
Down, down--that fall seemed endless as I rushed down through space,
but unimpeded as I was by air-resistance it was but an instant before
I had slammed down on the ship's broad back, lying motionless for an
instant and then rising carefully to a sitting position. Just above me
hung our racing cruiser, the opening in its bottom directly overhead,
and in another moment Korus Kan had followed me, striking the ship's
back beside me while I gripped him and held him tightly. Then came
one of the crew, and another, and another, until in a moment the last
of them was dropping down among us, Jhul Din alone remaining above.
He stepped toward the opening, to lower himself and drop down to us
likewise, but even as he did so I saw the great walls of the cruiser
above collapsing and buckling inward as they gave at last. I motioned
frantically to Jhul Din as the walls collapsed about him, saw him give
one startled glance around, and then as the cruiser's sides crumpled up
about him he ran forward and leapt cleanly through the opening in the
floor, hurtling down toward us and striking full in our midst, just as
the crumpled cruiser above, the power of its generators gone with its
collapse, jerked sharply out of sight toward the crimson sun behind,
hurtling away from us a twisted wreck of metal.
* * * * *
It was with something of a tightness in my throat that I saw the wreck
of our familiar, faithful ship drive away from us, but I turned toward
our own desperate situation. We were clinging to the back of the great
oval ship as it drove on toward the Cancer cluster, with above and all
about us the blackness of the void, and the galaxy's flaming suns.
Ahead shone the gathered suns of the great cluster, and I knew that we
must capture the ship soon if at all; so now, half creeping and half
walking, we made our way along the great ship's back toward the round
space-door set midway along that back. In a moment we were clustered
about it, and found it closed tightly from within, as I had expected.
Instantly, though, we set to work on it with the metal bars and tools
we had brought with us, drilling down through the thick metal of the
door while we clung, like a hundred odd tiny mites, upon the mighty
ship's back as it flashed on and on.
What might lie in the ship beneath, what manner of beings might these
terrible invaders be, we could not even guess, but it was our one
chance to penetrate inside, and frantically we worked. Within moments
more we had drilled through in a dozen places, were swinging aside the
great bolts that held the door closed inside, and then were sliding it
open and dropping swiftly down inside. We heard a little rush of air
outward as the door opened, and knew that this ship was inhabited by
air-breathing beings, at least, and then we found ourselves in the room
beneath the space-door, a bare little vestibule chamber in whose side
was a single square door.
Before opening this, however, we closed the round space-door above us,
plugging the holes we had drilled in it by driving in sections of metal
bar, and then I turned toward the door in the wall, felt carefully
around it, and finally pressed a small white plate inset beside it, at
which it slid silently aside. We stepped through it, bars raised ready
for action. We were in a corridor, a long corridor apparently running
the length of the great oval ship, but quite empty for the moment. The
throbbing of great generators was loud in our ears, a throbbing much
like that in our own ships but with another unfamiliar beating sound
mingled with it. Silently we gazed about, then began to make our way
down the corridor toward the ship's front end, toward the pilot room
at its nose, stopping first to divest ourselves silently of the heavy
space-suits, and then starting on.
Now we had come to an open door in the corridor's side, and peering
cautiously through it we saw inside a long room holding a score or
more of great, cylindrical mechanisms from which arose the throbbing
and beating of the oval ship's operation. About these mechanisms were
moving some two dozen of the ship's occupants, and as our eyes fell
upon them we all but gasped aloud, so utterly strange and alien in
shape were they even to us, who held strange shapes enough in our own
gathering. Many and many a strange race had we of the Patrol seen in
our long journeys through the galaxy, but all these were familiar and
commonplace beside the shapes that moved in the room before us. For
they were serpent-people!
Serpent-people! Long, slender shapes of wriggling pale flesh, each
perhaps ten feet in length and a foot in diameter, without arms or
legs of any kind, writhing swiftly from place to place snake-like,
and coiling an end of their strange bodies about any object which
they wished to grip. Each end of the long, cylindrical bodies was cut
squarely off, as it were, and in one such flat end of each were the
only features--a pair of bulging, many-lensed eyes like those of an
insect, big and glassy and unwinking, and a small black opening below
that was the only orifice for their breathing. These were the beings
who had come out of outer space to attack our universe! These were the
beings who had annihilated the galaxy's fleet and were preparing now to
seize the galaxy itself!
I turned from my horror-stricken contemplation of them to Jhul Din and
Korus Kan, close behind me. "The pilot room!" I whispered. "We'll make
for it--get the ship's controls!"
They nodded silently, and silently we stole past the open door and down
the long corridor, toward the door at its end that we knew must lead
into the pilot room at the ship's nose. Past other doors we crept,
all of them fortunately closed, and as we stole on toward the door at
the corridor's end I began to hope that at last our luck had turned.
But ironically, even as I hoped, the door at the corridor's end, not
a score of feet ahead, slid suddenly aside, and out of it, out of the
pilot room beyond it, came one of the writhing serpent-creatures. It
stopped short on seeing us, then gave vent to a strange, hissing cry,
a high, sibilant call utterly strange to my ears, but at the sound of
which the doors all along the corridor behind us slid swiftly open,
while through them scores of the serpent-beings writhed out, and upon
us!
"The pilot room!" I yelled, above the sudden hissing cries of the
serpent-creatures and the shouts of our own crew. "Head for it, Jhul
Din!"
Down the corridor we leapt, and out from the pilot room there came
to meet us a half-dozen of the serpent-creatures, while one remained
inside at the controls still. Then they were rushing toward us, and
as they reached us were coiling about us, endeavoring to crush us by
encircling us with their bodies and coiling with terrific power about
us. As they did so, though, our own metal bars were crashing down among
them, sending them to the corridor's floor in masses of crushed flesh
as we plunged on toward the pilot room. Now we were through them,
had crushed them before us, and were leaping through the door, the
single serpent-creature inside wheeling to face us. Before he could
spring upon us, though, Jhul Din had lifted him high above his head
and then had flung him far down the corridor, where he struck against
the wall and fell crushed to the floor. Then Korus Kan was leaping to
the controls, swiftly scanning them and then twisting and shifting
them, heading the racing ship around in a great curve, away from the
Cancer cluster ahead and back in toward the galaxy's center, while
Jhul Din and I now sprang back down the corridor to where our crew was
struggling fiercely with the hordes of serpent-creatures rushing up
from all parts of the ship.
Down that corridor, and down another, through rooms and halls and
twisting stairways, down through all the great ship the battle raged,
the serpent-creatures leaping and coiling about us with the courage of
despair while we strode among them, metal bars smashing down in great
strokes, mowing them down before us. Despite their overpowering numbers
they were no match for us in such hand-to-hand fighting, and they dared
not use ray-tubes, like ourselves, lest they destroy their own ship
about them. So we forced them on, ever sending them down in crushed,
lifeless masses, as they gradually gave way before us.
I will not tell all that happened in that red time of destruction, but
quarter there could be none for these things that had come to attack
our universe, that had destroyed our comrade ships in thousands; and so
within a half-hour more the last of the serpent-creatures had perished
and we were masters of the ship, though but a scant two score of us
were left to operate it, so fierce had been the battle.
* * * * *
Our first action was to clear the ship of dead, casting them loose into
space through the space-doors; then Jhul Din and I made our way back
into the pilot room, where Korus Kan was holding the ship to a course
inward into the galaxy. The controls, he had found, were very much
like those of our own cruisers, but the great generators, as we found,
were much different. Instead of setting up a vibration in the ether to
fling the ship forward, as in our own cruisers, they projected a force
which caused a shifting of the ether itself about the ship, forming a
small, ceaseless ether-current which moved at colossal speed, bearing
the ship with it. The speed could thus be raised or lowered at will by
controlling the amount of force projected, and as the general nature
of the generators was clear enough the remaining engineers of our crew
took charge of them while we fled on into the galaxy.
"We'll head straight for Canopus," I said, indicating the great white
star at the galaxy's center far ahead. "We'll report at once to the
Council of Suns; our capture of this ship may be of use to them."
While I spoke Korus Kan had opened the power-control wider, and now
our newly captured prize was racing through the void toward the mighty
central white sun at thousands upon thousands of light-speeds, though
I knew that even this terrific velocity, all that we dared use inside
the galaxy, was but a fraction of what the ship was capable of in
outer space. Glancing about the pilot room, I endeavored for a time to
penetrate the purpose of some of the things about me, as we flashed
on. Above our window, as in our own cruiser, was a great space-chart,
functioning similar to ours, I had no doubt, and showing the dot that
was our ship flashing on between the sun-circles that lay about us.
There was a device for flashing vari-colored signals, also, such as
space-ships inside the galaxy use to show their identity on landing.
There was, too, a cabinet containing a great mass of rolls of thin,
flexible metal, inscribed with strange, precise little characters that
I guessed formed the written language of the serpent-people, though
they were beyond all comprehension to me. I turned back to the windows
about me, gazing forth into the vista of thronging suns and worlds that
lay all about us now as we flashed on into the galaxy toward Canopus.
From all the suns about us, our space-chart showed, great masses of
interstellar ships were also flashing inward into the galaxy, the first
exodus of the galaxy's people from the outer suns and worlds, driven
inward by the fear of these mighty invaders from the outer void who had
already destroyed the galaxy's fleet, and were preparing now to grasp
all our universe. Far behind us I could see the great ball of suns that
was the Cancer cluster, glowing in supreme splendor at the galaxy's
edge, and I knew that even now, on the worlds of those thronging suns,
the great fleet of the invading serpent-creatures would be settling,
would be moving to and fro, wiping out the races that thronged those
worlds, wrecking and annihilating the civilizations upon them and
making of all the suns and worlds of the great cluster a base for their
future attacks upon and conquest of the galaxy. Could we, in any way,
save ourselves from that conquest? It seemed hopeless, and now, weary
as we were with crushing fatigue from the swift succession of events
that had crowded upon us in the last few hours, since our discovery
of the invading swarm's approach, it was with a dull despair that I
watched Canopus enlargening ahead as we flashed on toward it.
On between the galaxy's thronging suns we raced, our vast speed
carrying us through them and through the swarming, panic-driven ships
about them before they could glimpse us. Onward, inward, we flashed,
veering here and there to avoid some star's far-swinging planets,
dipping or rising to keep clear of the masses of traffic that
were jamming the space-lanes leading inward, racing on at the same
unvarying, tremendous velocity while we three in the pilot room, and
the remainder of our crew beneath, strove to remain awake and conscious
against the utterly crushing oppression of fatigue that pressed down
upon us. At last we were flashing past the last of the suns between
us and Canopus, and the great white central sun lay full before us, a
gigantic globe of blazing, brilliant light. As we leapt toward it I saw
Korus Kan gradually decreasing our speed, our ship slackening in its
tremendous flight as we slanted down toward the planets of the great
sun, and toward the inmost planet that was the center of the galaxy's
government.
Down, down--our speed was dropping by hundreds of light-speeds each
moment, now, as we sped down through the terrific glare of the vast
white sun toward its inmost world. As we shot downward I saw that Jhul
Din, now, was lying on the floor beside me, overcome by the fatigue
that crowded down upon me also; only Korus Kan, of all of us, holding
to the controls untiring and unaffected, the metal body in which his
living organs and intelligence were cased being untrammeled by any
weariness. Beneath us now lay the great masses of traffic, countless
swarms of swirling ships, that had fled in to Canopus from the outer
suns at the invaders' attack, and as they glimpsed our great oval craft
these swarms broke wildly from before us. They took us for a raiding
enemy ship, we knew, but down between them unheedingly we flashed,
heading low across the surface of the great planet, still at tremendous
speed.
Moments more and there loomed far ahead and beneath the colossal tower
of the Council of Suns, toward which we were heading. By then I felt
all consciousness and volition beginning to leave me, as an utter
drowsy weariness overcame me, and I realized but dimly that Korus
Kan was slanting the ship down toward the great tower, until abruptly
there came from him a sharp cry. With an effort I raised my gaze and
saw that from below, as we sped downward, three long, shining shapes
were arrowing up to meet us. They were cruisers of our own Interstellar
Patrol, and as they flashed upward there suddenly leapt from them a
half-dozen brilliant shafts of the crimson rays of death, stabbing
straight toward us!
_5. For the Federated Suns!_
Half conscious as I was, it seemed to me in that dread instant that the
whole scene about us was but a strange, set tableau, racing ships and
flashing rays frozen motionless in mid-air. Then another cry from Korus
Kan jarred me back to realization.
"The signal!" he cried. "Flash the signal of the Interstellar Patrol
before they annihilate us!"
At his cry a flash of realization crossed my darkened brain, and I
understood that the Patrol cruisers beneath had recognized our craft
as an enemy ship, that Korus Kan himself dared not leave the controls
even for an instant to flash from the signal our identity. With a last
summons of my waning strength I rose, staggered blindly across the room
toward the switch, and then, as from beneath the crimson rays flashed
blindingly toward us, grasped the switch and swept it around the dial,
flashing from our ship's nose the succession of colored lights that
proclaimed us of the Patrol. I felt myself sinking to the floor, then,
seemed to see the three uprushing ships swerving by us at the last
moment as they glimpsed the signal, and then as Korus Kan sent the
ship slanting down and over the ground to land I felt a bumping shock,
seemed to sink still deeper into the drowsy darkness, then knew no more.
How long it was that I had lain in that darkness, in a stupor of sleep
from the weariness of our hours of rushing action, I could not guess
when next I opened my eyes. I was lying upon a thick mat on a low metal
couch, in a small room lit by a flood of white sunlight that poured
through a tall opening in its side. On a similar couch beside me lay
Jhul Din, just waking like myself; and for a moment we stared about
in bewilderment. Then the sunlight, the brilliant pure white glare
of light that could never be mistaken for the light of any star but
Canopus, gave me my clue, and I remembered all--our discovery of the
approaching swarm while patrolling the galaxy's outer edge, our flight
inward and the great battle, our capture of the enemy ship and our
escape. I jumped to my feet, and as I did so Korus Kan came into the
room.
"You're awake!" he exclaimed, as his eyes fell on Jhul Din and me,
standing. "I thought you would be, by now; the Council of Suns is
waiting for us."
"The Council!" I repeated, and he nodded quickly as we strode with him
to the door.
"Yes. We've been here for many hours, Dur Nal--you and Jhul Din
sleeping--and in those hours the Council has been in almost constant
session, deliberating this invasion of our universe."
* * * * *
While he spoke we had been traversing a narrow, gleaming-walled
corridor, and now turned at right-angles into another, strode down
it and through a mighty, arched doorway, and were in the tremendous
amphitheater of the Council Hall, a room familiar to all in the galaxy,
the vast circle of its floor covered now by the thousands of seated
members. It was toward the central platform that we strode, where Serk
Haj, the present Council Chief, a great, black-winged bat-figure from
Deneb, stood before the vast assembly, behind him on the platform
the score of seated figures who were the heads of the different
departments of the galaxy's government. It was toward seats among these
that he motioned us, as we reached the platform, and as we took our
place in them I glanced about the great hall, interested in spite of
the cosmic gravity of the moment. It was with something of a leap in
my heart that I saw, among all those dissimilar thousands of strange
shapes from the galaxy's farthest stars, the single human figure of the
representative of my own little solar system. Then, as Serk Haj went on
with the address to the assembly which our entrance had interrupted, I
turned my attention to his words.
"And so," he was saying, "it is clear to you how these strange invaders
from outer space, these serpent-creatures from outside our universe,
have been able to annihilate all but a few ships of our great fleet, to
settle upon the worlds of the great Cancer cluster as a base, to set
up clear around the edge of our galaxy the watchful patrol of their
ships that our scouts report. All this they have done with a fleet of
a few thousand ships, have shattered our galaxy's defenses and sent
wild panic flaming across that galaxy; yet these few thousand ships, as
we have now learned, are but the vanguard of the countless thousands
that are soon to follow, to pour down upon us in colossal, irresistible
hordes!
"It was through the feat of Dur Nal, here, and his companions, that
we have learned this. You have heard how, after the great battle, he
and his party were able to do what never before was done in all the
annals of interstellar warfare, to board and capture an enemy ship in
mid-space and bring it back, intact, to Canopus. That ship has been
thoroughly examined by the best of the galaxy's scientists, and in its
pilot room was found a collection of metallic sheets or rolls covered
with strange characters, the written records of these serpent-invaders.
Upon those records for hours our greatest lexicologists have worked,
and finally they have been able to decipher them, and have found in
them the facts of the history and purposes of these strange invaders
from outer space.
"These invaders, as the records show, are inhabitants of one of the
distant universes of stars like our own, lying millions of light-years
from our own in the depths of infinite outer space. So far are these
mighty galaxies like our own that they appear to us but faint patches
of light in the blackness of space, yet we recognize them as universes
like ours, and have given them names of our own, calling one the
Andromeda universe, and another the Triangulum universe, and so on.
The universe of these serpent-creatures, though, although one of the
nearest to our own, has never been seen or suspected by us because it
is invisible from our distance, being not a living universe of flaming
stars like our own and the ones we see, but a darkened, dying universe.
"It is a universe in which the thronging stars have followed nature's
inexorable laws and have darkened and died, one by one, a great
universe passing into death and darkness and decay as our own and
all others, some time in the far future, will pass. For eons upon
it had dwelt the great masses of the serpent-people, thronging its
countless worlds, and as their suns began to fail them, one by one,
as their universe swept toward its final darkness and death, they
saw that it was necessary for them to migrate to another universe
unless they wished to pass also into death. So they constructed great
space-ships which were able to travel at millions of light-speeds, by
causing an ether-shift about the ship; space-ships in which it would
be possible to do what never had another done, to cross the vast gulf
between universes. Five thousand of these, when finished, they sent
out with serpent-crews and death-beam armament as an advance party
which was to locate a universe satisfactory for their races and then
attack it, gaining a foothold upon it while the rest of the countless
serpent-hordes would build a still mightier fleet of tens of thousands
of ships, which would transport all their great hordes to the universe
they meant to conquer.
"So the five thousand ships drove out from the dying universe into
the void, toward the Andromeda universe, the nearest to their own.
Down they poured upon it in swift attack, but up to meet them rose the
people of the Andromeda universe, a single race ruling all of it, whose
science and power were so great that with mighty weapons they drove
back and defeated the five thousand attacking ships, forcing them back
into outer space again. It was clear that for the present the Andromeda
universe could not be conquered, so they turned at a right angle, and
after flashing a message by some means of etheric communication to the
masses of their peoples in the dying universe, struck out through the
infinite void in a new direction, toward our own universe.
"Across the void they came, toward our universe, and rushed in upon it
after the long days of their tremendous flight through space, met and
annihilated our own great fleet at the galaxy's edge, and have settled
upon the Cancer cluster, gaining the foothold they desired. Soon from
their dying universe will come their vast main fleet with all their
hordes, and with a mighty weapon which the records mention as now being
constructed in the dying universe, a weapon to annihilate all life
on our worlds with terrific swiftness. They will come, in all their
masses, and when they have annihilated the races of the Federated Suns
and hold all our galaxy in their grasp will then sail back with renewed
power to pour down upon the Andromeda universe and conquer it also.
A cosmic plague of conquest and destruction, creeping through the
infinite void from universe to universe!"
Serk Haj was silent a moment, and all in the great room were silent, a
silence such as surely none ever experienced before. I was listening
tensely, Jhul Din and Korus Kan beside me, but no whisper broke that
stillness until the Council Chief's voice went calmly on.
"Doom creeps upon us," he said, "yet there is still one chance to stay
that doom. We know that before attacking us the serpent-creatures
attacked the Andromeda universe and were repulsed, that they plan to
return to that attack after they have conquered us. So if we could
send a messenger across the terrific void to the Andromeda universe,
to tell its peoples of the serpent-creatures' attack upon us and their
intention to invade the Andromeda universe once more, after conquering
us, there is a chance that those peoples would come to our aid, with
the powerful weapons with which they have already once repulsed the
serpent-creatures, and would help us to crush these invaders before all
their resistless hordes can pour down on our galaxy. It is a chance--a
chance only--but on that chance rests the fate of our universe!
"This chance, a chance to seek the help that may save us, has been
given to us by Dur Nal and his companions, in their capture of the
enemy ship in mid-space; for this captured ship, with its colossal
speed, can do what none of ours can do: it can cross the mighty void
that lies between us and the Andromeda universe, and carry an appeal
for help to that universe. The captured ship has been thoroughly
studied by our scientists, for we plan to build a great fleet of others
with mechanisms like it, to help in crushing these invaders whom we can
not crush alone. A special crew of picked engineers and fighters, from
various of our stars, has been selected for it, and now waits in it
for the start of this great flight through the void that they are to
make for our galaxy. The command of it, though, can go only to the one
who captured it, to Dur Nal, who was first to warn us of the oncoming
peril, and to his lieutenants, Jhul Din and Korus Kan!"
With the words we three snapped to our feet, the great assembly rising
likewise in their excitement, and now Serk Haj turned to face us.
"Dur Nal," he said, steadily, "it is not for me to exhort you and your
friends to do now your best, who have done always your best. If you
can break through the enemy's patrol around the galaxy's edge, can
cross the mighty void which never yet has any of our galaxy crossed,
and can carry to the Andromeda universe our appeal for help, it may be
that you will save us all--it may be that you will save the races and
civilizations of all the Federated Suns from conquest and annihilation
and death. To you three, who have spent your lives in the service of
the Federated Suns, I need say no other word."
We saluted, and there was a moment of death-like silence, until I
spoke. "We start at once!" I said, simply.
* * * * *
The next moment we three were striding down the broad aisle across the
mighty hall, between the thousands of members who, still in the grip
of that strange silence, watched us go, the one chance of our universe
with us. Out of the great hall we strode, and down the big corridor,
out of the great tower into the white glare of Canopus' light, and
toward the long, gleaming oval shape of our waiting ship. Inside it our
crew awaited us, a full eight score of strange, dissimilar shapes from
every quarter of the galaxy, among them the two score who had been of
my cruiser's crew and had helped capture this ship. Swiftly I gave to
them our first orders, heard the space-doors clanging as we ascended
to the pilot room, and then as Korus Kan stepped to the controls heard
the mingled throbbing and beating of the great generators beneath.
I gave a brief signal, and Korus Kan gently opened the mighty ship's
controls, its nose lifting now as it shot smoothly upward. Past us
now from beneath there rushed up two cruisers of the Patrol, speeding
up ahead of us and flashing signals that cleared swiftly from before
us the masses of swarming traffic above, that swept hastily to either
side as our long, grim ship drove up and outward. Up, up--and then we
were clear of the last of them, our escorting Patrol cruisers dropping
behind us now and turning back as with rapidly mounting speed we shot
out from the great planet and upward, mighty Canopus blazing full
behind us now, as we flashed out again from it, out with our velocity
increasing by leaps and bounds, out toward the Cancer cluster once
more, toward the galaxy's edge.
With the passing minutes our generators were throbbing faster and
faster, and we were leaping on through the galaxy at a speed that
equaled or exceeded that of our flight inward. Suns were flashing by
us on either side now, at a rate that was an index to our appalling
speed, but still we flashed on with greater and greater speed, racing
out between the thronging suns of the galaxy toward its edge, the great
ball of suns of the Cancer cluster expanding before us as we raced on
in its direction. On--on--until the mighty cluster lay full to our
right, until we were flashing past it, the blackness of outer space
stretching ahead, and in that far-flung blackness the dim little patch
of light that was the Andromeda universe. We were passing the mighty
cluster, now, heading straight out into the black abyss, and my heart
hammered with excitement as we flashed on. Could we pass the patrol of
enemy ships around the galaxy's edge without a challenge, even? Could
we--but suddenly there was a low exclamation from Korus Kan, and I
turned to see, racing up beside us at our left, a close-massed squadron
of five great oval ships!
They had glimpsed us on their space-charts, we knew, and now were
flashing beside us through space at a speed the same as our own,
drawing nearer toward us while from their white-lit pilot rooms their
serpent-pilots inspected us. A moment I held my breath, as they flashed
on at our side, peering toward us; then, apparently satisfied that our
great oval craft was but one of their own fleet, they began to drop
behind, to turn and resume their patrol. I breathed a great sigh, but
the next moment caught my breath again, for the foremost of the five
ships, as it dropped behind, had paused at our side, had veered a
little closer as though still unsatisfied. Closer it came, and closer,
until the serpent-creatures in its pilot room were clear to our eyes,
as it and the ships behind it raced on with ourselves through space.
Then suddenly from that foremost ship a signal of brilliant light
flashed to those behind it, and at once all five drove straight toward
us!
"They've seen us!" shouted Jhul Din. "They know we're not of their own
fleet!"
But as he shouted I had leapt to the order-tube, had cried into it a
swift command, and then as the five ships veered in toward us there
leapt from our vessel's sides long, swift shafts of crimson light,
the deadly red rays with which our captured ship had been equipped at
Canopus, narrow brilliant shafts that touched the two foremost of those
five racing ships and annihilated them even as they sprang toward us.
The other three were leaping on, though, their death-beams reaching
like great fingers of ghostly light through the void toward us, and I
knew that we could not hope to escape them by flight, since they were
as swift as our own craft; so in a moment I made decision, and shouted
to Korus Kan to head our ship about.
Around we swept, in one great lightning curve, and then were rushing
straight back upon the three racing ships. Into and between them we
flashed, death-beams and red rays stabbing thick through the void in
the instant that we passed them. I saw one of the great pale beams
slice down through the rear end of our ship, heard shouts from beneath
as those of our crew in that end were wiped out of existence, and then
we were past, were turning swiftly in space and flashing back outward
again, and saw that two of the three ships before us were visible only
as great crimson flares, the other ship hanging motionless for the
moment as though stunned by the destruction of its fellows.
"Four gone!" yelled Jhul Din, as we flashed toward the last of the five
ships.
That last ship, though, paused only a moment as we raced toward it,
and then suddenly flashed away into the void to the right, vanishing
instantly from sight as it raced in flight toward the Cancer cluster.
We had destroyed and routed the squadron that had challenged us, had
broken through the enemy's great patrol! Korus Kan was opening our
power-controls to the utmost, and now the throbbing and beating of the
great generators beneath was waxing into a tremendous, thrumming drone,
as we shot outward into space, the Cancer cluster falling behind us as
we flashed out at a tremendous and still steadily mounting speed.
Out--out--into the vast black vault of sheer outer space that lay
stretched before and about us now, the awful velocity of our great
craft increasing by tens of thousands, by hundreds of thousands of
light-speeds, as we shot out into the untrammeled void. Behind us the
mighty, disk-like mass of flaming stars that was our universe was
contracting in size each moment, dwindling and diminishing, but before
us there glowed out in the vast blackness misty little patches of
light, universes of suns inconceivably remote from our own. Strongest
among them glowed a single light-patch, full before us, and it was on
it that our eyes were fixed as our ship at utmost speed plunged on. It
was the Andromeda universe, and we were flashing out into the mighty
void of outer space toward it at a full ten million light-speeds, to
seek the help which alone could save our universe from doom!
6. _Into the Infinite_
Standing at the controls, his tireless metal figure erect as he gazed
out into the vast blackness of cosmic space that lay before us, Korus
Kan turned from that gaze toward me as I stepped inside the pilot room.
Silently I stepped over beside him, and silently, as was our wont, we
contemplated the great panorama before us. A stupendous vault of sheer
utter darkness it stretched about us, darkness broken only by the misty
light of the great universes of thronging suns that floated here and
there in this vast void through which we were racing. Behind us our own
galaxy lay, just another of those dim glows; for hours had passed since
we had launched out into outer space from its edge, and in those hours
our awful speed had carried us on through the void through thousands of
light-years of space.
But though in those hours of flight our own universe had dwindled to a
mere mist of light, those other misty patches that were the universes
ahead had hardly grown at all in size or intensity of light, making
us realize that even the vast expanse of space through which our ship
had already flashed was but a fraction of the gulf that lay between
us and the great Andromeda universe. Before us the soft glow that was
that universe seemed a little brighter, a little larger, but even so
I knew that more than a score of days must elapse before even our
ship's tremendous velocity would bring us to it. And even were we able
to secure the help we needed, it would still be many days before we
could flash back to our own galaxy, and in those days, I well knew, the
serpent-invaders would be completing their last plans, tightening their
grip on all the suns and worlds of the Cancer cluster, and preparing
the way for the vast hordes that soon would cross the void to pour down
on that cluster, spreading resistlessly from it across all our galaxy.
It was with heavy heart that I gazed ahead, knowing these things, but
my gloomy thoughts were suddenly interrupted by an exclamation from
Korus Kan, who had been peering intently forward into the tenebrous
void, and who now pointed ahead, toward the right.
"That flicker of light," he said: "you see it?"
I bent forward, gazing to where he was pointing in the heavens before
us, and then at last made out in the blackness, not far to the right of
the glowing Andromeda universe, another patch of light of equal size,
but one whose light was so dim as only to be seen with straining eyes.
A mere dim flicker of light it was, in that crowding darkness, but as
I gazed at it the nature of it suddenly came clearly to my mind, and I
uttered a low exclamation myself.
"The universe of the serpent-creatures!" I said. "It's the dying
universe from which they came to invade our own!"
He nodded. "Yes. It's nearer the Andromeda universe than our own, too."
I saw that he was right, and that the two universes, that of Andromeda
and this dim, dying one, lay comparatively close to each other, and
at almost equal distances from our own, the two forming the base of a
long, narrow triangle of which our own universe was the apex. Together
we gazed toward that dim flicker of light, in a thoughtful silence. We
knew, even as we gazed, what great preparations were going on in that
dying universe for the conquest of our own galaxy, what mighty efforts
the serpent-races there were making, to complete their vast fleet
and the strange, huge weapon which the records we had captured had
mentioned, so that they could flash through the void to pour down on
our galaxy. The knowledge held us wrapped in thought as our great ship
raced on, still holding to its tremendous utmost velocity, rocking and
swaying a little as it plunged through the vast ether-currents which
swirled about us here in outer space.
Gradually, as we two stood in silence with our great craft speeding
on, I became aware that during the last few minutes the air inside
the pilot room had become perceptibly warmer, and that its warmth was
still increasing. I glanced at the dial that registered the output of
our heat-generators, but it was steady at its accustomed position; yet
with each moment the warmth was increasing, until within a few minutes
more the heat about us had become decidedly uncomfortable. Korus Kan,
too, had noticed it, and had now swung backward the control of the
heat-generators; yet still the warmth increased, the heated air in the
pilot room rapidly becoming unbearable. I turned to the Antarian, fully
alarmed now, but as I did so the door snapped open and Jhul Din burst
up into the pilot room.
"What's happening to the ship?" he cried. "Its inner walls are getting
almost too hot to touch!"
In stunned surprize we gazed at each other, our heating-mechanisms
turned completely off now, yet the inside-temperature dial's arrow was
still moving steadily forward! The thing was beyond all reason, we
knew, and for an instant we stood in amazement, the heat increasing
still about us. Then suddenly Jhul Din pointed upward toward the
massed dials above the controls, his arm quivering.
"Look!" he cried. "The outside-temperature dial!"
Swiftly we raised our own eyes toward it, the dial upon which was shown
the temperature outside the ship. It should have shown absolute zero,
we knew, as always in the infinite cold of empty space. But now it did
not, and our eyes widened as we stared at it, in utter astonishment and
fear. _For it registered a temperature of thousands of degrees in the
empty void about us!_
"Heat!" I cried. "Heat in empty outer space! It's unthinkable!"
Unthinkable it was; yet, even as we stood and stared, the arrow on the
outside-temperature was still creeping steadily forward, showing a
swiftly increasing heat outside, while the air inside had become all
but unbreathable, parching to the lungs. At the same moment a faint
light began to appear about us, a dim-red glow that was intensifying
with each moment that we raced onward, and as we wheeled toward the
windows we saw, in the blackness of space before us, a great, faintly
glowing region of red light ahead, stretching across the heaven before
us. Ever stronger that crimson glow was growing as we raced on, the
heat about us mounting with it, and from beneath came the cries of fear
of our crew as they too glimpsed the awful region of heat and light
through which we now were racing.
I knew that not much longer could the heat about us increase thus
if our ship and ourselves were to survive, yet steadily the arrows
on the temperature-dials were moving forward, and as more and more
of the awful heat outside penetrated through the insulation of our
heat-resistant walls I felt my brain turning dizzily, saw big Jhul
Din stagger and sway against the wall, and saw Korus Kan, the heat
penetrating through his metal body even more than through our own,
slumping sidewise across the controls as he was overcome by it, only
half conscious. I sprang to his side, despite my own dizziness and
parching throat and lungs, grasped the controls and held our ship
straight onward, since all about us the vast glow of crimson light and
heat stretched, encircling us and beating upon us as we flashed onward.
No flame there was, nor incandescent gas, nor solid burning matter of
any kind, nothing but a titanic region of brilliant crimson light,
without visible source of any kind, glowing with terrific heat there in
the emptiness of outer space.
* * * * *
The glow about us was becoming more brilliant with each moment that we
raced on, and as the heat outside and inside increased still more I saw
Jhul Din fling open the pilot room's door in a vain search for cooler
air; heard from beneath a rumbling, ominous thumping and cracking, as
our heat-seared walls began to warp in the terrible temperature to
which they were being subjected. Far ahead in the awful region of heat
and light through which we were speeding I glimpsed now a deeper spot
of crimson light in the great red glow, and as we raced on toward it
I saw that it was the center of all the great outpouring of red light
and of heat, since it was all but blinding in its brilliance, while our
dials showed a temperature mounting each moment that we neared it.
"It's the center of the whole thing!" cried Jhul Din, staggering toward
me and then slumping down to the floor, overcome. "Keep the ship clear
of it!" he shouted, collapsing as he did so, while beside me I saw
Korus Kan, completely unconscious, neither the great crustacean Spican
nor the metal-bodied Antarian possessing my own resistance to the heat
that now was smothering us, though I too knew that not much longer
could I hold to the controls.
Hold to them I did, though, but half conscious now myself; then
as there flamed dead ahead the heart of the whole great inferno,
a blazing area of brilliant crimson light that dazzled me, its
terrific heat pouring full down upon our plunging ship, I swung the
controls sidewise, swerving our craft to the left and around the great
heat-region's fiery heart. Along its side we flashed, our ship plunging
and reeling now as it shot through ether-currents that must have been
of unparalleled size and speed, but even in that darkness that was
stealing over my senses I could see that in that hell of light and
heat to our right there was still no core of matter, nothing but light
and heat and space. Full beside us it flamed as we shot past it, our
rocking ship's sides still grating and cracking terribly beneath the
heat that beat upon them, racing past that awful glare of crimson light
and heat that was like a colossal forge at which some mighty workman
beat out flaming suns, blazing in terrific intensity and dimensions
there in the void between universes.
On we raced, while I strove with all my waning strength to hold the
ship, bucking and swaying as it was, clear of the fiery inferno to
our right, and then it was dropping behind, the brilliant crimson
light and terrible heat about us lessening a little as we shot by it.
Moments more and it had dwindled to a deeper spot of light in the great
red-glowing region to our rear, and then as we flashed still onward at
our utmost speed the last of the light and heat about us were passing;
so that a moment later, with heat-mechanisms again switched on, we were
flashing again through the cold black void as before. With the passing
of the overpowering heat the cracking of the ship's sides had ceased,
and Korus Kan and Jhul Din were staggering to their feet, consciousness
returning with the cooler air. Together we stared back, to where only a
swiftly vanishing little glow of faint red light in the darkness behind
gave evidence of the hell of heat and light through which we had just
come.
"Heat and light in the void of outer space!" I cried. "The thing's
impossible--and yet we came through it!"
Korus Kan had been gazing back with us, but now he turned at my
exclamation, shook his head. "Not impossible," he said quickly. "That
heat and that light we came through were not generated like the usual
heat and light of burning suns--they were generated in empty space
by the ether itself!" And as we stared blankly at him he quickly
explained himself. "You know that heat and light are but vibrations of
the ether of various frequencies, just as are radio-active or chemical
rays, and the electro-magnetic waves we use for speech and signaling.
Highest of all in frequency are those electro-magnetic waves; next in
order of frequency come heat waves; next the red light-vibrations,
and down the various colors of light to the lower-frequency violet
light vibrations; and below these, lowest of all, the radio-active
or chemical rays. Well, our scientists have long known that various
of these ether-vibrations have been set up in the ether of outside
space by the collision of great ether-currents. By those collisions
are formed sometimes electro-magnetic vibrations, interfering with our
speech-vibrations as static, or sometimes light-vibrations, glowing
without visible source in the heavens and known to us as the zodiacal
light. Here in the void, though, where mighty currents of size and
speed inconceivable must collide, the vibrations set up were in the
frequency-range of heat and of the lower adjoining frequency, that of
red light; so that that region we came through is one where the immense
ether-currents that we plunged through collide and set up a ceaseless
outpouring of heat and light waves there in the ether, in empty space
itself."
I shook my head. "It seems plausible," I said, "yet the reality of
it--that titanic region of awful heat and light----"
"It seems strange enough," he admitted, "but it's really no stranger
than if it had been a great region of static, or----"
A sharp cry from the Spican stabbed through our talk. "The walls!" he
shouted. "They're beginning to glow--look----!"
Startled, we swung about, and then the blood drove from my heart at the
strangeness and awfulness of what we saw; for, engrossed in our talk,
we had not noticed that all in the pilot room about us, walls and floor
and mechanism and controls, was beginning to shine out with a strange,
flickering luminosity, a misty, fluorescent light that with each moment
was waxing in intensity, a quivering, unfamiliar light that seemed to
glow from all in our ship, as it raced swaying on, though outside was
nothing but the same blackness of space as before! Even as we stared
about us, astounded, our own bodies, and especially the metal body of
Korus Kan, had begun to radiate the same lambent light, and then, with
a sudden great leap of my heart, I saw that the edges and corners of
the walls about us were smoothing and rounding a little, crumbling
and disappearing a little as though slowly disintegrating. At the
same moment a strange tingling shook through every atom of my body, a
quivering force that flooded through me with increasing intensity.
Horror-stricken we stood, until from one of the levers beside me an
inch of the handle fell off, a little piece of metal that rattled to
the floor and that was crumbling slowly, disintegrating, even as did
the lever from which it had crumbled off. Then Korus Kan was leaping
toward me, across the glowing pilot room.
"Swerve the ship's course!" he cried, wildly. "_We've run into another
great region of vibrations--radio-active vibrations that will crumble
the ship and all in it to pieces in a few more moments!_"
I grasped the shining levers, swung them sharply sidewise, sent our
craft flashing off at a broad angle to its previous course, but
still about us the glowing light waxed and deepened, and I felt an
infinite nausea overcoming me as through my body surged the floods
of radio-active vibrations from the ether about us that had caused
all matter in our ship to radiate that misty light. With each moment
the shining walls about us seemed crumbling faster, and I knew that
moments more would see the ship's end unless soon we escaped from the
great trap of disintegrating death into which we had ventured. I felt,
too, that not for long could we ourselves stand the impact of these
disintegrating vibrations, felt the tingling that shook my own glowing
flesh increasing in intensity, while all about us, now, tiny bits of
metal were falling from crumbling walls and ceiling and machinery.
Still grasping the controls, though, I held the ship to a course aslant
from our previous one, while my two companions tensed with me over
them, gazing ahead, while from beneath again came wild cries of alarm
as those of our crew, who had already run the gantlet of the enemies'
death-beams and of the great heat-region, saw the new peril that
encompassed us. There came, too, from somewhere in the ship, a great
thump and clang of metal as some one of our mechanisms there broke
loose from its crumbling base, but still we flung onward through the
void, rocking and twisting, and in a moment the terrible tenseness that
gripped us lessened a little as we saw that the glowing of the walls
about us, and of our own bodies, was beginning to wane, as we drew
out of the zone of deadly force. A few more moments of onward flight
and they had vanished altogether, and then I brought the ship back to
its course, heading once more toward the misty light-patch of the
Andromeda universe, while I drew a long breath of relief.
* * * * *
There was a silence of moments before Jhul Din, first of us, found his
voice. "Heat-regions and radio-active force regions!" he exclaimed.
"If more of them lie between us and the Andromeda universe, what's our
chance of getting there?"
Korus Kan shook his head. "We'll get there," he said, "but we'll have
to keep close watch every moment of our flight--there's no way of
telling how thickly scattered these great vibration-regions may lie in
space about us."
A moment more and Jhul Din left us, passing down into the ship's
body to ascertain what damage had been wrought by the great zone of
radio-active force, though we knew that we had escaped from it before
it could seriously damage the ship. And as I now relinquished the
controls to Korus Kan, pausing with him a moment to look out again with
some fearfulness into the black void through which we were racing, it
was with a full realization, at last, of the tremendous perils and
unguessed circumstances that might lie in the vast spaces through which
we must yet flash. Yet as my eyes fell again on the misty-glowing
circle of the Andromeda universe, and the sinister, dimly flickering
mass of the dying universe of the serpent-people, to its right, I felt
my determination steeling again within me.
It was the sight of those two far patches of light ahead, I think, that
held us all to our purpose in the hours, the days, that followed. Long,
strange days they were, when with no sun whatever near us we could
measure time only by the great abysses of space through which our ship
was steadily flashing, computing from those distances and from our
unvarying velocity the passing of the hours. But with each day, with
each hour, we were racing countless billions of miles nearer toward
the Andromeda universe, and toward the goal of our tremendous journey.
On and on we plunged, our prow turned ever toward that misty circle of
light ahead, that was largening and brightening with each hour that we
sped toward it.
Thrice, in those following days, we glimpsed great regions of heat
and crimson light like that through which we first had plunged, and
each time we were able to swerve away from them and detour around them
in time, and so escaped a renewal of our first dread experience of
them. More than once, too, our instruments gave us warning of zones
of radio-active or electrical force near us, and these we gave even a
wider berth than the heat-regions, for these we feared most of all, I
think. Ether-currents and vast ether-maelstroms were about us, too, we
knew, but the tremendous speed of our craft brought us flashing through
those where a slower-moving ship would have perished.
As it was, one danger that had menaced us always in navigation inside
the galaxy, the presence of meteors and meteor-swarms, was lacking
in our flight. Yet I think that almost we would have welcomed their
presence about us, for all their danger, if only for the knowledge that
some other matter besides our ship moved and existed in the mighty void
around us. It was our ship's isolation, the knowledge that all about
it for countless billions upon billions of miles, thousands upon tens
of thousands of light-years, there stretched only the awful regions
of empty space, an ocean of lightless space in which the galaxies of
flaring suns here and there were but tiny islands, that oppressed
us most. Far behind lay our own galaxy, and far ahead the Andromeda
universe; and between universe and universe, an infinitesimally tiny
speck there in the mighty void, our ship raced on and on.
But as we added day after measured day to our flight, as we flashed
nearer and nearer toward the Andromeda universe, it slowly began to
change before us, to wax from a little patch of glowing light to a
larger and brighter patch, and then to a great oval of light that
flamed brilliant in the blackness of space before us, and finally to a
vast disk-shaped mass of stars like our own universe. The disk mass lay
in space with edge toward us, and seen thus, the light of its countless
thronging stars was fused almost into a single waxing glow, but as we
swept nearer and nearer that glow began to resolve itself into the
light of the myriad massed suns of which it was composed. So brightly
flamed those gathering suns in the heavens before us that only with an
effort could we make out, far toward the right, the still faint glow of
the dying universe of the serpent-people, as near to us almost as that
of Andromeda, yet infinitely dim and dead in comparison with it.
* * * * *
Steadily we flashed on, day following day, until when a score of them
had passed we computed ourselves as having traversed two-thirds of
our journey, and could see that ever more swiftly the great universe
of stars ahead was widening across the heavens. On that twentieth day
I spent hours with Jhul Din in our regular inspection of the ship's
mechanism, passing with him through the long room where our engineers,
depleted in number by the death-beam that had sliced through our ship,
tended carefully the mighty generators. Then the Spican and I passed
out of the room, and were proceeding down the long corridor that led
toward the pilot room when there came suddenly from it, ahead of us, a
sharp cry.
We stopped short a moment, then raced down the corridor and burst up
into the pilot room, where Korus Kan turned swiftly from the controls
toward us.
"Ships are approaching from ahead!" he cried, pointing up toward the
big space-chart.
We looked, and saw that even as he had said there moved upon that
chart a half-hundred black dots, in close formation, creeping steadily
downward across the blank chart to meet the upward-creeping dot that
was our ship. In silent amazement we watched, as our craft raced on,
and then saw that as we neared them the fifty ships ahead were slowly
halting, and then beginning to move back toward the Andromeda universe
in the same direction as ourselves. They were allowing us to slowly
overtake them, obviously intending to race beside us at the same speed
as ourselves, toward the Andromeda universe. And as they made that move
Jhul Din uttered an exclamation.
"They must be ships from the Andromeda universe itself!" he cried.
"They've learned of our approach by space-charts of some kind--have
come out to meet us!"
My heart leapt at the thought, for if it were so it would mean the
first success of our mission across the void. Silently we watched, as
our ship's single dot on the chart raced closer and closer toward the
half-hundred dots above it, they moving now at a speed almost equal to
our own. Within moments we would be able to glimpse them, we knew, and
gazed tensely into the blackness of space ahead, toward the Andromeda
universe's flaring suns, as our craft raced on. Moments were passing,
tense moments of silence and watchfulness, and then far ahead we
glimpsed in the void, hardly to be seen against the great glow of the
Andromeda universe, a little mass of light-points that steadily were
largening as we gradually overtook them.
A full fifty of them in sight, they were flashing on in a close
formation, allowing us to overhaul them, changing from mere
light-points into dark, vaguely glimpsed shapes as we drove nearer
toward them. Then at last we had reached them, were driving in among
them as they moved now at the same speed as ourselves, could see their
shapes more clearly as long and _oval_, their front ends white-lit
transparent-walled rooms like our own. Nearer we were flashing to those
before us and about us, and then in those white-lit control rooms I
glimpsed their occupants, slender, writhing pale shapes at sight of
which I cried aloud.
"Serpent-ships!" I cried. "Serpent-ships from the dying universe
ahead! Those back in our galaxy from whom we escaped have warned them
of our coming, by the means of etheric communication their records
mentioned--they know our mission and they've come out to intercept us
here in space!"
Even as I cried out, Korus Kan's hands flashed out to the controls,
but he was an instant too late. For at that same moment the ships
just before us had turned and circled in one swift movement, and were
rushing straight back toward us. I had a flashing glimpse of their
white-lit prows racing toward us through the intense darkness, and
saw with photographic clearness the slender serpent-shapes in those
brilliantly lit pilot rooms, and then the foremost ship loomed suddenly
enormous as it flashed straight toward us. With a sharp cry Korus Kan
drove the controls sidewise to swerve our ship, but before we could
avoid the onrushing craft ahead it was upon us and with a terrific,
thunderous shock had crashed straight into our own racing ship!
7. _The Gates of a Universe_
I think now that it was only that last jerking aside of the controls
by Korus Kan that saved us from utter annihilation in that moment.
For as he moved them our ship swerved sidewise, not enough to avoid
the collision but enough to cause the onrushing ship to strike our own
obliquely along the side instead of head on, and it was that alone
that saved us. The crash shook our great craft like a leaf in a gale,
trembling and reeling there in the black gulf of space and flinging us
all to the pilot room's floor, and for a moment it seemed to us that
our ship had been riven apart. Then, as it steadied, we scrambled to
our feet, just in time to see the ship that had crashed into us reeling
away to the side, a shattered mass of metal, while down upon us from
above and all about the other serpent-ships were swooping.
As Korus Kan sprang back to the controls I leapt to the order-tube,
was on the point of shouting a command to our crew beneath, when down
from the hovering ships above us there dropped around us a dozen or
more of great flexible ropes or loops of gleaming metal, that encircled
our ship like great snares. Within another instant our craft had been
drawn upward by them until it lay securely lashed between two of the
enemy ships, our ray-tubes useless now; since to loose them was but
to perish with the ships that held us. Then another ship was slanting
down above us, and as it hung over us there projected downward from its
lower space-door toward our own upper space-door a hollow tube of metal
of the same diameter as the two space-doors, that attached itself with
a click to our own upper door, forming a hermetically sealed gangway
there between our two ships in space.
Until that moment we had stood motionless in amazement, somewhat
stunned by the suddenness of our ship's capture; then as the space-door
of our ship clanged open above I uttered a cry, sprang out into the
corridor that ran the ship's length, and saw the members of our crew
bursting into that corridor in answer to my cry, even as from the
space-door chamber beside it there writhed out a horde of scores of the
serpent-creatures! Jhul Din and Korus Kan were beside me, now, and with
shouts of fierce anger we rushed upon the masses of serpent-creatures
who still were pouring down from the ship above through the hollow
gangway.
The mêlée that followed was wilder than when we ourselves had captured
this same ship; since though we and all our crew flung ourselves
forward upon the things without hesitation, we were weaponless and
outnumbered by ten to one. As it was, I struck out with all my power at
the hideous, writhing beings, feeling some of them collapse beneath my
wild blows even as they strove to coil about me; saw Korus Kan, with
his triple powerful metal arms, crushing the life from those who leapt
upon him, cool and silent as ever even in that wild din of battle;
glimpsed the great Spican grasping those about him in his tremendous
arms and literally tearing them into fragments as we battled on. But
rapidly the members of our crew who battled about us were going down,
the life crushed from them by the coiling bodies that overwhelmed
us, and then as I strode on I too was gripped from beneath, by a
serpent-creature that had wound itself about my feet, and now pulled me
down.
[Illustration: "We were weaponless and outnumbered ten to one."]
Struggling in the grip of a half-dozen of the alien creatures, I
heard Jhul Din shouting hoarsely, saw him finally pulled from his
feet also by a great mass of the writhing things, and then Korus Kan
and the remainder of our crew were overcome too, and within another
moment all was over. Scores of the serpent-creatures lay dead about
us, but with them lay many of our own crew; not more than a bare score
were left to us now of all our party. Gripped tightly still by the
serpent-creatures, we were thrust down a narrow stair and into an empty
little storeroom beneath the pilot room, in its metal walls but a
single space-window giving a view forward. The door snapped shut as
the last of us were thrust inside, and then our captors had left us,
the lashings that had snared our ship were cast loose by the ships on
either side, and as the humming of the generators waxed loud again our
ship and those about it began to move once more through space.
"They're heading now toward the dying universe!" exclaimed Korus Kan,
gazing through the single window into the black gulf outside. "They're
going to take us there as prisoners!"
But I too, gazing through the window at his side, had seen that our
ship's prow was turning now toward the right, so that ahead now instead
of the great glowing mass of the Andromeda universe there lay the dim,
faintly glowing patch of light that was the serpent-peoples' waning
universe. Toward it now our ship and the ships about us were flashing
at greater and greater speed, and as they hummed on the despair that
had already gripped me deepened. It was not the peril in which we
ourselves lay that affected me, for well I knew that from the moment of
our capture our fate had been sealed, and that our temporary reprieve
from death meant only that some more horrible fate awaited us in the
dying universe. It was that the last chance of our own universe had
vanished with our capture, the last hope to summon from the Andromeda
universe the help that could save our galaxy gone now forever.
In a silence of utter despair I gazed ahead as our ship and those
about it hummed on, while Jhul Din and Korus Kan and all the survivors
of our crew prisoned with us maintained the same despairing silence.
There was no plan for escape, no suggestion of it, even, for well we
knew the impossibility of even winning clear of the room that was our
prison, not to speak of overcoming the hordes of serpent-creatures who
now operated our ship. In a strange apathy of spirit we sat and stood,
hour after hour, speaking little. Our eyes and minds turned only to the
window through which we could see, in the black abyss of space ahead,
the faintly glowing universe of the serpent-people broadening slowly
ahead as our ships raced on at full speed toward it.
* * * * *
A day passed, and that dying universe had grown across a full third
of the vault of space before us, a great, dim-glowing region of
flickering luminescence utterly different from the radiance of the
shining Andromeda universe, that lay now far to our left. On and on the
serpent-ships raced, unceasingly, hour upon hour, until at last on the
third day of our imprisonment their speed began to slacken, the drone
of the great generators falling a little in pitch as they drew near at
last to their galaxy, that had expanded outward now until it seemed to
fill all the heavens before us, so strange a spectacle to our eyes that
almost we forgot our own predicament and despair in contemplation of it.
Full in the heavens before us it lay, a mighty galaxy fully as large
as our own, as the Andromeda universe, but infinitely different, a
galaxy not of life but of death. In all its mighty mass were no flaming
white or blue or yellow suns like those of our own galaxy, no brilliant
young stars surrounded by circling, sun-warmed worlds. Here was only
a vast forest of dead and dying suns, stretched across the heavens,
huge throngs of dark, burned-out stars, cold and black and barren, that
crowded thick upon one another, with here and there a few dying suns
of dark, smoky red, somber crimson stars in the last stages of stellar
evolution. It was with the light of these few alone that the great
mass faintly glowed, an expiring universe in which all light and life
were sinking into darkness and death.
Silent with awe and wonder we watched as our ships drove in toward this
darkening galaxy, and then I began to make out, between us and it, a
strange, constant flicker of blue light that seemed to extend all about
the faint-glowing universe before us. Stronger that flicker was growing
as we sped on toward it, though through it there shone clearly as ever
the light of the crimson suns beyond it. At last we seemed racing
straight into it, and now I saw that it was a colossal globular shell
of flickering blue light, almost invisible, that enclosed within itself
all the mighty, circular mass of the dying universe before us. Our
ships seemed about to flash straight into it, but now turned sharply to
the left, speeding along the great light-barrier's edge. A ship beside
us, though, had turned a little too late and had struck the light-wall
while turning, and as it did so I saw it rebounding back with terrific
force as though in collision with a solid wall, its whole prow crumpled
by the impact. Then, at last, I comprehended the nature of this vast
shell of flickering blue light that enclosed the dying universe.
"It's a vibration-wall!" I cried to my companions. "A great wall of
etheric vibrations enclosing all this universe!"
For I saw now that that was the great barrier's nature. It was a
mighty shell of perpetual vibrations in the ether itself, extending
all about the universe before us, allowing light and electro-magnetic
communication waves to pass through it, unchanged, but excluding and
holding out the vibrations of matter, by meeting them, as I knew
must be the case, with a vibration of equal frequency which opposed
them, reflected them back, forming a barrier more impenetrable than
any of solid matter, yet one all but invisible, extending about all
this mighty universe, excluding from it for all time all matter from
outside. Too, as I was later to learn, the great vibration-wall was
impenetrable to the heat-vibrations, reflecting those of its dying
suns that struck it back into the universe inside. It was for this
purpose that the vast barrier had been erected, as the suns of the
serpent-people failed, to prevent the escape of any of the precious
heat-radiations of their few living suns, and also to place about all
their universe a wall impenetrable to all invaders. Set in the ether
about their universe eons before, the vibrations that made up the great
barrier were perpetual and undying, a vast wall of defense about the
serpent-universe.
We were flashing close along the mighty, flickering barrier's edge,
now, and the speed of our ships slackened swiftly as there loomed far
ahead in space two great, dark bulks starred here and there with points
of white light. Moments more and they had grown to immense size as
we neared them, and now we saw that these were mighty, square-walled
structures of gleaming metal, each a full five thousand feet in length
along each of its four sides, and half again that much in height:
two colossal metal forts that floated motionless there in space, set
directly in the great wall of flickering blue vibrations, and between
which there was a great opening in that wall, a clear space in which
was no flickering barrier, and which I divined was the single opening
in all the great wall. And flanking that opening on either side
hung the massive metal structures, upheld there in the void, as I
guessed, by mighty generators like those of our own ships, castles of
metal whose countless deadly death-beam tubes commanded the opening
between them and from whose white-lit windows the serpent-garrisons
of them gazed out upon us, great space-forts hung there at the
vibration-wall's one opening, guarding the gates of a universe!
In toward the narrow opening between the great forts swept our ships,
and as they moved slowly inward there flashed a challenging signal of
lights from those forts, answered at once by similar signals from our
ships. Then we were driving inward, between the towering metal castles
on either side, flashing in through the great vibration-wall and into
the dying galaxy itself. With generators again humming at high speed
our half-hundred ships swept on, into the thronging thousands of dead
and dying suns that swarmed before us, inside the colossal protecting
shell of the great vibration-wall.
All about us now were great hordes of swarming dark-stars that we could
but dimly glimpse, as our ships flashed between them, vast throngs of
black and burned-out suns that outnumbered the few still flaming stars
by hundreds to one. Here and there about us, though, as we swept on,
we could make out a red sun or two, some comparatively brilliant and
others so dark and far gone that they seemed only like giant cooling
embers in the black heavens. Clusters there were, too, of which all but
one or two suns would be black and dead, and as we flashed on into the
depths of this universe we began to realize at last what tremendous
necessity it had been that had sent the serpent-peoples driving out
through the limitless void in search of a new universe.
Far ahead, though, there loomed before us as we sped on a trio of giant
crimson suns more brilliant than any we had yet seen in this dying
universe, and which hung at its center, each of them as large as great
Canopus itself in our own galaxy. In a great triangle they hung there,
two of them much brighter than the other, a mighty triplet of titanic
waning suns that seemed like the dying monarchs of the vast and dying
realm about them. It was down toward these three great suns that our
ships were slanting now, down toward the space at the center of their
great triangle, and now we saw that in that space there swung a single
mighty world, a dark, immense planet of size inconceivable, almost as
large as the three great suns at whose center it turned, and whose
light and heat fell perpetually upon it.
* * * * *
Broader and broader the great turning world was growing as we slanted
down toward it, until it lay like a tremendous dark shield beneath us,
filling all the heavens below. As our ships sank still lower toward it,
speed swiftly slackening, we began to make out details on its surface,
to make out what seemed to be a vast mass of palely shining structures,
towers and walls and vast, terraced buildings that glowed all with pale
blue light, indescribably ghostly in appearance as they soared into
the dusky, crimson light of the three encircling suns. Here and there
through the masses of these blue-shining structures ran streets, narrow
openings in which swarmed great masses of the writhing serpent-people.
And as I gazed down upon this tremendous city, upon the countless
glowing structures of pale blue light that made it up, my astonishment
at what I saw broke from me in a startled cry.
"This city!" I exclaimed. "Its buildings are of vibrations like the
great wall around their universe!"
A city of vibrations! A mighty city that covered apparently all this
giant planet, and yet whose every structure was built, not of matter
but of etheric-vibrations that were matter-resistant like the great
wall, vibrations infinitely more lasting and impenetrable than any
matter, and projected upward at will into buildings of any shape or
size. Here and there in the mighty city, even as we sped down over it,
we could see buildings vanishing instantaneously, could see other
mighty buildings springing as instantly into being, all of the same
pale blue light, reared or destroyed instantly by snapping on or off
the vibrations that were projected upward to form them!
Now, as our ships slanted down over the vast mass of pale-glowing
structures that stretched from horizon to horizon, I saw that ahead and
beneath there lay amid those structures a mighty circular clearing,
scores of miles in diameter and paved smoothly with the same pale blue
force as the city's buildings and streets. In this vast circle, ranged
regularly in long rows, rested thousands upon countless thousands of
gleaming oval space-ships, in all stages of completion. Over and among
them, swarming ceaselessly through them and toiling to complete them,
moved mighty hordes of the serpent-creatures, armed with great tools
of strange design, the thunderous clamor of their work coming up to
us through the great planet's air. It was the immense workshop of
the serpent-races that lay beneath us, I knew, in which their hordes
labored ceaselessly to complete the mighty fleet that was to carry them
through the void to our universe!
It was not the ranks of half-built ships, though, nor the toiling
throngs among them, that held our gaze in the vast circular clearing
over which we were racing. It was the colossal shape that loomed at
that clearing's center and that occupied fully half the area of its
vast circle, a stupendous metal cone-structure that rose in the air
before us for fully a score of miles, the diameter of its base almost
as great, a gigantic, smooth-sided mountain of metal towering there
above the countless ships and workers in the great clearing around it,
and above the far-stretching city about that clearing. Past its side
our ships were speeding, and we could see now that about it and upon
it there labored other great masses of serpent-creatures, swarming
in and out of the heavy doors that swung open in its sides at various
levels, and laboring upon the great masses of machinery that we could
glimpse inside. Some of these, we saw, were great generators like those
of our ships, making it clear that the vast cone was intended to race
through space. Then, as Korus Kan's keen eyes peered toward and into
its interior as we flashed past, he turned toward us, startled.
"It's a colossal death-beam projector!" he exclaimed. "One that
can move through space like their ships--and that can stab forth a
death-beam of unthinkable size! With that, when they complete it, they
can wipe out all life on a whole world with a single flash of the
stupendous beam!"
Stunned, we gazed toward it as our ships flashed past. The tremendous
cone itself was apparently complete, from vast base to the truncated,
flattened tip. The generators that were to move it through space were
apparently all installed, and the great hordes of serpent-workers who
swarmed in it now were beginning to place in it the massed mechanisms
for the production of the colossal death-beam, which would be projected
up through a tremendous, hollow tube or tunnel running up from the
great cone's interior to the great, round opening at its truncated
tip. The terrific beam, generated in that interior, would flash out of
that opening at the top in whatever direction the vast cone itself was
headed in space, would flash through space with its tremendous power
for immense distances, spreading out fanwise and expanding in every
direction as it flashed on, until it struck the planet at which it
was aimed, enveloping all that planet in its ghostly glow and wiping
out instantly all life upon it! This, then, was the great weapon of
irresistible power which the captured records of the serpent-creatures
had mentioned! And irresistible it was, I saw now; for with it, when
completed, the serpent-creatures could sally forth and with one sweep
of the colossal beam destroy all fleets of space-ships opposing them by
annihilating their crews, could descend upon our universe and with that
same great beam wipe out all life upon world after world of our galaxy,
swiftly, resistlessly, until in all our universe was left no living
thing except themselves!
But now, even as we stared in horror and amazement at the vast cone,
our ships were driving past it, still over the great clearing filled
with close-ranked masses of the half-built ships, until before and
beneath us lay the mighty circle's edge. And now we saw that beyond
it, touching it, there lay another smaller circle of clear space, amid
the vast city's crowding structures of blue light, a circle from which
throngs of space-ships were constantly rising and upon which others
were descending, it being obviously one of the points of departure and
arrival for all ships. Down toward it our own ships were speeding,
slower with every moment, until at last they had landed at this smaller
circle's edge, our own closest to that edge, the pale-glowing mighty
buildings towering up just beside us.
Then the space-doors of our ships were clanging open, and their
occupants were writhing forth from them. A moment and the door of
our prison snapped open; then, herded forward by a half-dozen of
serpent-creatures armed with small death-beam tubes, we were marched
out of the ship and onto the smooth pavement of blue force that covered
this circle also. There, massed together, we were halted for a moment,
and took the opportunity to stare about. From the ships behind us,
just landed, the last of the serpent-crews had writhed forth, passing
across to a narrow street that opened through the mass of towering,
shimmering buildings before us, from the circular clearing's edge. We
ourselves were being marched toward that street, now, the great oval
ships lying empty and deserted behind us, and at sight of their open
doors I turned and twitched the arm of Jhul Din, walking beside me.
"It's a chance in a million to get away!" I whispered, to him and to
Korus Kan. "If we can overpower these guards and get back inside our
ship----"
They turned toward me, startled, and then as they glanced back toward
the deserted ships their eyes lit with excitement. A moment more and
I had whispered my plan, glancing toward the half-dozen guards behind
us, and then the next moment we put it into effect, Jhul Din suddenly
slumping to the blue-force pavement and lying motionless, sprawled as
though suddenly stricken down. It was the most primitive of ruses,
and I could only hope in that moment that our guards might not have
had experience of it. The next moment, though, they had seen the
motionless form of the big Spican, and with a natural perplexity had
writhed forward toward it, holding their beam-tubes, though, gripped
in the coils of their strange bodies, alertly toward ourselves. Beside
the big crustacean they halted, tubes trained still upon us as they
inspected him. Then the next moment the Spican had reached out his
great arms with inconceivable swiftness and suddenness, grasping the
serpent-guards beside him before they could turn their tubes down upon
him, threshing with them in sudden fierce battle as we rushed forward
to aid him.
The next moment we were all struggling there with those guards in a
wild mêlée, their deadly tubes knocked from their grasp by Jhul Din
in his leap upon them. With the strength and fury of despair we flung
ourselves upon them, rending their writhing bodies to fragments as
they sought to coil about us, our hoarse shouts rising above their
own hissing cries of fear and alarm. In but a moment, it seemed, we
were crushing the last of them beneath us, Jhul Din and one or two of
our crew leaping already toward the open door of our ship, while we
staggered up to follow. But as we did so there came from behind us
other hissing cries, and we whirled about, then stopped short. For
back from the street into which they had just gone were rushing the
serpent-crews of the ships behind us, a resistless horde that was
flashing upon us with the ghostly death-beams of their tubes stabbing
full toward us!
_8. The Hall of the Living Dead_
Racing forward as they were, the serpent-creatures rushing upon us
could only loose their death-beams at chance upon us, and it was that
alone that saved us, the deadly rays going wide except for one that
struck and annihilated two of our party in its wild whirling. Then,
before they could loose the beams again upon us, we had rushed forward
to meet them and were among them; while at the same moment I shouted
hoarsely over my shoulder to Jhul Din, who with his three followers
had reached now the open door of our ship, behind us, and who now had
hesitated for an instant as he saw our new foes rush down upon us.
"Go on, Jhul Din!" I cried. "Get away in the ship--we'll hold them till
you get clear----!"
Then we were meeting the serpent-creatures before us, and the next few
moments we seemed surrounded, weighed down, by a solid mass of writhing
bodies at which we struck crazily with the last of our strength. Even
as we struggled wildly, though, I heard above the shouts and hissing
cries about me the clang of the ship's space-doors, the swift humming
of its generators; then as I staggered clear of my opponents for a
moment I saw the great craft, with Jhul Din at the controls in its
pilot room, lifting suddenly from the clearing, slanting steeply upward
at immense speed, vanishing almost instantly in the crimson sunlight
above. I yelled with exultation at the sight, and then was pulled down
once more by my opponents, held tightly with Korus Kan and the others,
as with wild hissing cries the greater part of the serpent-creatures
rushed to their ships.
A moment more and two score of their craft were shooting sharply upward
in hot pursuit of Jhul Din and his fleeing ship. Held tightly by our
serpent-captors, we waited with them the return of the pursuing ships.
Would they catch the big Spican? Slowly the minutes dragged past,
while in the gulf of space above us, we knew, Jhul Din and his three
followers were racing, twisting, fighting against that remorseless
pursuit that would track him by the space-charts. Then at last, after
a wait that seemed eternities in length, the dark, long shapes of the
ships that had pursued him drove down from above and landed beside us,
their serpent-crews emerging, but without trace of Jhul Din or his
ship. Whether he had managed to elude them and drive out between the
great space-forts into open space and escape, or whether he had met his
end beneath their death-beams, we could not say nor guess.
I knew, though, that they would hardly have given up the pursuit
unsuccessfully so soon, and it was with doubt and fear in my heart
that I rose now in response to the motioned commands of our captors.
Guarding us now with a score or more of death-beam tubes they marched
us across the circle toward the street that opened from it, and then
down that street's length, between the mighty structures of blue force
on either side. Half-transparent as were those buildings of pale blue
light, we could see in them all the various floors and levels, as
though in buildings of blue glass, and on those levels great ranks
of half-glimpsed mechanisms tended by moving, writhing throngs of
serpent-beings. Other throngs of them moved about us in the narrow
street, from building to building, passing and repassing around us as
we marched along.
To these, though, and to the buildings about us we paid but small
attention; for at the end of the narrow street down which we were
marching there loomed a great blue-shining structure of the same
vibration as the others, but which dwarfed them by its tremendous
size. Its vast, terraced sides slanted up for level upon mighty
level, and as we neared it we saw that the street itself ended in
it, passing through the high, great doorway before us into the
shining structure's interior. In and out of it were pouring hordes
of the serpent-creatures, and into it we were marched by our guards,
through the great hall inside and on through a succession of other
corridors in which writhed serpent-throngs. Through the open doors of
the rooms along those corridors, as we passed by them, I could see
serpent-creatures grouped about low, desk-like platforms, could see
massed rows of great mechanisms that seemed tabulating or recording
machines of some sort, saw other great rooms filled with flexible metal
rolls like those we had captured with our oval ship, great collections
of written records, and realized that this huge building must hold
within itself the central controlling government of all the races of
the serpent-creatures, on this great central world and on the worlds
that revolved about the few living suns in the universe about us.
Our captors halted us, at last, before a door heavily guarded by
serpent-creatures with ray-tubes, and while one of our own guards
passed through the door into the great rooms we could glimpse inside,
the remainder kept close watch upon us. I sensed that our own fate was
being decided in those rooms beside us, and a few moments later saw
that my guess had been right, for there came out the serpent-creature
who had gone in, giving to our guards brief hissing orders. At once
they marched us onward, emerging again into the great central hall that
ran through the vast, blue-shimmering building, and progressing with us
down that great, crowded corridor, until they turned us sharply to the
right, through a big open door into a mighty hall or room, the nature
and purpose of which we could not grasp for the moment.
It was filled with great, transparent cases, ranged in long, regular
rows, extending from flickering blue-light wall to wall of the vast
hall. In those cases there were shapes and figures, rigid and unmoving,
that had apparently once been living things, and that were of a
strangeness inconceivable. In hundreds, in thousands, they were grouped
there in the protecting cases, beasts and beings all but indescribable
in appearance, so strange were they even to our eyes, which had seen
all the countless forms of life of our own galaxy. There was, in a case
near us, a vast flat thing of white flesh, disk-like and scores of feet
in diameter, with a single staring eye at its center. In another case
was a great, many-legged cylinder of flesh without discernible features
whatever. In still another, just before us, a black, powerful-looking
insect-shape that was apparently double-headed, with two sets of
black, beady eyes. All down the great hall's length stretched the rows
of cases, filled with beings of which the sight of some alone was a
creeping horror, and as we gazed at that incredible collection of alien
forms in amazement, its significance rushed upon me.
"It's a museum!" I exclaimed. "A great collection of the living forms
that have existed in this dying universe--preserved here for countless
ages, perhaps, out of the past!"
As I spoke, though, there were coming down toward us from the far end
of the great hall two serpent-creatures who seemed the custodians of
this strange collection. Our guards addressed to them a few hissing
commands, and the two turned, seemed to survey the cases about them,
while we stared in perplexity. Then one turned toward a niche inset
in the wall, in which rested two transparent containers or tubes of
liquid, one of bright red and the other of green, and a long, slender
metal needle that was apparently a hypodermic of some sort. Thrusting
the needle into the red liquid, the serpent-creature holding it
advanced to the case nearest us, which contained only the double-headed
insect-creature. He swung the side of the case open, and then, with a
swift jab, inserted the needle in the body of the thing inside.
There was a moment of silence, and then, to our amazement and horror,
the insect-thing moved, its eyes roving from side to side, its limbs
twitching. The thing was alive! The two serpent-creatures stepped
toward the case, as it came to life, holding death-beam tubes toward
it and addressing it in hissing tones. Apparently it was of some
intelligence, for in response to those orders it stepped outside the
case, down the hall toward another case which was all but filled by
other strange shapes. Into this it stepped, at the command of the
two, and then the one with the needle filled it with the green fluid,
and inserted this in turn into the thing's body. At once that body
stiffened, ceased to move, the thing becoming as rigid and unlife-like
in appearance as before, its eyes staring stonily ahead in all the
appearance of death.
Horror filled me at the sight, horror that sickened me, for I saw now
that the things about us, the countless strange shapes in these rows
of cases, were all as alive and conscious as ourselves, their life and
intelligence unharmed but their bodies thrown into a state of rigid
suspended animation by the insertion of the green fluid into them, a
fluid that must be like the poisons with which some insects are able to
keep their captured prey alive and unmoving indefinitely, a fluid that
suspended all animation instantly and that could only be neutralized
by the injection of the opposing red fluid, though always the victim
remained conscious and alive. _Alive!_ These myriad alien shapes about
us--rigid and motionless, yet living and conscious, living perhaps for
ages in that living death--my brain reeled at the thought. I turned to
Korus Kan, sick with horror, but then stopped short, stiffened. For now
the serpent-creature grasping the metal needle and the tube of green
fluid was coming toward us!
All the horror of the fate intended for us burst across my brain in one
flash of awful comprehension, then, and a strangled cry broke from me.
"They're going to keep us here too!" I cried, pointing with trembling
hand. "Keep us here as strange beings--in living death in this museum
of strange beings!"
* * * * *
A moment we stood, in horror-stricken silence, and then as the full
awfulness of the thing reserved for us penetrated the brains of
my companions they uttered a medley of hoarse shouts of rage and
horror and as one leapt forward upon the serpent-creatures with the
fluid-tubes and upon our guards.
I think that we expected no better than death in that moment, for the
death-beam tubes of the guards were full upon us, but I think too
that we all preferred a swift, clean death to the horror of living
death that awaited us in this museum of hell. But the very motive that
made us desire death prevented the guards from loosing it upon us,
preferring to follow their orders and place us in the collection about
us rather than annihilate us. For instead of loosing the rays, as we
sprang, they leapt to meet us, at the same time giving utterance to
loud, hissing cries of alarm.
Our guards outnumbered us, and though we leapt upon them with all
the energy of horror and despair, striving to wrest the death-tubes
from their grasp, they coiled about and held us, while into the great
hall from the big corridor outside there rushed in answer to their
alarm other scores of serpent-creatures, leaping likewise upon us.
Wearied as we were and outnumbered by five to one, our struggle,
though fierce, was of short duration, and then we were held completely
by the creatures about us, while toward us again came the two
serpent-creatures with the metal needle and two liquid-tubes. First
toward me they came, dipping the needle into the green liquid and then
stabbing it into my arm.
I shrank deeply as the sharp needle pierced my skin, but the next
moment ceased to shrink, as through me there ran a wave of cold, a
flood of utter iciness that held me motionless, unable to move. No
muscle of mine, down to the smallest, could I control, lying there
staring straight ahead, unmoving, unwinking, unbreathing even. My
lungs, my heart, my blood, all had stopped moving in the instant that
the poison flooded through me, yet my brain was as clear or clearer
than ever, coldly clear, as though attached to it was no body whatever.
My senses, though, still functioned, and though all power of motion had
left me I could still see and hear as clearly as ever. It was as though
my brain had been suddenly lifted from the mass of flesh that was my
body, and endowed with a strange, lifeless life of its own.
Now the guards rose from me, leaving me lying motionless and rigid,
and turned toward Korus Kan, who was being held down by others.
His metal body seemed to puzzle them for an instant, and then they
solved the problem by injecting the needle of green fluid into the
nerve-tissues at the edge of his eyes, from which it would spread
instantly to the other living organs cased by his metal body. Another
moment and he too lay like me, rigid and powerless to move, our eyes
meeting in an unchanging, stony stare. Within minutes more the green
fluid had been injected into the last of our score of followers, and we
had all become but rigid living statues, our consciousness and senses
alone unaffected. Then by the serpent-creatures we were set into the
transparent case from which the double-headed insect-thing had been
moved to make way for us, were placed in a sitting position with backs
against the case's sides, and then it was closed and the guards passed
out of the big hall, leaving in it only the two serpent-creatures who
were its custodians.
Rigid, unmoving, unbreathing, yet with consciousness, mind and senses
as clear as ever, living brains cased in bodies that were helpless and
motionless, I think that no position of any in all time could have been
more terrible than ours. Had consciousness been suspended also, with
the powers of our bodies, the captivity we suffered would have been
but a dreamless sleep, at least; but to allow our consciousness and
intelligence to remain, our bodies severed from our control--that was
a torture that surely none other could ever equal. Statue-like we sat
there, while hour followed hour, gazing always in the same direction
with unmoving and unwinking eyes. Certainly no wonder would it have
been had we gone mad in the first hours of that ghastly, terrible
imprisonment.
As the hours, the days, dragged past, though, I bent all my mental
efforts toward the keeping of my sanity, and though at times my
brain reeled beneath our terrible predicament, I desperately forced
my thoughts into other channels. From where I sat I could gaze out
into the great corridor outside the room, and that at least gave me
something moving to contemplate, as through it swept the never-ceasing
hordes of the serpent-people, a rush of activity that dwindled never
until the rising of the darkest of the three suns marked the coming
of the night, the sleep-period of the serpent-people. The light of
that darker sun was so far dimmer than that of the other two that as
this world turned between the three one-third of each day was spent
in a dusky red darkness, a strange night in which all activity in
the vast serpent-city about us seemed to cease, only our room's two
serpent-guards and some others here and there outside remaining alert,
our two room-guards being replaced at the beginning of each night by
two others who alternated with them in their duties.
It was these things alone, though, the coming of night and the changing
of our guards, the cessation and recommencement of the activity in the
corridor outside, the waning and waxing of the crimson light that fell
through the great building's flickering blue vibration-walls, that
alone marked for us the passage of time. Day was following day while
we sat on there in living death, unmoving as stones, and I knew that
with each day the great fleet of the serpent-creatures I had glimpsed
in the clearing would be approaching nearer to completion, as would
the colossal death-beam cone with which they meant to wipe out all the
races of all the galaxy's worlds. And we, on whom had rested the one
chance of our universe, had failed--we were prisoners. I could not
believe that Jhul Din, with his two or three followers, had managed to
get through the great vibration-wall about this universe and speed to
the Andromeda universe for help. Our last hope was gone, and the last
hope of our galaxy with it, prisoned as we were in the helpless flesh
of our own bodies, from which there could be no escape, lacking even
the power to destroy ourselves and end our endless torture.
* * * * *
The passing days became blurred and confused in my mind, as we sat on
there, and I felt that my brain was beginning to give at last beneath
the awful strain. Time still I could roughly measure, though, by the
waning of activity in the corridor outside, by the darkening of the
crimson light that slanted through the pale blue walls. I think that
it was on the tenth day of our imprisonment that I watched that light
darkening, as always, wondering for how many times I was to see it
thus, for how many days, years, ages, we were to lie in this living
death, in the serpent-creatures' museum. As I watched, the passing
throngs in the corridor outside were thinning, disappearing, with the
coming of the dusky night, and soon there was almost complete silence
about us, only the low hissing of the two serpent-guards, near the
room's door, as they conversed there, breaking the stillness. Then
suddenly my brooding thoughts were broken into by sharp surprize as I
glimpsed a big, stealthy shape that showed itself for a moment in the
corridor outside, and then dodged swiftly back.
With a sudden flame of excitement leaping in me for the first time
since our imprisonment, I gazed toward the door, eyes unmoving as
always. A moment more and the dark, erect shape that I had glimpsed
outside came slowly into view once more, peering around the door's edge
at the two serpent-guards, who for the moment were turned away from
it. Seeing this, the lurking shape came slowly into the room, through
the door from the shadows of the corridor, and as it did so I saw it
clearly, and well it was for me that I could not speak or surely I
would have shouted aloud. For it was Jhul Din!
A great wave of hope flooded through my brain as I saw the big Spican
move stealthily inside, a thick metal bar in his grasp, his eyes roving
about the dusky-lit great room. Then, as they fell upon our own case,
upon us sitting motionless, I saw him gasp. A moment he surveyed us, my
eyes staring stonily straight into his own as we sat still rigid and
unmoving, and then he had turned, was moving silently toward the two
unsuspecting guards. Closer he crept toward them, while I watched in an
agony of suspense, and then as he reached them, raised his great bar
above his head, the two creatures, warned by some slight sound, whirled
suddenly around and confronted him!
Instantly the death-tubes they held came up, but in the moment that
they did so Jhul Din's bar had smashed down upon them in a great,
crushing blow that laid both lifeless on the blue force-floor. Then
the Spican sprang to our case, opening its side and lifting us out,
seeking with rough restorative measures to revive us. Yet we lay as
silent and rigid as ever, and I saw despair creep into his eyes, I
could have shouted to him in my agony of mind had not my muscles been
as far-severed from my brain's control as ever. Then the Spican raised
from his fruitless efforts, gazed despairingly about, until his eyes
fell upon the niche in the wall that held the tubes of red and green
fluid. With a leap he was upon them, bringing them and the needle back
toward us.
A moment he studied them, in doubt, then inserted the needle in the
green fluid and pierced my forearm with it. I could have screamed to
him his mistake had I had power of speech, for the green fluid injected
into me had no effect upon me whatever, since I lay already beneath its
force. Seeing this he swiftly made trial of the red fluid, injecting
this in the same manner into my body, and then, as he gazed anxiously
down upon my rigid figure, I felt a sudden warmth flooding through me,
and for the first time in all those days became _aware_ of my body,
felt muscles and limbs moving in answer to my will's commands, felt
heart and breathing starting after their long cessation. Then I was
staggering up to my feet, the Spican's great arm about me, reeling
upward with muscles utterly strange and cramped after those days of
living death.
"Jhul Din!" I cried, my voice strange to my own ears after that time of
speechlessness, and he gripped my arm reassuringly.
"Steady, Dur Nal," he said. "You're out of that now, and we'll win
clear of this hellish city yet."
As he spoke he was dropping to the floor, injecting swiftly into the
bodies of the rest the red fluid, beginning with Korus Kan, and as
he did so he explained to me swiftly how he and his three followers
had managed to elude the ships that had pursued him by fleeing from
them into a near-by cluster of dead and dying suns, and pretending to
have perished by crashing into a great dark-star, landing his ship
upon its barren, burned-out surface and escaping the scrutiny of the
pursuing ships, who returned in the belief that he and his ship had met
annihilation. In that hiding-place, upon that black and airless and
lightless star, he had remained for days, not daring to venture forth
amid the swarms of serpent-ships that filled the space-lanes about
him, yet resolved to return and ascertain our fate. When at last, days
later, he had been able to venture out, back to this vast world and
down upon it through the dusky night, he had boldly landed the ship
where it would excite no suspicion, in the landing-circle from which
he had first escaped in it. Then, leaving his little crew of three
in it and stealing through the shadows of the silent streets toward
the great central building where he hoped against hope to find some
trace of us, he had made his way through the darkened corridors of the
huge structure until he had stumbled upon the strange museum of the
serpent-people where we were prisoned.
While he swiftly explained this to me Korus Kan and our followers
were staggering up beside me as the injections of red fluid revived
them, one by one, and I turned toward the door, then uttered a
horror-stricken exclamation. For in the corridor outside a single
serpent-creature faced us, attracted perhaps by the sound of our
voices, its glassy eyes full upon us! Even in the instant that I saw
it, before ever I could leap upon it, it had turned with incredible
quickness and was flashing back down the corridor, farther into the
great building, uttering as it did so a high, hissing cry. And in an
instant that cry was taken up and re-echoed in all the great structure
about us, by the roused serpent-creatures who were rushing in answer to
it!
"The alarm!" I cried. "Out of the building and to the ship!"
With lightning swiftness now Jhul Din was injecting in the last of
our followers the restorative red fluid, and then as those last ones
stumbled up into consciousness beside us, we raced toward the door,
out into the corridor. There, abruptly, we stopped short, our last
wild hopes of escape in that instant blasted. For less than a thousand
feet down the great corridor from us, pouring out into it from every
quarter of the vast building's interior in answer to the hissing cries
of alarm, there was racing down upon us a great mass of hundreds upon
hundreds of the writhing serpent-creatures!
_9. A Dash for Freedom_
Doom stared at us in that instant as the serpent-creatures rushed down
the great corridor toward us, for well we knew that never could we win
our way down the long street to our waiting ship with that pursuit
behind us. For a flashing moment as we stood there, stunned, it seemed
that recapture was inevitable, and then as a sudden thought flared
across my brain I cried out to my companions.
"Get out of the building!" I cried. "I can hold them here----!"
They hesitated, and then sprang down the corridor toward the street,
while at the same instant I leapt into the great museum-hall from which
we had just emerged. With a single bound I had grasped the needle
and tube of restorative red fluid and was at the great transparent
cases, ripping the sides open frantically and stabbing the needle with
lightning swiftness into their occupants. Those in a dozen or more
cases I had swiftly treated thus before I dropped the tube and needle
and leapt back to the door, into the corridor. As I did so I had seen
the first of the strange, terrible shapes I had touched with the needle
beginning to stir, to move from their cases.
As I sprang back out into the corridor, though, the racing masses
of the serpent-creatures were but a scant hundred feet behind me,
my own companions racing out of the building ahead of me, now. The
serpent-things loosed no rays upon us, desiring, I knew, to return us
to that hell of living death from which we had escaped, but as I sprang
down the corridor they were so close behind that another moment, I
knew, would see my capture and that of my friends ahead. Then, just
as the serpent-creatures, racing behind me, reached the door of the
museum, they halted, recoiled. For out into the corridor from that
museum-hall had flopped a great, terrible shape, the mighty disk of
pale flesh with a single central eye that my needle had been first to
revive!
Instantly it had moved upon the serpent-creatures upon whom its glaring
eye fell, and before they could escape had thrown its vast disk
of flesh about a mass of scores of them, bunching its body swiftly
together then with terrific power and crushing them within it. At
another mass of them it leapt, ravening with terrific fury after its
prisonment of untold ages of living death, while out of the museum
there came after it the other shapes I had revived, awful insect-beings
that leapt upon the serpent-creatures with terrible claws and fangs,
heedless of the death-beams that flashed toward them, many-limbed
things of flesh that whirled forward as fiercely to the attack,
grotesque, terrible monsters of a dozen different sorts that leapt
now upon the serpent-creatures who had prisoned them for ages with
inconceivable raging power, heaping about them great masses of crushed
and mangled serpent-dead.
Only in a glance over my shoulder did I glimpse that massacre of the
serpent-creatures behind me, for I was racing on down the corridor and
out of the building into the narrow street, where my friends awaited
me. With a word I explained to them what had happened, and instantly
we set off down the street, between the great, towering buildings of
beaming blue force that lay silent and dead now in the dusky darkness,
only their own flickering light and that of the vast, dim-red sun that
swung in the black heavens above lighting us forward as we raced on.
Behind, though, in the great building from which we had fled, were
rising appalling cries, the hissing utterances of the serpent-creatures
and the strange and awful cries of the things with which they battled.
Now about us were rising other cries as the serpent-creatures across
all the city began to rouse beneath the terrific din of the wild fight
in the central building. Behind us, as we raced on down the narrow
street, we saw them emerging from the buildings, gazing about, and then
as we were glimpsed, fleeing toward the landing-circle where lay the
ships, other cries went up and after us leapt the serpent-things from
all along the street, pouring into that street from its buildings and
from adjacent streets and racing after us.
But a few hundred yards ahead lay the landing-circle, and as we ran
on we could make out the gleaming, great shapes of the oval ships
lying upon it, could discern the shape of our own awaiting ship,
at the circle's edge, its door open before us. Toward that black
opening, as toward some tremendous magnet, we stumbled on with the
last of our strength, but close behind came the serpent-creatures in
ever-increasing masses, the alarm spreading now over all the gigantic
city about us, and there lay still a distance that seemed infinite
between us and that open door. Then, when we were but a scant hundred
feet from it, the serpent-creatures hardly more than that behind us,
Korus Kan slipped, stumbled and went down.
We wheeled around, reaching down to help him up, but halted even as we
did so. For the serpent-creatures behind us were within yards of us
now, hissing cries of triumph rising from them as they writhed toward
us. Then, in the next moment, from the great, looming bulk of our ship
ahead there stabbed down and over us a shaft of blinding crimson light,
a narrow, deadly ray that struck the writhing masses of our pursuers
and swept through them in a great, slicing curve, sending them into
annihilation in dazzling bursts of light as it touched them. Those
farther behind came racing on, nevertheless, but before they could
reach us we had stumbled on and into the ship, and with space-doors
clanging and generators suddenly droning loudly, our ship shot up into
the darkness just in time to escape a dozen pale death-beams that
sprang toward us from the mass of our pursuers.
Up into the darkness above the vast, blue-glowing city we flashed,
Jhul Din and Korus Kan and I bursting up into the pilot room and
replacing our follower there whose timely action had saved us. Beneath
us the whole city was rising as the alarm spread, lights flashing
out here and there among its buildings, serpent-hordes pouring into
the streets, while from the landing-circle from which we had just
risen there shot up after us a dozen long gleaming oval ships, in
close pursuit. So swiftly were they after us that before we had fully
realized their nearness, their death-beams were sweeping and slicing
through the darkness about us. I shouted a swift order, Korus Kan
whirled the controls about and sent our ship flashing straight back
into the mass of our dozen pursuers, and then we had leapt through
them, our red rays striking right and left as we did so, and two of
their great craft had flared there in the darkness above the great city
in blinding crimson light, and we were racing up into the darkness
again with the ten remaining ships farther behind, but still speeding
on our track.
Upward we shot with terrific speed, and in a moment the vast, turning
world beneath, covered with the masses of blue force-structures, had
contracted and dwindled to a mere point beneath us as we fled up and
outward into space. As we flashed up from it, though, I had glimpsed
rising from it a full five hundred serpent-ships, with a score of the
great disk attraction-ships, and as these lifted to follow the ten that
leapt close behind us, I saw that the serpent-creatures were taking
no slightest chance of our escape. I turned to Korus Kan, swiftly, as
our craft leapt upward, shouting to him above the droning roar of the
generators that filled our craft now.
"Head straight out toward the great vibration-wall--toward the opening
in it!" I cried.
"We'll never get through that opening--between the space-forts!" Jhul
Din exclaimed. "They'll have received word of our escape, and will be
waiting for us!"
I shook my head. "We'll have to run between them and take our chance!"
I yelled. "It's our one chance of escape from this universe!"
* * * * *
Now the giant central world beneath was no longer visible, as we raced
upward and outward from it at terrific speed, and ahead loomed one
of the three giant suns that lay about that world. We were leaping
forward straight toward it, and in an instant it had broadened across
the heavens to a stupendous disk of raging crimson fire, a thunderous,
titanic sun into which we seemed inevitably doomed to plunge, but as it
flared across the firmament before us Korus Kan swerved the controls,
and we were flashing by it, past the red star's edge and on outward
through the dying universe. Traveling at a speed that was all but
suicidal to use inside any universe, thrumming on at all but our utmost
velocity, we reeled outward through the throngs of dead and dying stars
about us, while behind us at a speed that matched our own our ten
pursuers came relentlessly on, with the five hundred-odd ships that we
had seen rising from the serpent-city following us in turn.
Out--out--the minutes of that mad outward flight through the dying
universe are but a confused, strange memory of a wild, awful race
through the massed dead and dying stars that thronged thick about us,
and between which we drove with such terrific swiftness that hardly
could we glimpse them in passing save on our space-chart. On that
chart I saw a close-massed cluster of dark suns full before us, saw
the Antarian swing the ship lightning-like sidewise to avoid it, then
sharply drive the controls back again as before us a crimson-flaming
star about which turned countless worlds of the serpent-people
loomed before us. Out--out--flashing crazily on past crimson sun and
thundering dark-star, through the massed suns of great dead and dying
clusters and past far-swinging planets, with the ten long ships behind
clinging remorselessly to us--out--out--until far ahead there became
visible across all the heavens before us the wavering pale blue tight
of the great vibration-wall that encircled this universe.
Out between the last of the dying universe's dark and dying suns we
were racing, toward that mighty wall, and as we leapt forward I pointed
toward it. "The space-forts!" I exclaimed. "Make for the opening
between them, Korus Kan--and slacken speed a little!"
Straight toward the two great metal structures set in the pale
blue-shining wall we leapt, two huge fortresses of gleaming metal
from whose narrow openings came brilliant white light, whose mighty
death-beam tubes swung threateningly out toward the space between
them, the single vibrationless opening in the vast and impenetrable
vibration-wall. They had been warned, were ready for us, we knew, and
knew too that not even by a miracle could our ship run between those
towering forts without coming under the deadly beams, yet still toward
them we leapt, at a speed slackened a little, now, while after us like
leaping things of prey came the ten ships, rapidly overhauling us,
flashing closer each moment.
We had almost reached the great opening in the wall, now, the ten
ships behind almost upon us, and as we flashed through space the whole
scene was like one from some weird dream--the thronging dark and
dying suns of the great universe behind us, the tremendous, all but
invisible, pale blue wall of light that enclosed it, the single opening
in that wall full before us, guarded on either side by the mighty
metal space-forts, the great ships leaping after us just behind. We
were flashing into the narrow opening--from the great space-forts to
right and left the deadly death-beams were stabbing out toward us in
scores, in hundreds--the ships behind were almost upon us, their own
death-beams stabbing toward us--and then I cried a single word to Korus
Kan. He thrust the controls suddenly forward with a lightning-like
move, and just as our ship was flashing into the narrow opening it
dipped sharply downward instead and plummeted down through space while
the ships just behind, before they could dip with us, had rushed into
the opening and into the hell of death-beams that crossed and recrossed
in it from the space-forts on each side!
The next instant, while we curved swiftly upward again, we saw the ten
ships that had rushed into that opening whirling blindly about as the
death-beams from their own space-forts seared through them and wiped
out all life inside them. Those in the great space-forts, realizing
those ten to be their own ships, had turned off the beams in the next
moment but were an instant too late, since in the narrow opening the
ten ships were whirling crazily to that side and this, without guiding
intelligence inside them, smashing into each other and into the
space-forts on each side as they rushed insanely in all directions. And
even as that wild confusion inside the opening was at its height our
own ship had curved up and was flashing at full speed into the opening,
between the space-forts!
For an instant, in that wild chaos of whirling ships, those in the
space-forts did not glimpse our own flying ship and in that instant we
were half through the great opening between them. Then they had seen
us, had loosed their beams upon us in scores, and in the next instant
all about us seemed a single tremendous mêlée of aimlessly whirling
ships, and gigantic space-forts, and pale death-beams that sliced and
swept about us. Thick about us flashed those ghostly fingers of death,
and full before us two of the whirling ships collided and smashed with
terrific force, then Korus Kan had dodged them by a swift shifting of
the controls, our generators roared suddenly louder as he turned on our
utmost speed, and the crazy chaos of ships and beams and forts about us
had suddenly vanished, replaced by darkness and silence unutterable.
We were _through_, were racing out into the void again with the great
vibration-wall and the dying universe it enclosed and the pursuing
serpent-ships inside it dropping farther behind each moment! In the
blackness that encircled us the dying universe was a far-flung,
dwindling glow behind us, and our own a far patch of misty light to
the left, but there shone in the darkness far ahead a misty disk of
radiant light, and it was toward this that our ship was heading. For we
were flashing out again upon our interrupted mission, were flying out
through the awful gulf of outer space once more toward the Andromeda
universe!
_10. Flight and Pursuit_
"Through the vibration-wall!" I cried, as our ship raced out at
utmost speed. "Out of the serpent-universe--and we may yet get to the
Andromeda universe in time!"
The eyes of Jhul Din and Korus Kan were as aflame with excitement as my
own, at that moment, and from beneath came the triumphant shouts of our
followers. There remained of the latter hardly more than a bare score,
I knew--few enough to handle the great ship, but the control and
operation of it were so simple that by standing alternate watches we
could hold our course through space. Briefly I explained this to Korus
Kan, he nodding assent, when from Jhul Din there came a cry that caused
both of us to spin around toward him in swift alarm. The big Spican's
eyes were fixed upon the space-chart above, and as we turned he raised
an arm toward it.
"The five hundred serpent-ships!" he cried. "They've come out through
the great wall too--_they're after us_!"
The blood in my veins seemed to chill with sudden renewal of our former
tenseness and terror, as on the space-chart we saw, racing out after
us from the dying universe, the five hundred-odd serpent-ships that
had risen from the giant central world to pursue us, and that now,
undeterred by the fate of the ten ships we had lured to destruction,
were speeding out into the great void after us. Moments they had been
delayed, apparently, by the confusion and chaos there in the opening
between the space-forts, but though in those moments we had flashed
far ahead their close-massed ships came on after us at their topmost
speed--a great pursuit that they were carrying out into the void
between the universes!
"They'll pursue us to the bitter end!" I exclaimed, my eyes on the
chart. "They'll go to any length rather than let us get to the
Andromeda universe!"
I wheeled about, my eyes seeking our speed-dials. Already we were
traveling through the void at our own highest velocity, a full ten
million light-speeds, but the shining mass of the Andromeda universe
seemed infinitely distant in the blackness ahead, with that swift,
relentless pursuit behind us. A moment more and Jhul Din strode out
of the pilot room down to the great, throbbing generators beneath,
striving to gain from them a fraction more of speed. For now was
beginning, we knew, the most bitter of all chases, a stern chase with
vast abysses of space lying between us and the universe that was our
goal, and with the five hundred flying craft of the serpent-creatures
close behind.
On--on--moment after moment, hour after dragging hour, our ship hummed
through the awful void, flashing with each moment through countless
millions of miles of the infinity of blackness and emptiness that lay
about us, with the half-thousand ships of the serpent-creatures coming
grimly on behind. The far-flung, dim-glowing dying universe behind us
glowed even dimmer, diminishing in extent, too, as we shot onward,
while before us the shining disk-mass of the Andromeda universe shone
ever more brightly; yet it was with a terrifying slowness that that
disk largened as we flashed toward it. Tensely I stood with Korus
Kan in the pilot room, gazing toward it, and even then could not but
reflect upon what a strange spectacle it would all have presented to
any observer who could have seen it: a spectacle of one mighty ship
pursued by a half-thousand, as it raced through the void from one
universe to another, manned by a score of dissimilar beings drawn from
the stars of still a third universe, and carrying with them its fate.
But it was with dark enough thoughts, as our ship flashed on for hour
upon hour, that I myself contemplated the three universes that lay
before and behind and beside us. Before us the Andromeda universe was
shining in ever-increasing size and brilliance with each hour that we
raced toward it; but what, I wondered, would we find in that universe
even were we able to escape the swift and terrible pursuit behind? Was
there any chance of finding in it, in the race that held sway over
its suns and worlds, the help that could save our galaxy? Was it not
possible that even were we able to reach it we would be treated by that
race as merely other strangers and invaders from an alien universe?
My eyes swung, too, toward the far little glow of light in the
blackness to our left, a patch of misty light that seemed very tiny in
the stupendous blackness and emptiness of space that lay about it. Yet
my mind's eye, leaping out across the terrific abysses that separated
us from it, could see that little light-patch as it was, could make out
the throngs of blazing stars that formed it--our galaxy, the giant suns
and smaller stars and thronging, far-swinging worlds through which we
had roamed with the ships of the Interstellar Patrol. And I could see
it as it would be now, convulsed with panic fear, as from their great
base of the Cancer cluster the vanguard of the serpent-invaders spread
terror and destruction out over the neighboring suns, preparing the
way for the mighty host of invaders that was to follow.
But it was when I turned, glancing back to where the dying universe
of the serpent-people glowed dim and ominous behind us, decreasing
steadily in size as we flashed from it, that my mood was darkest. In
that mighty mass of dead and dying suns, I knew, there on the giant
world that turned between that central triplet of great, dying suns,
the serpent-races were completing their plans, were preparing to launch
themselves across the void toward my own universe. Already their vast
fleet of tens of thousands of ships was all but complete, and soon
would be completed, too, that gigantic death-beam projector whose awful
power no force could ever withstand. Our only chance of preventing the
descent of that vast horde and their terrible weapon upon our galaxy
was to reach the Andromeda universe and procure there, somehow, the
aid with which we might return and crush the serpent-people in their
own dying universe. And had we a chance even to reach the Andromeda
universe, with the half-thousand craft of our serpent-pursuers driving
relentlessly on our track?
* * * * *
In the hours that followed, it was as though all else had ceased to
exist, so centered were our minds upon that remorseless pursuit. On and
on we flashed, our throbbing, beating generators flinging us through
the void with their utmost power, but behind came the serpent-ships at
their topmost speed, too, and though for forty-eight hours we had raced
through space we had covered hardly a third of the distance to the
Andromeda universe. As I raised my eyes to the space-chart then, toward
our single ship-dot and the swarm of dots behind it, a sharp, cold
thrill ran through me. For now I saw that the gap of a few inches that
separated us from them on the chart had lessened a little, the swarm
drawing noticeably closer toward our single ship-dot. A moment I stared
up at the chart in stunned silence; then, with realization, a cry broke
from me.
"_The serpent-ships!_" I cried. "_They're overtaking us!_"
My cry brought Jhul Din back up into the pilot room, and standing
together with eyes riveted upon the space-chart we saw clearly that
with every moment, slowly but steadily, the serpent-ships behind were
drawing nearer, though we were moving at our utmost speed. Our ship,
battered and worn by its tremendous flight through the void from
universe to universe, and by the space-fights it had come through, was
a fraction slower than the new ships of our pursuers, and that fraction
of difference in speed, we saw, was bringing them closer upon us with
each passing minute. Yet there was a chance still, we knew, to gain the
Andromeda universe before they overtook us; so still at utmost velocity
we flashed on, toward the shining universe ahead.
On--on--the hours that followed, while we drove through the awful
void with the serpent-ships behind closing slowly and inexorably in
upon us, live in my memory only as a strange period of ceaseless,
rushing flight, with our eyes always upon the space-chart and upon
the brilliant disk-mass of light ahead. Twice we flashed through the
outskirts of great heat-regions glowing there in the void, and once
past the edge of one of the deadly areas of radio-active vibrations,
but ever after passing them our ship swung back toward the universe
ahead. That universe, as we hummed on hour upon hour, was changing
from a glowing disk of light into a great mass of individual points of
light, into a gigantic mass of stars that loomed in greater radiant
splendor before us with each passing hour. Green and red and yellow and
blue suns we could glimpse among its thronging thousands, and others
still white-hot with youth, shining with ever greater brilliance as we
drove through the void toward them.
Before us the great universe lay in all its true gigantic glory, when
we had covered two-thirds of the distance to it, but by that time our
eyes were not upon it at all, but upon the space-chart and the black
void behind us; since in the intervening hours the serpent-ships had
crept ever closer toward us, their swarm on the space-chart less than
an inch behind our racing ship-dot. Even that little gap, in the hours
that followed, was lessening, closing, while we three in the pilot room
watched it in tense silence. At last, with the blazing mass of suns of
the Andromeda universe stretched across the heavens but a dozen hours
ahead, we saw that the serpent-swarm on the chart was all but touching
our single ship-dot, saw that the end at last was at hand.
"They'll overhaul us in less than an hour!" exclaimed Jhul Din. "We'll
never even reach the Andromeda universe!"
To his outburst we made no answer, gazing in silence up at the big
space-chart, watching doom creep upon us. The serpent-swarm had crept
still farther upon us until its foremost dots seemed touching our own
ship-dot, its foremost racing craft in reach of our own. Then, gazing
through the rear distance-windows that projected from the pilot room's
sides, the big Spican uttered a low exclamation, pointing mutely
backward as we turned toward him. And as we gazed we saw, far behind us
there in the lightless void, a swarm of close-massed light-points that
steadily was largening, was drawing nearer toward us, toward our doom.
For it was the end, I knew. We had escaped death in a hundred forms in
the last days, but this we could not escape, for with the Andromeda
universe still hours away our chance of escape was gone. Dodge and
turn as we might, they would corner us, would hem us in; and though we
might destroy one or two of their half-thousand ships, by no miracle
could we hope to escape the rest. For a moment a deathly silence held
us as we stared back toward those nearing light-points, and then I
whirled around to the order-tube.
"Battle-positions--all of the crew to the ray-tubes!" I shouted, and as
I turned back to the other two I cried to them, "We'll let some of them
feel our rays before they end us!"
I heard Jhul Din shout his approval, saw Korus Kan's eyes burning as he
glanced back toward our pursuers, heard from beneath the cries of our
crew as they took up their positions at the ray-tubes, ready to smite a
last blow at our enemies before they overwhelmed us. Behind us in the
blackness the onrushing serpent-ships had grown from light-points to
great dark oval shapes with white-lit pilot rooms at their noses, the
score of great disk attraction-ships racing on among them. Ever closer
they were leaping, and I knew that in a moment more those disk-ships
would be near enough to grasp us, would glow with attractive force and
hold us helpless while the death-beams of the fighting-ships swept us.
But as we tensely waited for the end, still flashing on at our own full
speed, there was a sharp cry from Korus Kan, and we wheeled toward him
to find him regarding the pilot room's walls with eyes suddenly alight
with new hope.
"It's another radio-active vibration region!" he cried, pointing
toward the walls and controls that were beginning to flicker out with
the strange, fluorescent light we had always dreaded. "If we plunge
straight into it there's a chance we can shake off the pursuit!"
I caught my breath at the suggestion but in an instant saw that he
was right, that though we might meet death amid the disintegrating
vibrations, we might perhaps escape and throw off our pursuers, from
whom death was certain as things were.
"It's a chance!" I exclaimed. "Head straight into the radio-active
region, Korus Kan!"
He glanced swiftly at the instruments before him, swerved our
racing ship a little to the right, and then walls and floor and
mechanisms about us were glowing with ever-waxing misty light as we
drove in toward the great region's heart. I felt the same tingling
force flooding through me that I had already once experienced, as
our flying ship raced on, again swaying and spinning as it flashed
through the mighty ether-currents whose meeting and collision formed
the great region of vibrations about us, though outside was only the
same blackness as before. With every moment, though, our ship, our
mechanisms, our own bodies, were glowing with waxing light, while in
the darkness behind I saw that the great swarm of ships racing after
us was itself aglow now with light, as it, too, rushed into the great
radio-active region after us. And still, with a courage that matched
our own desperation, they were speeding after and closer to us,
undeterred even by the crumbling death that flooded space all about
them and us now.
Glowing ship and glowing bodies, force that rapidly was overcoming us
with a dizzy nausea and that was crumbling the walls and machinery
about us, the gathered suns of the Andromeda universe far ahead and
the glowing half-thousand pursuing ships just behind--all these were
but a mad chaos in our minds as we reeled on, farther and farther into
the mighty radio-active region. I heard even above the roaring of our
generators a clatter of falling metal somewhere toward the ship's rear,
while even about us the walls and all else were crumbling, like sugar
in water, glowing and disintegrating, as our whole ship was beginning
to break up. Now, too, as the great swarm of ships behind raced ever
closer a score or more of their number had drawn level with us, on our
right, attaining that position by slanting in to cut us off when we had
swerved in toward the radio-active region. And as pursued and pursuers
raced on, all glowing and disintegrating alike, that score of ships to
our right was pressing ever closer toward us.
Nearer they came, and then from their glowing ships toward our own
stabbed the pale death-beams, sweeping about us as we flashed on, a
shining mark. As they did so, though, our own red shafts burned out
swiftly, two of those attacking ships flaring to nothingness beneath
them, while with a swift turn to the left Korus Kan had avoided the
pale beams. That turn, though, took us now every moment outward once
more from the radio-active region's center, forcing us out once more
into clear space where the serpent-ships could annihilate us without
danger to themselves. Out and out we flashed, and though our ship
and all in it still glowed with the fluorescent light, that glow was
waning, and the clang of falling metal from beneath, from the ship's
disintegrating sides had ceased. Out--out--the score of ships to our
right joining with the greater mass behind us again, and all drawing
closer toward us, until the tingling nausea that had filled us had
vanished, the glowing light of our ships and theirs vanishing likewise.
Then, in one great mass, they were leaping again upon us.
Our lives at last within their grasp, they flashed after us and toward
us, and I knew that an instant more would see them about us, their
death-beams striking at us from all around as they encircled us. I
gazed ahead for a moment, to where the giant universe of Andromeda
stretched like a great rampart of burning suns across the black, cold
heavens, still hours away from us, and then gazed back to where the
close-massed hundreds of serpent-ships leapt after and upon us, the
death-beam tubes in their sides already swinging toward us. Then in
me, at that instant of onrushing doom, there flamed up a strange,
wild rage, a fierce, utter fury that had grown in me during all the
struggles and flights that had been ours since first we had met these
serpent-creatures. I wheeled around to Jhul Din and Korus Kan, my anger
breaking from me in a fiery shout.
"Turn the ship square around and halt, Korus Kan!" I cried. "We of the
Interstellar Patrol are not going to be picked off as we run--we're
going to turn and face them head-on!"
Korus Kan's eyes flamed at my cry, his hands moved swiftly on the
controls, and then our ship had curved suddenly about and had slowed
and stopped, swinging around and hanging motionless in space, facing
our enemies. Even as we had curved and stopped, they too had swiftly
halted, as though suspicious for the moment of some trap, and hung
before us in the black gulf of space, facing us. Then there was an
instant of utter stillness and silence, as there in the void we faced
them, our ship motionless in space, we three in the pilot room gazing
toward their own great swarm of ships hanging motionless before us;
the mighty Andromeda universe flaming in the heavens behind us, now,
and the far, dim glow of the dying serpent-universe in the blackness
ahead, and the misty little circle of light that was our own galaxy
away to the right; all these lay about us in a silence that was the
silence of doom. For a single moment the great tableau held, and then,
disdaining to use their attraction-ships upon us now, the great swarm
of serpent-ships leapt as one toward us, their hundreds of death-beams
stabbing toward us!
But as they did so, as they sprang upon us there in space, there
leapt from above and _behind_ us a mighty swarm of other ships--long,
slender, flat, gleaming ships entirely different from the oval-shaped
serpent-craft, or even from the cigar-like ships of our own
galaxy--long, flat ships like none we had ever seen before, that
flashed down over and past us straight upon the serpent-fleet! From
the sides of these strange new ships there projected thick, squat
cylinders that were pointed now toward the serpent-ships before us,
and though no ray or beam could be seen issuing from those cylinders,
the serpent-ships at which they were aimed were crumpling, were
contracting and folding up into shapeless masses of crumpled metal, as
though crushed in the grasp of a giant hand! And as that mighty swarm
of strange, flat ships flashed down upon the serpent-fleet that reeled
back and recoiled from its terrific blows, I heard a wild cry from
Korus Kan, as he and Jhul Din stared out with me.
"Strange ships attacking our pursuers!" he cried. "They're ships
that have come out from the Andromeda universe to save us from the
serpent-creatures' pursuit!"
_11. Into the Andromeda Universe_
As the mighty swarm of Andromeda ships from behind us drove down upon
the half-thousand serpent-craft ahead, I could only stare for a moment
in stupefied surprize, so stunning had been our sudden transition from
death to deliverance. I saw the long, flat craft of the Andromedans,
a full thousand in number, flashing down on the serpent-ships in one
great swoop, saw the latter, in groups, in dozens, in scores, crumpling
and constricting as the deadly cylinders of the Andromedan ships were
turned toward them. Within an instant, it seemed, a full two hundred of
the half-thousand serpent-ships had crumpled and whirled away beneath
the terrible, invisible force of the cylinders, though death-beams
were raging out thickly all about the swooping Andromedan ships. Then,
with almost half their fleet wiped out, the remaining three hundred
serpent-ships, including their score of great disk-attraction-ships,
had whirled around and were racing back into space toward their own
dying universe, fleeing from the terrific blows of the attacking ships
that had come out from the Andromeda universe ahead, just in time to
save us.
Now, as the serpent-fleet flashed from sight, into the void toward its
own universe, the thousand Andromedan ships massed swiftly and moved
toward our own, that hung still motionless there in the gulf of space.
In tense silence we watched them come, hoping that they might not set
us down, too, as enemies because of our serpent-ship, but they turned
none of their deadly cylinders toward us. Those cylinders, as I was
later to learn, were in reality projectors that shot forth a shaft of
invisible force, one that caused the ether about any ship it struck to
compress about that ship instantly with terrific force, compressing
thus into small compass the ether-vibrations that were the matter of
the ship, and thus crumpling that matter itself, in an instant. It
was a weapon fully as terrible as the crimson destruction-rays of
our galaxy's ships or the pale death-beams of the serpent-creatures,
a shaft of crumpling force that we knew could destroy us instantly.
Instead of loosing it upon us, though, they slanted down until one of
their foremost ships was hanging just above our own.
We guessed then that they meant to enter our ship, and in a moment our
guess was confirmed as the long, flat ship hovering above sank downward
until its lower surface was lying along the upper surface of our own
oval craft, the two touching. Then we heard a section of the underside
of the ship above sliding back, and a moment later, at my order, one of
our crew slid open our own upper space-door. The openings in the two
ships, in the upper side of ours and the lower side of theirs, were
thus together, pressed so closely by the weight of the upper ship as
it pressed down upon us that it formed a hermetically sealed opening
connecting the two. Then, down through that opening from the ship
above, down into the corridor of our ship and toward our pilot room,
there came a half-dozen of the Andromedans from the ship above us, a
half-dozen of the people of the Andromeda universe.
I do not know what weird and alien shapes we had expected to see in
these beings of a different universe, but I do know that never had
our imaginations envisaged creatures of so utterly strange a nature
as these that came toward us now. For they were _gaseous_! Tall
columns of misty green gas, that held always to the same pillar-like
outline, as unchanging of form as though of solid flesh, and that were
gliding along the corridor toward us! Upright, unchanging columns of
green, opaque vapor, from near the top of whose six feet of height
there branched out on each side a smaller arm of the same thick green
gas, arms that they moved at will, and in which some of them held
instruments and weapons! Tall, erect columns of thick, green vapor,
without features of any kind that we could see, that yet were living,
intelligent and powerful beings like ourselves! Their bodies, their two
arms, their very organs and features and senses formed of gas, just as
our bodies are solid, and that of a jellyfish liquid!
Down the corridor they came toward us, gliding smoothly forward,
halting just before us and surveying us, I knew, by whatever strange
sense of sight was within their gaseous bodies. Dumbly we stared
toward them, for the first time now wholly appreciating the immense
difference between us and them; then, at a loss for another gesture,
I held out my hand toward the foremost of them. Instantly his own arm
came out toward me, gripped my hand with a grip as solid as though that
arm had been of flesh instead of gas, a grasp that though cold was real
and tangible. When the one before me had withdrawn his grasp, then I
spoke aloud to him, but there came no reply. Instead the Andromedan
extended toward me, in the grasp of his other arm, a small globe of
what seemed misty glass, a few inches in diameter and mounted upon a
little metal base. As he held it, though, pressing a tiny button in
the base, the misty globe suddenly glowed with light, and then in it I
could see figures moving, as though in some tiny cinema-screen.
The scene in it was that of a great, gleaming-walled room, utterly
strange in appearance, with a mass of shining, unfamiliar apparatus
grouped about it, among which moved a dozen or more Andromedans like
those before me, upright columns of green gas gliding to and fro,
inspecting and tending the different mechanisms. Then all of them
grouped about a single one, a vast tube that I sensed was a great
telescope, which pointed out into the blackness of space, and down from
which there fell upon a broad white surface a swift-moving picture,
one of a single oval space-ship rushing through the void, with Korus
Kan, Jhul Din and myself visible in its white-lit pilot room, while
not far behind it there raced in pursuit of it a great swarm of
serpent-manned ships. Then the Andromedans grouped about that great
telescope were seen moving swiftly over to an apparatus at the room's
center, apparently one of communication; and the next moment the whole
scene had vanished, and was replaced by one of a thousand long, flat
ships--Andromedan ships--slanting swiftly upward from a great world and
into space. Then that, too, had clicked off; there was a flashing scene
of those same thousand ships leaping upon our pursuers as they had
done but a moment before; then all light in the little instrument had
vanished as the Andromedan before me snapped off its control button.
* * * * *
A moment we remained in silence, puzzled, until Korus Kan broke the
stillness with an exclamation. "It's a communication instrument, Dur
Nal," he exclaimed, "one that shows in visible pictures the thoughts
of whoever it is connected to--it's their method of communication with
each other, apparently."
I nodded now, with sudden understanding. "Then that's the way that they
discovered our peril--came to save us!" I said. "That's what they're
telling us!"
But now the Andromedan had held the little instrument forward to
me, and as I took it, in some perplexity, he silently indicated two
little round metal plates inset on its bottom, which he had grasped
when holding the thing and which I now grasped in turn, pressing
the tiny control button as I did so. The next instant a current of
thrilling force seemed racing up my arms, through my brain, and in
the little glowing sphere appeared only a confusion of vague forms.
Then, as my brain cleared, I concentrated my thoughts on our mission
and its reason; and at once, in the instrument's glowing sphere,
there appeared clearly the five thousand serpent-ships attacking our
universe, destroying our fleet by means of their death-beams and
attraction-ships, settling upon the worlds and suns of the Cancer
cluster. Then, with the shifting of my thoughts, there was a glimpse
of our ship flashing out into the void from our own universe toward
that of the Andromeda and then the little sphere had gone black as I
snapped off the button that controlled it.
For the moment we could not know whether we had been fully understood
by the beings before us, but the next instant one of them pointed with
a gaseous limb toward the gathered suns of the Andromeda universe,
flaring in the blackness ahead, and as we nodded and pointed also,
they stepped over beside us. The next moment the opening in the under
side of the ship above and the space-door in our own ship had clanged
shut, and as the whole great fleet of ships about us began to move
toward the Andromeda universe, Korus Kan opened up the power of our own
generators, moving smoothly along among them. Within moments more, the
strange, gaseous forms of the Andromedans standing there beside us,
our ship and all those about it were flashing at full speed toward the
great galaxy ahead.
From the ship's hull beneath I could hear an odd, grating sound, as of
the clash of metal on metal, that continued to come to my ears as we
flashed on, but in the moments, the hours that followed, I paid but
small attention to it, engrossed as we all were in the magnificent
spectacle of the universe ahead. Like a tremendous belt of suns across
the black heavens it was, largening in vastness and brilliance with
every moment that we flashed nearer, until by the time we had raced
toward it for a half-score of hours it seemed to fill all the firmament
before us with its hosts of flaming stars. We were flashing on in the
same course as the ships about us, heading toward a spot where there
shone two great yellow suns that were like twin wardens of this mighty
universe. And as we hummed through the void toward them, sweeping in
nearer to this great galaxy's edge, the ships about us and our own
ship, too, had begun to slacken their tremendous speed, until at last
at a reduced velocity we were driving in past the outmost suns of the
Andromeda universe.
The dull grating sound from beneath was persisting, still, but now
interest in all else had left me as there spread before and about me
the wonders of this stupendous universe. A universe it was as large as
our own, as large as the dying serpent-universe, but different from
either. For if ours was a young universe, with the majority of our
stars glowing with blue and white-hot youth, and the serpent-universe
an aged and dying one, with burned-out and waning crimson suns, this
one before us was a universe in its prime--a universe the vast majority
of whose suns were flaming yellow with their greatest splendor, a
golden galaxy of living stars infinitely different from the dim, dying
universe from which we had just escaped, and infinitely different,
too, from the giant, white young suns and raw, vast nebulæ of our own
youthful universe.
As we sped in between those gathered, flaming suns, though, as we drove
in past the edge of their great mass, my eyes began to take in their
position and arrangement, and as they did so I saw that not alone in
age or youthfulness was this universe different from any other I had
seen. For as we flashed into the thronging suns, past a great group
of them massed to our right, I saw that the suns of that group were
gathered in a great circle, a score of mighty flaming suns, each set in
position with mathematical exactness, forming a perfect circle as they
hung here in space, one of the two great yellow suns I had glimpsed
from afar having a place in that circle. And inside that mighty circle
of suns I glimpsed a vast mass of swarming planets--hundreds, thousands
even, of great, turning worlds that moved in regular orbits inside the
great ring of suns about them, lit and warmed perpetually by their
encircling fires.
Stupefied, stunned, by that tremendous sight, I did not, could not, for
the moment understand the significance of what I was seeing. But as we
flashed on past the great circle and its swarming enclosed planets,
as we approached another close group of suns, I saw that it, too, was
formed of a score or more of great suns grouped in a perfect circle
like the first, and that inside that circle of suns there swung also
hundreds and thousands of whirling worlds! And beyond it shone another
mighty ring of suns, and another, and others, as far as the eye could
reach, all the suns in all this tremendous universe being grouped by
the score into great circles inside of which swung countless planets!
And then, at last, there broke upon my reeling brain the meaning of
what I was seeing.
"Suns in circles!" I cried, as I gazed out across that mighty vista.
"They've done this themselves--consciously, deliberately! They've
placed all the suns of their universe in great circle-groups, so that
inside those circles their countless peoples can exist!"
For I saw, now, that it was so, that only by intelligent design could
the countless swarms of thronging suns about us ever have been placed
in these mathematically perfect circles, inside which their great
planets swung. Long ago their universe must have been much like our
own, a great chaos of suns reeling blindly in all directions, swarming
like a vast hive of stars, each with its own few planets moving about
it. But as their numbers had increased, as they had come to need every
world, every planet for their existence, they had grasped their suns
with titanic, unguessable forces, had swung them from their accustomed
chaos into order, into great circles, placing inside those circles all
their countless worlds--worlds of which thousands could then exist
upon the light and heat of a mere score of suns by having those suns
grouped in a ring about them.
Now, driving in past great circle after circle of flaming suns, past
the countless planets that moved inside those circles, we were flashing
on with the ships about us toward the center of this strange and
mighty universe. On our space-chart I could see that thick about us
were great masses of interstellar traffic, which cleared away before
us as we drove inward. Circle after circle of fiery suns we were
leaving behind, mass upon mass of swarming planets inside, but never
on our space-charts showed any wandering dark-stars, or meteor-swarms,
or vagabond, sunless worlds, all matter in this universe apparently
having been swept up by the Andromedans and used as habitations for
their races, inside the great sun-circles. A gigantic mass of perfectly
grouped stars they stretched about us, those sun-circles, filling
the heavens about us; but now, far ahead, there shone out ever more
brilliant at the center of this great universe another great circle of
suns, that seemed the largest in all this universe. A score of titanic,
flaming stars, they hung there at this galaxy's center, and it was
toward these that our racing ships were heading.
Toward them we gazed with intense interest as our ships fled on,
but suddenly were startled back to realization of our immediate
surroundings by a great rumbling and grating from beneath, our ship
swaying to one side and heeling sickeningly over, even as it flashed
ahead. In sudden tense silence we stood, listening to that rumbling and
cracking beneath, and then up from the speech-tube beside me there came
a startled cry from one of our crew below.
"The ship's splitting!" he cried. "The walls have been grating
and giving ever since we ran through that radio-active
disintegrating-region--and now the ship's beginning to break in two!"
There was an instant of silence in the pilot room, the only sound
that fearful grating rumble from beneath as gradually the ship's
walls, weakened and crumbled by the disintegrating vibrations of the
radio-active region through which we had plunged, began at last to
split. A moment more, we knew, would see our ship riven apart there
in space, with instant annihilation the fate of all of us. Silent,
stunned, for a moment we stood there, the Andromedans beside us
comprehending the situation as well as ourselves; then I whirled around
to Korus Kan, flung my arm up toward the great central sun-circle that
lay now full ahead, nearest of all the sun-groups to our onward-racing
ships.
"Full speed!" I cried to him. "There's a chance still that we can get
to those suns and worlds before the ship breaks up!"
With that cry the Antarian flung open the power-control, and instantly
our ship, rumbling and groaning still as its walls gave about us,
plunged on at utmost speed. I knew that we had perhaps a chance in a
thousand to reach the worlds inside that sun-circle before our craft
broke beneath our feet, but it was our only chance, and as we reeled
on now with the generators roaring their greatest power, and with a
thunderous, cracking roar rising from beneath also as our walls parted,
it was with the consciousness that the next few moments would seal our
fate. The great fleet of Andromedan ships about us had leapt forward
with us, were behind and about us, but for the moment all our attention
was centered upon the great circle of suns ahead, largening before us
swiftly as with one last great burst of speed our ship shot through the
void toward it.
Our ship swayed blindly over, now, even as it reeled on through space,
another great crash of riven metal coming to our ears from beneath,
the floor slanting steeply up beneath us. Flung against the wall as
we were, though, Korus Kan clung still to the controls, heading our
swaying flying ship straight on toward the sun-circle, until in a
moment more we had reached that circle, were slanting downward at the
same terrific speed above that great ring of mighty suns. Inside that
vast circle there moved a mighty swarm of thronging worlds, as in the
other sun-circles, but at the very center of this vast swarm of planets
there hung motionless a single gigantic planet, largest by far of
all in this universe, a huge central world down toward which our own
crazily swaying ship and the ships about us were slanting!
Down--down--there was a sudden rush of air about our ship as we shot
toward the surface of the great planet, and I had a flashing glimpse of
that surface, scores of miles beneath, through our window--a smooth,
park-like surface swarming with hordes of the gaseous Andromedans
and with ascending and descending ships, a surface in which I seemed
to glimpse innumerable round, well-like openings, but upon which I
could see no buildings. Abruptly, though, even as I glanced downward,
there came a tremendous final cracking from our ship's center, each
end tipped sharply down from that center as the crumbling craft broke
cleanly in half, and then the two wrecked halves of it were whirling
down toward the surface of the great world far below!
_12. The Council Decides_
Of the moment following, while we rushed thus down to death, flung
into a corner of the pilot room by the ship's splitting, I remember
most clearly the rush of cold air that shrieked through our falling
half. Had our ship broken in empty space instead of in the air of that
great world's atmosphere, we would have met instant annihilation;
since even the gaseous Andromedans, as I was later to find, could not
live save in air, like ourselves, their gaseous bodies disintegrating
in any other element. For the moment, though, as we flashed down
toward the surface of the world beneath, it seemed that death for
us had been delayed but a moment. We were whirled crazily around as
our wrecked half of the ship fell, and through the window I had a
glimpse of the ground beneath, rushing up to meet us with appalling
speed. I tensed for the crash, and for death, as it leapt up toward
us--nearer--nearer----
There was a hoarse cry from Jhul Din, and I glimpsed in the next
instant a dark, great shape that swooped down past and beneath us from
above. The next instant, just as I waited for the annihilating impact
with the ground, there was a slight jar, a clang of metal against
metal from beneath, and then swiftly, miraculously, our wild fall was
slackening. In another moment the ground was just beneath us, and
smoothly and slowly we sank downward, coming to rest upon it without a
jar! I staggered up to the window, gazing forth, stunned by that sudden
escape from inescapable annihilation, and then saw the explanation of
it. Our half of the wrecked ship was resting upon the back of one of
the great, flat Andromedan ships, that had flashed down under it and
caught it upon itself, bearing us down to the ground and saving us from
the crash and from death!
A moment more and we were stumbling out of the pilot room, down to the
ground from the Andromedan ship on which we rested. As we reached it I
saw that the other falling half of our ship had been saved in the same
way by another Andromedan craft, lying close beside us on that craft
with the members of our crew in it pouring out to join us. Another
instant and they stood with us, a vast mass of the gliding, gaseous
Andromedans that swarmed on this world's surface having collected
about us, a strange, silent horde that I knew were contemplating us
with their alien sense of sight. Quickly toward us, though, came the
half-dozen Andromedans who had been with us in the ship and had escaped
with us, leading us now through the throngs of gaseous figures about us
toward some destination of their own.
As we moved along with them, though, our interest was not so much in
our destination as in the stupendous and unparalleled scene about
us. Far away to the distant horizons stretched the smooth surface of
this great world, covered with an even growth of jet-black sod that
gave it an extraordinarily park-like appearance, with here and there
tall, spiked growths or plants of the same ebon black. That blackness,
as I guessed, was due to the perpetual, fierce light of the great
ring of suns that belted the firmament overhead, the circle of suns
at whose center this mighty planet hung, and whose ceaseless light
would naturally give to this world's vegetation a pigmentation of
deepest black. The belt of giant suns above, the countless swarms of
Andromedans about us, like gliding pillars of misty green gas, the
ebon vegetation, the masses of mighty ships that rose and descended
ceaselessly in the broad areas set aside for them--all these held us
silent with the silence of awe, as with our guides we moved on.
It was none of these things, though, wonderful as they were, that
intrigued me most of all about us--it was the total absence of
buildings, of visible structures or habitations, on all the surface of
this world. The smooth black sod, the countless Andromedan throngs, the
departing and arriving ships--these were all that were visible about
us, all except a great number of round, well-like shafts that opened in
the ground everywhere about us. These shafts were some six feet across,
and were placed always in pairs, or groups of two, and as I gave them
more attention I saw, in a moment, that they held the answer to the
absence of all buildings about us. For into them and out of them the
gaseous Andromedans were moving in ceaseless streams, moving straight
into one empty shaft and sinking smoothly downward out of sight, upheld
by some force at the shaft's bottom beneath that nullified gravity
just enough to make it possible for them to float gently down. From
the other shaft of the pair, too, other Andromedans would be rising
smoothly upward through the air, reaching the surface and gliding
away, that other ascending shaft having at its bottom a constant force
sufficient not only to nullify completely the pull of gravity but to
give all in the shaft a slight upward thrust.
Into these shafts, as we moved past them, I glanced down, and saw
that far beneath they opened into brilliant-lit rooms and halls, some
of great size. I understood, then, how they had come to be used, how
the Andromedans, their vast hordes cramped upon the surface of their
worlds, had removed all buildings from the surface and had sunk them
deep in the ground itself, subterranean buildings that could be entered
or left by the ascending and descending shafts, and that gave them all
the surface of their worlds free for their ships and to move about on.
In and out of the great buildings sunken in the ground beneath us were
moving constant streams of Andromedans, up and down the shafts; and now
we saw that before us lay a pair of such shafts much greater in size
than all others we had seen, and the center of a great rush of traffic
of the gaseous beings about us. It was toward these greater shafts that
our Andromedan companions were leading us, the figures before us giving
way as we approached.
A moment more and we stood at the edge of the descending shaft, the
Andromedans beside us motioning toward it and moving over its edge,
sinking smoothly downward. Hesitatingly I followed, stepped from the
edge into the empty air of the shaft; but the next moment my fear left
me, for instead of plunging down a dead weight, I and my companions
who had followed me were sinking downward as gently as though gripped
and upheld by unseen hands. Down we floated, through the great shaft
bright-lit by the belted suns above, down until we were sinking down
out of the shaft itself into a vast, white-lit hall that stretched
away for a great distance in all directions from us, and down from the
center of whose ceiling, where the two great shafts opened from above,
we were sinking.
* * * * *
Smoothly we sank downward from the great hall's ceiling to its floor,
landing upon a great disk inset in that floor beneath the descending
shaft and glowing with dark purple light, the glowing force that
combatted gravitation enough in the shaft above it to allow us to float
gently down. For the moment, though, I paid not so much attention to
it as to the strange, vast hall in which we now stood. Colossal in
size and circular of shape, the mighty, white-lit room was as large or
larger even than the great Council Hall of the Federated Suns, in our
own universe, though it was far different in appearance. There were
in it no ranks of seats, the smooth floor being divided by crossing
black lines into thousands of squares of equal size, and in each of
those squares there rested, motionless, one of the gaseous Andromedans,
thousands upon thousands of them, like massed columns of thick green
vapor, being grouped in the great room about us.
We stood ourselves on a section of the floor at the room's very center,
raised a few feet above the rest of the floor, and except for the two
purple-glowing disks beneath the ascension and descension shafts the
only object upon this raised portion was a great globe of what seemed
misty glass, exactly like the tiny one with which the Andromedans had
first communicated with us, but of vastly greater size, being some
dozen feet in diameter. Toward this, as we hesitated there at the
center of that gigantic assemblage of strange, silent figures, there
moved the leader of the Andromedans who had accompanied us. He grasped
with his two gaseous arms the metal studs that projected out from the
great globe's base, and at once the misty sphere glowed with inward
light, while in it appeared the thousand Andromedan ships, flashing out
into the void, rescuing us from the serpent-fleet, and bringing us back
into their own universe, a swift succession of explanatory scenes.
This explanation completed, the Andromedan moved back from the great
sphere and motioned me toward it. Slowly I stepped forward, sensing
the gaze of the massed, silent thousands on me. I knew that it was the
supreme moment of our mission, the moment for which we had battled
our way through three universes, the chance to obtain from this great
council of the Andromedans the help that might save our universe. I
glanced back to the anxious faces of my friends, drew a long breath,
and then grasped the two studs before me, concentrating all my thoughts
on what I wished to express, as the big sphere above glowed with inward
light again, the thrilling current from it rushing into my brain.
In the glowing globe now appeared our universe, a great galaxy of stars
floating in space like their own. Swiftly, with shifting thoughts,
I showed them its throngs of peopled worlds, the traffic that swept
between its suns, the ordered life of its teeming, dissimilar races.
Then as my thoughts shifted again they saw the first five thousand
serpent-ships rushing in upon that galaxy, destroying all our fleet
and settling upon the suns and worlds of the Cancer cluster, saw us
fleeing inward and then turning to capture one of the serpent-ships
by boarding it in mid-space. Then, briefly, the globe flashed forth
the interior of our own great Council Hall, with our Council Chief
exhibiting and explaining the records of the serpent-people which we
had captured in their ship. In a swift flash I explained the meaning of
those records, a flash that showed the serpent-people, masters of the
suns and worlds of our own universe, sailing out with increased powers
to attack the Andromeda universe, and as that flashing scene showed
in the great globe I saw a silent stir of excitement run through the
massed thousands about me.
In another moment, though, the globe's scene had shifted back to the
Council Hall, with ourselves receiving our orders from the Council
Chief, entering our captured serpent-ship and slanting up and outward,
bursting past the patrolling serpent-ships, through the void of outer
space, only to be captured by the other serpent-ships that had come out
to meet us. Our flight then to the serpent-universe, our glimpse of the
vast serpent-fleet being built, and the colossal death-beam cone, and
the escape of Jhul Din appeared in swift succession. Then came our own
strange captivity, our rescue by Jhul Din and escape outward from the
serpent-universe through the great space-forts, and our pursuit and
final rescue by the thousand Andromedan ships. Then, as our final plea,
I showed the vast hordes of serpent-ships and their irresistible mighty
death-beam cone sailing out from the dying universe toward our own,
rushing upon our galaxy and wiping out all its races. The great globe
then went dark, as I released my hold upon its studs and stepped back
from it. Our mission was ended, and its success or failure lay in the
hands of the massed Andromedans about us.
There was a moment of stillness, a moment in which, I knew, the fate
of our universe and of all in it was being decided, a moment in which
the silence of the mighty hall seemed thunderous to our strained
nerves. Then I saw each of the thousands of Andromedans in the hall
reach down toward two smaller metal studs that projected from the
floor before each, and as the great globe beside me glowed again with
light, I sensed quickly that upon it would be registered the decision
of the majority of the great council about me, the method used by them
in reaching and registering a decision. Tensely we watched the great
glowing globe, and then in it appeared another scene.
It was a scene of countless ships, gleaming flat Andromedan ships,
gathering from all the suns and worlds of their universe, upon the
giant central world where we were now, tens of thousands of great ships
that rose from that world, slanting up and outward. Among them were
a hundred ships quite different from the rest, great hemispheres of
gleaming metal that rose as smoothly and swiftly as the rest, domed
side uppermost; and as though in explanation there flashed in the globe
a swift picture of those same hundred domed craft hanging above great
suns in the Andromeda universe, projecting down beside and around
them great walls and sheaths of the dark-purple glowing force that
neutralized gravity, so that those suns, screened from the pull of
the suns on their right by a great wall of that glowing purple force,
would move away to the left in answer to the pull of the suns there,
or vice versa. These, I realized swiftly, were the great sun-swinging
ships by means of which the Andromedans had placed their suns in
ordered circles, and now in the globe with all the tens of thousands
of ordinary flat Andromedan ships they were flashing out into space.
Then came a brief scene of the whole vast Andromedan fleet flashing
down out of space upon the dying universe, bursting through the
opening in the great blue-force wall around it and attacking all the
serpent-creatures' suns and worlds!
The next instant the globe had gone dark again, but I knew now what
the decision of the council was, and I whirled around to my friends
with excitement flaming up in me. "They're going to help us!" I cried.
"They're going to mass all their great fleet and with it and their
sun-swinging ships sail to attack the serpent-universe!"
I can not remember now the moments that followed that momentous
decision, so overwhelming to us then was the consciousness that we had
succeeded in our mission, had dared the awful void and the perils of
three universes and had procured the help that might save our galaxy.
I remember being led by our Andromedan guides into and through other
rooms off the great hall; of the thousands of gaseous figures of the
council crowding up the shaft toward the surface above, to speed to
every quarter of their universe and summon all their fighting-ships; of
Jhul Din noisy with exultation and Korus Kan quiet as ever, but with
gleaming eyes. Then all about me seemed dissolving and darkening as
the utter fatigue of our strenuous last hours overcame me, a fatigue
through which only my knowledge of our mission's importance had so far
borne me, and beneath which now I sank into dreamless sleep.
* * * * *
When I awoke I sensed that hours had passed, though Jhul Din and our
followers lay still unconscious about me. Leaving them there, I strode
out of the room and into the great Council Hall, whose stupendous
circle lay empty now and bare, seeming immeasurably more vast in its
white-lit emptiness than when filled with the thousands of gaseous
Andromedans. I moved across it to the raised section at the center,
stepped upon the purple-glowing disk beneath the ascending shaft, and
then, thrust upward by the force of that disk, was moving smoothly
toward the round opening in that ceiling and on up the shaft until
I had burst out into the unceasing light of the belt of suns above,
stepping sidewise onto the ground as I did so. And now I saw that Korus
Kan, not a dozen feet away, had turned and was coming toward me.
"Their ships are gathering, Dur Nal!" he exclaimed, eyes alight.
"You've slept for nearly a day, there below, and their ships have been
coming in those hours from every sun and world in their universe!"
I swept my gaze about, a certain awe filling me as I saw now the
tremendous forces that had gathered and were gathering here on the
surface of this giant central world. A tremendous circular area of
miles in diameter around us, around the shafts that led down to the
hall of the council, had been cleared of all else and was now a single
vast gathering-point for the thousands of ships that were massing
here. Even while we gazed, the air above was being darkened by the
swarms of those ships that shot ceaselessly downward, landing in this
great circular area, drawing up in regular rows and masses. In tens of
thousands they were grouped about us, a tremendous plain of gleaming
metal ships that stretched as far as the eye could reach.
At the center of this vast plain of ships, though, there lay a round
clearing, in which we ourselves stood, a clearing in which there rested
only a hundred other ships, different far from the thousands around
them, a hundred domed, gleaming craft like giant hemispheres of metal.
Not a thousand feet from us lay these great, strange craft, their
space-doors open and their Andromedan crews busy among the masses of
strange mechanisms inside, and I recognized them instantly as the great
craft I had seen in the thought-pictures in the Council Hall below, the
mighty ships whose projected sheaths and walls of dark-purple force
could move giant suns at will.
"The sun-swinging ships!" I exclaimed, and Korus Kan nodded, his eyes
upon them also.
"Yes," he said, "they'll be the most powerful weapons of the whole
great fleet--with them we can crash the suns and worlds of the
serpent-universe together at will."
Now, though, we turned our attention from them to the tens of thousands
of ships that lay about us. In and out of those ships, too, were moving
countless masses of Andromedans, swift-gliding gaseous figures who were
inspecting and testing the mechanisms of their craft and the cylinders
in their sides that shot forth the crumpling shafts of force. They were
making all ready for our start, we knew, for the battle that must ensue
when we poured down on the serpent-universe, and we strode over toward
them. Already we had learned that the controls and mechanisms of the
Andromedan ships were much like those of the serpent-ships, their speed
being fully as great, but some features of them were still strange to
me. A dozen steps only we took toward them, though, and then stopped
short.
For down out of the sunlight above was slanting toward us a
close-massed swarm of ships that seemed different from the masses of
ships that were landing ceaselessly about us, that moved more slowly,
more deliberately. Down it came while we watched it, standing there,
seeing it change from a far swarm of black dots in the sunlight above
to a mass of long dark shapes, that were becoming clearer to our eyes
each moment--shapes that, I saw with a sudden great leap of my heart,
were not long and flat, but oval!
"_They're serpent-ships!_" Korus Kan's great cry stabbed like a
sword-blade of sound toward me. "They're the serpent-ships that pursued
us to this universe--the three hundred that escaped when we were
rescued--they've seen this great fleet gathering and have come to
strike a blow at it!"
Serpent-ships! My mind was racing with superhuman speed in that instant
as they drove down toward us, and I saw that the Antarian was right,
that these were the three hundred that had escaped when we were rescued
by the Andromedans, and that we thought had fled back to their own
universe. Instead they had turned and followed us, knowing that we
meant to gather forces to attack their universe, had flashed into the
Andromeda universe toward this central world, unseen among the swarms
of other ships that were gathering here, and now were swooping down
with their score of great disk attraction-ships lowermost, driving down
toward us in a fierce, reckless attack! In a single instant it all
flashed plain in my mind, and then Korus Kan and I had whirled around,
and he was racing back toward the hundred domed sun-swinging ships
behind us.
"I'll warn these hundred ships!" he yelled, as I turned too and raced
toward the nearest of the thousands of fighting-ships about us.
Even as I ran toward those thousands of ships, though, their Andromedan
crews still unaware of their peril, I saw the massed serpent-ships
above slanting straight down toward the hundred domed craft behind
me, their attraction-ships hanging motionless above those craft for a
moment. I had reached the Andromedan fighting-ships, now, and as the
crews of the nearest glided forth to meet me I cried out, pointing
upward. They saw the serpent-ships swooping down from above, and then
were throwing themselves into their own ships. I raced into one with
them, up to the pilot room set near the stem on its long flat upper
surface. The Andromedans beside me flung back the controls, then, and
our ship and the ships about us were leaping up like light toward the
down-rushing serpent-ships.
At the same moment I saw Korus Kan racing into one of the domed
sun-swinging ships above which hovered the score of attraction-ships,
saw the doors of those domed ships clanging shut as they prepared to
escape from the menace above, since they could project their mighty
purple force downward only, and would thus be helpless if caught in
the attraction-grip of the disk-ships above. A moment more and those
hundred domed craft, the most powerful weapon of the great Andromedan
fleet, would be safe, I knew. But in that moment, as the three hundred
serpent fighting-ships dashed down toward us, I saw the score of
hovering attraction-ships glow suddenly with flickering light; the
hundred sun-swinging ships beneath were pulled smoothly upward by that
tremendous attractive force; and then the attraction-ships, grasping
the hundred domed craft that were the heart of our fleet, were racing
straight up and outward into space!
_13. The Sailing of the Fleet_
As that score of glowing disk-ships, with our own hundred sun-swinging
craft in their grip, flashed up and out of sight, our fighting-ships
were flashing upward with the three hundred fighting-ships of the
serpent-creatures racing down to meet us. Then, before we could swerve
aside from their mad downward charge to pursue the attraction-ships,
they had met us, and in all the world about us there was nothing for
the moment but crashing and striking ships. Even as they had flashed
down upon us, and we up to meet them, the invisible shafts of force
from our cylinders had stabbed up and crossed their downward-reaching
death-beams, so that scores of their own ships had crumpled and
collapsed in the instant before we met them, scores of ours in turn
driving crazily forward and sidewise as the pale beams wiped all life
from them in that same moment. As we met them, though, it seemed that
our ships and theirs were all to perish alike in crashes in mid-air,
without further need of weapons, so terrific was the impact.
All about us in that moment I glimpsed ships smashing squarely into
down-rushing serpent-ships, while our own craft spun and whirled as
racing ships grazed along its sides. Then, hanging in the air there
a scant mile above the ground, we whirled and grappled with the
serpent-craft in a fierce, wild struggle. Their whole aim, we knew,
was to keep us occupied long enough to permit the escape of their
attraction-ships with our own sun-swinging craft in their grasp, while
our object, in turn, was to brush aside these serpent-ships before us
and race in pursuit of the attraction-ships. Charge and struggle as we
might, though, in the moments following we could not break loose from
the fury of the serpent-creatures' attack, who drove toward us with
death-beams whirling in all the mad recklessness of despair.
I saw Andromedan ships all about us driving aimlessly away as those
pale beams struck them, saw others destroyed by serpent-ships that
crashed deliberately into them, and then pouring up from beneath came
the masses of the great fleet beneath, thousands of ships that raced
up and around the struggling serpent-ships, crumpling and destroying
them with countless invisible shafts of force from their cylinders.
Within another moment the last of the enemy craft had vanished, but by
that time our own ship and a half-thousand others were flashing up in
pursuit of the attraction-ships.
Up, up we raced--up until the giant world was but a tiny ball beneath,
hanging at the center of the great ring of suns--but then we stopped,
and hung motionless. For we were, we saw, too late. About us there
stretched only the far-reaching circles of flaming suns that made up
the Andromeda universe, with no sign of the attraction-ships or their
prey. In those moments that the struggling serpent-craft had held us
back, the attraction-ships had flashed out from this universe into the
boundless gulf of space, with the hundred sun-swinging craft in their
grasp, with Korus Kan himself in one of those ships. On none of our
space-charts were they visible, safe from our pursuit out in the void,
and we knew that somewhere in that void our sun-swinging craft and all
in them were meeting their end, held in the relentless grasp of the
attraction-ships and destroyed by them, since the sun-swinging craft
could project their own terrific forces only downward. We were too
late. Silently, slowly, we slanted back down toward the great central
world.
As we came to rest there, among the tens of thousands of other gathered
ships, I saw Jhul Din and our followers, aroused from beneath by the
battle, running forward to meet me. I saw him glance about as he came
toward me, inquiry in his glance, and then I shook my head.
"We've lost the most powerful weapon of the whole Andromedan fleet," I
told him, slowly. "And we've lost, too, Korus Kan."
I think that in the hours that followed, while the last thousands of
ships swept in from all quarters of the Andromeda universe to gather
around us, it was the loss of our friend that lay heavier on the minds
of both myself and the Spican than that of the hundred sun-swinging
ships. Those hundred ships, we knew, would have enabled us to wreck all
the serpent-universe, whereas now we must meet them ship to ship, and
trust to courage and fighting-power alone to win for us. Yet even their
loss seemed small to us beside that of the friend with whom we two had
roved all the ways of our galaxy in the cruisers of the Interstellar
Patrol, with whom we had dared across the void and through the
serpent-universe and its perils, toward this Andromeda universe.
Silent, though, we remained, watching the thousands of long, flat ships
massing about us, and it was still in silence that I received from the
Andromedan leaders the knowledge that I had been chosen to command
their vast fleet in its great attack, since I was familiar with the
serpent-universe which we were to attack.
* * * * *
A half-dozen hours after the raid of the serpent-ships, the last of the
Andromedan craft had sped in from the farthest suns of their universe,
and a full hundred thousand mighty ships covered the surface of the
great world as far as the eye could reach, gleaming there beneath the
light of the belted suns above. Long, grim and ready they waited,
their gaseous Andromedan crews alert at the controls, while before us
lay in the central clearing our own long, flat flag-ship. In it, too,
the Andromedan crew stood ready, the scant score of my own strange
followers among them, its space-door open and waiting for our start.
Standing beside it, though, Jhul Din and I paused; then I turned back
to where the score or more of Andromedans that were their leaders, the
chiefs of their great council, stood.
Tall, steady figures of strange, thick green gas they stood there,
regarding me, I knew. They had gathered all their forces to save a
universe alien to themselves, to crush the serpent-peoples, and had
placed all those forces under the command of myself, an alien to them.
The greatness of their spirit, the calm, vast magnanimity of them,
struck home to me in that moment, and impulsively I reached a hand out
toward them once more, felt it grasped and gripped as though by solid
flesh by a score of gaseous arms; a moment in which, across all the
differences of mind and shape, the beings of two universes gripped
hands in kinship of spirit. Then I had turned from them, and with Jhul
Din was moving into our great ship, up to the pilot room, where the
Spican took his position at the controls. The space-door below slammed
shut, our generators throbbed suddenly, and then we were slanting
smoothly upward.
Before me stood a tall, square instrument bearing a bank of black
keys--keys that transmitted to the ships of our vast fleet my formation
and speed orders, as I pressed them. I pressed one now, as we shot
upward, glimpsed a long rank of ships on the ground behind and beneath
us rising smoothly after us in answer, pressed another and saw another
rank rising and following, until within a few moments more the whole
of the vast fleet, a hundred thousand gleaming ships, had risen and
was driving up and outward, with our flag-ship in the van. Up we
moved, until we were slanting up over the ring of mighty suns that
encircled the great central worlds and the swarms of smaller planets,
that central world vanishing behind us as we flashed on, and the great
circle of suns about it, and the suns beside us, all dropping smoothly
behind.
Out between those great circles of suns we moved, our great fleet in
a long, streaming line to avoid all danger of collisions with the
suns and worlds about us. I saw the Andromedans in the pilot room
with me standing motionless by its windows as we flashed on past the
circled suns and swarming worlds of their universe, knew that they were
watching those suns and worlds drop behind as they moved out to the
great struggle that would decide the fate of their universe as well
as of my own. Then at last we were racing out between the last great
circles of suns, out over the edge of the Andromeda universe into the
blackness and emptiness of outer space once more.
Now as the great darkness of the void lay before us, I pressed the
keys before me in swift succession, and at once the thousands of
ships behind me leapt into a new formation, that of a colossal
hollow pyramid that flashed through space with my flag-ship at its
apex. Faster and faster our great fleet shot out into the void, the
tremendous mass of ships behind me uniformly increasing their speed,
until at last at our utmost velocity we were racing on toward the
faint, wraith-like glow of the serpent-universe ahead.
Outward, into the darkness and silence of the eternal void, we were
flashing once more, but as I stood with Jhul Din there in the pilot
room, watching the great Andromeda universe dwindling in the darkness
behind us, no exultation filled me. We had done what none in our galaxy
ever before had done, had crossed the gulf and procured the aid with
which we were racing to crush our enemies before they could pour down
upon us, but my thoughts were not on these things but on the friends we
were leaving behind us. Somewhere out in the void from that Andromeda
universe, Korus Kan had gone to his death with the sun-swinging ships,
and as we sped on through the void toward the serpent-universe it was
the thought of that that held our minds rather than that of the great
battle before us.
Hour upon hour of swift flight was dropping behind us as we raced
steadily and smoothly on, detouring far around the great heat-regions
and radio-active regions that we encountered, heading on toward the
serpent-universe that was glowing ever broader before us. Smooth,
immeasurable and endless they seemed, those hours of swift and steady
flight, but at last we became aware that they were coming to an end,
the dying universe ahead a great dim glow across all the blackness
of the firmament. Ever our eyes hung upon that misty region of light
as we flashed nearer and nearer to it, and ever the same doubt, the
same wonder, rose and grew in our minds. Could we, really, crush and
destroy the serpent-peoples in this strange universe? What would be the
outcome of the tremendous battle we must fight in it to prevent the
serpent-hordes from pouring across space toward our own universe?
Before us now the somber splendor of the dying universe filled the
heavens, a vast mass of dead and dying suns, black and burned-out stars
and suns of smoky crimson, glowing in the blackness of space like the
embers of a mighty, dying fire. Around that great, dim-glowing mass we
could make out the gigantic shell of flickering blue light, all but
invisible, that surrounded it, the titanic and impenetrable wall of
vibrations that enclosed it. In toward that wall our vast fleet was
racing, moving at slackening speed as I touched a key before me, until
at last the mighty flickering barrier loomed close ahead, the single
opening in it, guarded by the huge space-forts on each side, lying
straight before us. And as we drew within sight of that opening we saw,
hanging in space just inside it, massed solidly across it, a thousand
oval ships!
"The serpent-ships!" I exclaimed. "They're going to hold the gate of
their universe against us!"
Jhul Din was staring at them as though puzzled. "But why only a
thousand ships?" he said. "Why haven't they massed all their great
fleet there at the gate----"
But I had turned, had pressed the keys before me in swift succession,
and at once our tremendous fleet had slowed and smoothly halted,
hanging there in space. Then, as I depressed still other keys, our vast
mass of ships split smoothly into three separate masses, my flag-ship
at the van of the central mass, the others moving to right and to left
of us. A moment our three great masses of ships hung there, and then
those on either side of us had flashed toward the great space-forts
that guarded each side of the great opening, while our own central
mass, my ship at its head, drove straight in toward the great opening
itself!
Straight toward and into the opening raced our close-massed ships
and then the next moment it seemed that all the universe about was
transformed into a single awful mass of pale beams that stabbed
toward and through us from the space-forts on each side and from the
close-massed ships ahead. How our own ship escaped annihilation in that
first moment of terrific, reeling shock, I can not guess; since behind
and about us scores of our ships were driving crazily away, their
occupants annihilated by the deadly beams. Yet from all our own craft,
reeling blindly as they were there in the opening, our cylinders were
loosing their shafts of invisible force upon the space-forts to each
side and upon the serpent-ships that leapt toward us from ahead.
Then as those ships met ours, there in the narrow opening with the huge
towering space-forts at each side, there ensued a moment of battle so
terrific--battle more awful in its concentrated fury than any I had
ever yet experienced--that it seemed impossible that ships and living
beings could fight thus and live. Terrific was the scene about us--the
vast black vault of infinite outer space behind us, the far-flung,
dim-glowing mass of the dying universe before us, the gigantic wall of
pale blue flickering light that separated the two, the single opening
in that wall, flanked by the titanic metal space-forts, in which our
thousands of close-massed ships charged forward toward the onrushing
serpent-ships.
* * * * *
Ships were crashing and smashing as we met them, death-beams were
whirling thick from their ships and from the huge space-forts,
serpent-craft were crumpling and collapsing beneath our shafts of
force--and still our own ships were reeling away in scores as the
death-beams found them. I knew that not for long could we continue this
suicidal combat, since though the serpent-ships before us were being
swiftly wiped out, the space-forts on each side still played their
beams upon us with deadly effect. The other two divisions of our great
fleet, dashing to attack the space-forts from outside while we battled
there in the opening between them, had been thrust back, I saw, from
each attack by the masses of pale beams that sprang from the forts.
But as the whole struggle hung thus in doubt, as our ships fell in
fierce battle there in the opening beneath the beams of the forts, I
saw a score of ships among those attacking the right-hand fort drive
suddenly toward that fort with all their terrific utmost speed, leaping
toward it like great thunderbolts of metal. From the great castle the
death-beams sprang toward that score of ships, sweeping through them
and wiping all life instantly from them, but before the ships had time
to swerve or reel aside from that mad onward flight their terrific
speed had carried them onward, and with a mighty, shattering collision
they had crashed straight into the great fort's side.
I saw the great metal walls of the space-fort buckling and collapsing
beneath that awful impact, and then all the space-fort had
collapsed also, like a thing of paper, crushing within itself the
serpent-creatures and generators and death-beam tubes it had held. To
our left, another score of ships were leaping toward the left-hand fort
in the same manner, and as they crashed into it, racing on through a
storm of death-beams that swept through them, the left-hand space-fort
too had buckled and crumpled and collapsed. At the same moment the
last of the thousand serpent-ships before us was falling beneath our
force-shafts, and then the great opening lay clear before us, with
neither serpent-ships nor space-forts now in sight. We had forced the
gates of the serpent-universe!
Then, our vast fleet massing together once more, we swept in through
the opening, in a long column, into the dying universe. A full two
thousand of our hundred thousand ships we had lost in that mad attack
on the great gates, but heeded that but little as we flashed now into
the serpent-creatures' universe. Through the dead and dying suns
we sped, holding to a close-massed formation and moving slowly and
cautiously forward. At every moment I expected the great serpent-fleet
to burst out upon us from behind some dead or dying sun, for I
knew that their allowing us to advance through their universe thus
unhindered meant only that they had prepared some ambush for us. Yet as
we sped in toward the center of the dying universe, there appeared no
single enemy craft about us or on our space-charts, a total absence of
all serpent-ships that began to affect our nerves as we drove ever more
tensely forward.
At last there appeared far ahead the majestic trio of giant, crimson
suns that swung at this universe's heart, and as we moved down toward
these we knew that at last the final struggle was at hand, since
between those suns turned the great world that was the heart of the
serpent-civilization. Down toward that world we slanted smoothly,
expecting every moment the uprush from it of the great serpent-fleet;
yet still were we unchallenged and unattacked as we moved downward.
Upon us there leapt no serpent-ships; in space about us, as we sank
lower and lower, were no craft other than our own. In breathless
silence we watched, sinking down toward the great sphere's surface,
until at last we hung at a bare thousand feet above that surface, the
mighty city of blue force stretching from horizon to horizon beneath
us. And at sight of that city there burst from us wild, stunned cries.
For the mighty city was--empty! Empty, lifeless, its streets deserted
and bare, its vast mass of towering structures of blue vibrations
without occupant of any kind! No single serpent-shape moved in all that
tremendous city, and I saw that upon the great clearing where the vast
serpent-fleet and the colossal death-beam cone had rested there was now
nothing. The world beneath us, the universe about us, were a world,
universe--deserted!
[Illustration: "Its vast mass of towering structures of blue vibrations
was without occupants of any kind."]
"Too late!" Jhul Din's cry came to my ears like the voice of doom. "The
defense of the gate was only to delay us, and the serpent-races have
gone--they've struck! They've massed all their hordes in their great
fleet and with their giant death-beam cone have sailed out across the
void to attack our universe! We're too late!"
Too late! The thought beat upon my brain like drum-beats of horror as
we stood there, in utter silence. All had been in vain--our tremendous
journey, our fierce struggles, the loss of Korus Kan--since already
far across the void the serpent-hordes in their countless ships were
rushing toward our universe, where their vanguard had prepared a
foothold for them. They had known that we were summoning help from the
Andromeda universe, had swiftly gathered and sailed on their great
attack, leaving only a force at the great gate to delay us. Too late!
Then suddenly resolution flamed again inside me, and I pressed swiftly
the keys before me, sent our whole fleet turning and speeding outward
again--out through the dying universe away from the great trio of suns
at its center--out toward the great opening in the vibration-wall.
"Too late--_no_!" I shouted. "We'll follow them across the void toward
our own universe! They could not have completed that great death-beam
cone yet--they've taken it with them to our own universe to complete
it there--and if we can reach them and attack them before they have
time to complete it, we yet may save our universe!"
Now our great fleet was rushing toward and through the opening in the
vibration-wall, out into the void of outer space once more. There
we halted, massed again in our pyramidal flight-formation, and then
were turning slowly toward the left, toward the far little patch of
glowing light that was our universe. Then we were moving toward it,
with swiftly gathering speed, faster and faster, until at our utmost
velocity we were racing through the infinite immensities of space
toward it; flashing on toward the last act of the vast, cosmic drama
that was rising now to its climax; rushing on through the void toward
the final great battle in which the destinies of three mighty universes
and all their suns and worlds and peoples were to be decided for all
time!
_14. Back to the Galaxy_
Standing once more in the pilot room, with Jhul Din at the controls
beside me, I stared out through the room's fore-windows, straining
my vision out through the cosmic darkness that lay about our
onward-rushing ships. Far ahead, in that darkness, lay a great, glowing
mass of light, lay a radiant, disk-like mass that was resolving itself
into a great swarm of brilliant stars as we rushed ever on toward it.
In silence we two gazed toward it, for it was our own great galaxy that
lay before us, toward which for day upon dragging day, hour upon slow
hour, our mighty fleet had rushed on and on.
Now, as we gazed toward it, waxing there in splendor before us in the
lightless heavens, I could not but reflect upon how infinitely strange
and far a journey had been ours since we had left it, across what
infinities of trackless space and upon what alien suns and worlds we
had gone. Out into the infinite we had gone for the help that might
save our universe, and now out of the infinite we were coming with
that help, but two returning where three had gone out. Yet would the
help we brought be in time to save our galaxy? Already the great
serpent-hordes, we knew, would have reached that galaxy, would have
settled upon the suns and worlds of the great Cancer cluster where
their vanguard had made for them a base, and there they would be
laboring to complete the colossal death-beam cone with which they
could wipe out all the life on all the galaxy's worlds, and all our own
great fleet. Could we reach them and conquer them before they completed
that great cone of death?
We were within a few score hours of the galaxy ahead, I knew, and as
we raced on toward it at the same unvarying velocity, its individual
greater stars were burning out more clearly, and the great Cancer
cluster was a tiny ball of light at the glowing swarm's edge. Countless
billions of miles of space lay between us and that cluster still, I
knew, yet it was with something of hope that I watched it as we flashed
on. For though inside it the gigantic death-cone might be approaching
completion, it would not be long before our vast fleet would be pouring
down upon that cluster and upon the serpent-hordes within it, before
the great cone could be finished.
As I mused thus, though, there came a low exclamation from Jhul Din,
and I turned to find him peering forward into the void with a gaze
suddenly tense. Then he had turned toward me and was pointing ahead and
to the left into the darkness before us.
"One of the great heat-regions!" he exclaimed.
I gazed out toward it and in a moment I, too, had seen it--a dim, faint
little glow of red light, flickering there in the darkness of space
before us and to the left. Steadily that little glow was broadening,
deepening, though, while our temperature-dials were recording swiftly
rising heat outside as we neared it. There was no need to change the
course of our fleet, though, since the heat-region lay toward the
left and our present course would take us safely past its right edge.
It was, perhaps, the same region into which we had blundered on our
outward flight, and with interest we watched it as our great fleet
shot forward and along its outer edge. It was a vast area of glowing
crimson light to our left, now. A terrific furnace of heat-vibrations
loosed by the collision of the great ether-currents through which we
were plunging. Then, just as our fleet was speeding directly past the
mighty, glowing region, along its outer edge, our prow turned slowly
toward the left, toward the heat-region, and then we were racing
straight inward toward the region's fiery heart!
For an instant I stared in stunned amazement as our ship shifted thus,
then whirled around to the Spican. "Jhul Din!" I exclaimed. "The
controls! The ship's heading into the heat-region!"
But already he was twisting frantically at the controls, and now he
looked up wildly toward me. "The ship doesn't answer the controls!"
he cried. "It's heading straight inward--and the ships behind us--!"
And he pointed up toward the space-chart, where I saw now that as they
rushed on, the thousands of ships behind us were shifting their course
like our own and racing into the heat-region after us--racing in like
us toward a fiery death! Then, as I gazed stupefied up toward the
space-chart, I saw something else, saw that inches to the left of our
fleet on the chart, away on the other side of the glowing heat-region
from us, there hung a half-thousand ships, that showed on the chart as
a close-massed swarm of dots, hanging there motionless. And as I saw
them I understood, and with understanding a great shout broke from me.
"Attraction-ships!" I cried. "It's an ambush the serpent-fleet left for
us if we followed them! Attraction-ships hanging there on the other
side of the heat-region and pulling our ships toward themselves, and
toward and into that region!"
With that cry I leapt forward, pressing swiftly a half-dozen of the
keys before me, flashing an order for all ships behind to turn at
right-angles immediately. Watching the chart, though, I saw that nearly
all our mighty fleet was now moving into the heat-region, caught
in the grip of the attraction-ships beyond it. As my order flashed,
though, the last ships of our fleet, not more than a thousand in
number, had turned immediately, just before they too had raced into the
deadly grip, and were rushing clear. Then, as their occupants, too,
saw upon the space-charts the attraction-ships hovering beyond the
heat-region, I saw them race away and around the great glowing region's
edge toward those attraction-ships, while the rest of all our mighty
fleet was drawn farther and farther in toward its fiery heart.
All about us now was the faint red glow of the heat-region's outer
portions, while swiftly the heat inside our ship was increasing, the
air in the pilot room being already almost too warm to breathe. Onward
we were being pulled, irresistibly, our walls beginning already to warp
and crack beneath the terrific temperatures outside. Gazing forward
through the glare of the great region's fiery heart, even as we were
swept in toward it, I could make out through our distance-windows a
swarm of great, disk-shaped craft hanging beyond the heat-region, the
attraction-ships that were pulling us on to doom. Around the great
region's edge toward those disk-craft our own thousand escaped ships
were flashing, but before ever they could reach them, it seemed, we
must perish, so awful had the heat about us become.
Then I saw our thousand ships, racing about the great region's edge,
pouring down on the five hundred attraction-ships, rushing down upon
them in a mad swooping charge. About ourselves the crimson glare had
become all but blinding, and our walls were glowing dull red, the air
about us stifling. Already Jhul Din was swaying at the controls beneath
that overpowering heat, and as our walls wrenched and cracked again I
knew that a moment more of the terrific heat into which we were being
pulled would mean the end. But even with that realization I shouted
with sudden hope, since through our tele-magnifier I had glimpsed one
after another of the attraction-ships, far on the other side of the
heat-region, reeling and crumpling beneath the force-shafts of our
thousand attacking ships!
With every one of those attraction-ships destroyed, the pull that was
drawing us into the fiery maelstrom of light and heat was lessening
in strength, drawing us ever more slowly forward. But forward still
we were moving, pulled by the remaining attraction-ships that fought
still desperately against the thousand attacking craft, fighting to
the end in their great effort to destroy all our fleet. Into the
very inmost flaming heart of the great region we were plunging, now,
the whole universe about us seeming but a single thunderous inferno
of blood-like light and burning heat. Then, as choking and reeling
I felt the ship quiver violently with the approaching end, I saw
our thousand or less attacking ships beyond crashing down upon the
resisting attraction-ships in one irresistible, headlong charge, and
as those great disk-ships, flickering with attractive force, crumpled
and vanished beneath that last wild swoop, the pull upon us suddenly
relaxed, vanished also. The next moment we had shot the controls
sharply over, and our ship and all the ships behind it were shooting
out of that hell of heat and light into empty space once more.
Now, as we sped out into the clean cold void of space again, our ships
again taking up their formation and heading toward the galaxy, I turned
to Jhul Din.
"It's their last attempt to stop us!" I cried. "But we've won
clear--nothing can keep us from reaching them now!"
And as our great fleet again shot forward at full speed through the
void I stood now no longer tense or anxious but with the old lust
for battle burning up in me stood grimly silent with eyes upon the
universe ahead as its glowing mass of stars broadened across the
heavens before us. For now, I knew, we had plunged through the last
trap, the last delay, by which the serpent-creatures had planned to
hold back and destroy us, and now nothing could prevent the final
attack toward which we were racing. Our great flight outward from our
galaxy for help, our terrible captivity in the dying universe, our mad
flight to the Andromeda universe, and our struggle there in which one
of us had gone to his end, our sailing for the dying universe with
the great Andromedan fleet--all these things were drawing now toward
their climax, when we were to pour down on the Cancer cluster and the
serpent-creatures there in our great attack.
Humming, throbbing, droning, on through the void our great fleet shot,
force-shaft cylinders and other mechanisms clanging now beneath us as
our Andromedan crew cleared the decks below for action. With every
hour, every moment, the galaxy's stars were shining in greater splendor
ahead, a giant belt of suns across the firmament before us. My eyes
roved across them, from the yellow splendor of Capella to the white
brilliance of Rigel, and then something of emotion rose in me as they
shifted to Antares, the great crimson star that had been Korus Kan's
home sun. But my eyes hardened again as they turned toward the Cancer
cluster, a great ball of suns glowing in resplendent glory at the
galaxy's edge before us; for well I knew that upon the thronging worlds
of its clustered suns the countless races of the serpent-creatures were
gathered now, completing the gigantic death-beam cone with which they
would sweep out to annihilate all life in our galaxy save themselves.
Straight toward that ball of suns our fleet was leaping, and now Jhul
Din turned toward me.
"You're going to drive with our fleet straight into the cluster
itself?" he asked, and I nodded grimly.
"It's our only chance," I said. "All the serpent-hordes are on the
worlds inside it, and we've got to reach it to destroy that great cone
before they finish it."
Now the galaxy's flaring suns filled the heavens before us as our
mighty armada raced in through the outer void toward them, the Cancer
cluster flaming ahead in all the blinding glory of its gathered suns,
those suns appearing on the upper part of our space-chart as a mass
of glowing little circles, toward which our vast swarm of ship-dots
was speeding. Minutes more of our terrific speed would see us reaching
that cluster, I knew, and I turned toward the bank of keys before me
to shift our great fleet's mass into a formation that would allow us
to pour down into that ball of suns in our great attack. But as I did
so, as I reached toward those keys, there came from Jhul Din a cry that
held me rigid. He was gazing up toward the space-chart, and pointing.
"Look--in the cluster!" he cried. "Those dots--those ships----!"
I looked swiftly up, saw that among the massed sun-circles of the
Cancer cluster, on the chart, were moving a countless number of tiny
dots of black, dots that were sweeping outward from and between those
sun-circles, ships that were rising from the worlds around them!
Out between the cluster's glowing circles they moved, toward us, in
thousands, in tens of thousands, until all hung just outside it, a huge
swarm of dots as large or larger than our own, a full hundred thousand
mighty ships! There in space outside the cluster that vast fleet hung,
and then was moving out toward us, a tremendous swarm of dots that was
creeping down across the space-chart toward our own up-moving swarm,
a mighty armada that was rushing out through the void toward our own
inrushing armada! And as I gazed up at the great chart, stunned, there
came from beside me the Spican's cry again.
"_It's the serpent-creatures' fleet! They've seen us coming--know we
mean to attack the cluster and destroy the cone--and they've massed all
their ships and are coming out to meet us!_"
_15. An Armageddon of Universes_
As Jhul Din's cry rang out I stood for an instant quite still, my
eyes fixed on the chart upon which that great, outrushing swarm was
drawing nearer to our own each moment. It was the vast fleet we had
seen building in the dying universe, I knew, that had carried all
their hordes across the void to our galaxy, to the Cancer cluster,
and that they were flinging out now to meet and halt us here in outer
space while in that cluster they labored to complete their giant cone
of death. Before ever we could attack the cluster, now, we must come
to death-grips with the titanic fleet rushing out toward us, a fleet
that in size and power was at least as great as our own, and for that
instant hope sank within me. Then, as the two fleets rushed ever
closer, my doubts dissolved into a fierce determination.
"They've come out for battle," I cried, "and battle we'll give them! A
battle this time to the end!"
At the same moment I turned swiftly toward the bank of keys before me.
On the space-chart I saw that the serpent-fleet was driving toward
us in a long, rectangular formation, our own fleet racing in its
pyramid-formation to meet it. Both tremendous armadas were moving at
their utmost speeds, toward each other, but as I pressed a key that
slackened the speed of our own fleet I saw the other slowing also.
Then, in swift succession, I touched other keys, and out from the great
mass of our fleet behind me sprang two thousand of our swiftest ships,
driving out from our fleet in a great fringe, ahead of us and to each
side and above and below; and in a few moments more there leapt from
the approaching serpent-armada a similar line of scouts.
Tensely I gazed out into the void as our two fleets neared each other,
the scouts of each driving far ahead and to the sides, while steadily
our own speed was slowing as I touched one after another of the keys
before me. On the space-chart I could see the foremost scout-ships of
each fleet almost meeting, now, but even in that moment of suspense
the strangeness of my position and of all about me struck home to
me--the tremendous gloom of space about us, the blazing suns of our
galaxy stretched across the firmament ahead, the Cancer cluster a
brilliant ball of close-massed suns among them, the two tremendous
fleets that were rushing through the void toward each other. With
every moment the speed of the oncoming serpent-fleet was slackening,
though, and smoothly that of our own was lessening as my fingers moved
upon the bank of keys before me that held the control of all our
hundred thousand ships. Surely never in any struggle in all time had
any commander directed thus, with swift-changing finger-touches, such
a colossal force as moved now behind my flag-ship, responding swiftly
to every touch upon the keys before me. As I stood alone there in the
little pilot room, save for Jhul Din at the controls, the tremendous
responsibility that was mine seemed weighing down upon me tangibly,
crushing me, but I gripped myself, peered tensely ahead.
Smoothly still our great fleet shot through the void of darkness,
and then upon the space-chart I saw our most advanced scout-ships
creeping toward the advancing serpent-scouts and meeting them, touching
them. At the same moment, in the darkness far ahead, there glowed out
here and there long, pale shafts of misty white light, appearing and
disappearing, hardly to be seen against the flaring suns of the galaxy
beyond. All along a broad, thin line ahead those little beams of pale
light were showing, like ghostly, questing fingers of death, and as
they glowed and vanished there far ahead, soundlessly, the big Spican
beside me twitched with eagerness.
"The scouts!" he exclaimed. "They've met--they're fighting!"
I nodded, without speaking, straining my gaze into the void ahead,
where our scouting-ships and those of the serpent-fleet were, I knew,
already whirling and stabbing at each other, while in toward them were
moving the main masses of the two vast armadas. Hardly more than an
inch's gap lay between those two fleets on the space-chart, now, and as
I gazed ahead I saw the fighting scout-ships coming into view before
us, a long, thin line of battle extending across the void before us
and made up of gleaming oval serpent-craft and flat Andromedan ships,
dipping and striking and soaring there before us. Fiercely those
advance-ships of the two mighty fleets were grappling there, scores of
them reeling aimlessly away as the pale beams swept them or crumpling
suddenly up as the invisible but deadly force-shafts struck them. But
I was looking beyond them, now, looking beyond them to where, between
them and the galaxy's suns, a gigantic, far-flung swarm of shining
light-points was rushing toward us.
"The serpent-fleet!" I whispered.
On it was coming toward us, even as we moved toward it, the long line
of struggling, raging scout-ships between our advancing fleets.
Swiftly it was changing from a swarm of innumerable light-points to a
swarm of vaguely glimpsed shapes that grew larger, clearer, with every
moment that they neared us, thousands upon tens of thousands of great
oval ships, flashing toward us in a mighty rectangle! Toward it our
own vast pyramid of ships was rushing in turn, and then the struggling
scouts ahead had flashed back to rejoin their respective fleets, and
with only empty space between them now the two titanic armadas were
thundering toward each other! The Armageddon of our universes had begun!
* * * * *
Swiftly, as our vast fleet leapt forward through the void, my fingers
were pressing the keys before me, and instantly our massed thousands of
ships had shifted from their pyramidal formation into one of two long
and mighty columns, racing forward side by side. Nearer the colossal
rectangle of the serpent-fleet was rushing toward us--nearer with each
instant, until it seemed that the two vast armadas must crash into each
other and destroy each other. Bending tensely over my keys I saw their
huge fleet looming before us, an enormous, close-massed swarm of great
oval hulls rushing lightning-like toward us. Then, just before they
reached us, I pressed a single key.
Instantly our two great racing columns of ships divided, one to the
right, our own ship at its head, and one to the left, splitting from
each other and flashing past the great mass of the serpent-fleet on
each side! And as we thus flashed past there leapt from the cylinders
of our ships toward the serpent-fleet between our columns countless
deadly shafts of invisible force, shafts that in the instant that we
flashed past had crumpled and smashed to twisted wrecks of metal a
full three thousand or more of the great mass of the serpent-ships!
From their fleet's edge the pale beams sprang out in answer to us,
wiping the life from scores of our racing ships; but caught as they
thus were between our flashing columns they could not loose those beams
effectively, and in a moment we were past them. Then with the galaxy's
suns before us our great fleet was halting, turning, its columns
closing again together, while toward those distant suns were drifting
all about us the crumpled wrecks of the serpent-ships that had fallen
before us.
"First blood!" cried Jhul Din, and I nodded without speaking, bending
again over my keys as our fleet raced forward again toward the enemy.
The serpent-fleet, too, had turned, and was moving cautiously back
toward us, and I knew that not again could we execute upon them the
maneuver which we had just used. As we rushed again upon them, though,
their fleet racing again to meet us, my fingers pressed swiftly again
on the keys and our long columns of ships shifted swiftly into another
formation, a long wedge with our own flag-ship at its point. Just
before we again raced into the serpent-ships our fleet assumed this
formation, for it was my plan this time to tear by main force through
the serpent-fleet, shattering it before us. But in the instant before
we could do so, before our mighty wedge's point could crash into them,
their own fleet had divided suddenly, some fifteen hundred ships from
its center driving upward and far above us while the remaining gigantic
mass drove down under and beneath us. And in the next moment I saw that
five hundred of the fifteen hundred ships above were great disk-ships,
and that they were glowing with sudden, flickering radiance!
"Attraction-ships!" Jhul Din was shouting, but already our own ships
and all those behind us were turning upward, pulled resistlessly up,
while from beneath with death-beams whirling thick the mass of the
great serpent-fleet was leaping up toward us.
With the first sight of the attraction-ships, though--a sight which I
had been expecting--I had pressed quickly on two of the keys before me,
and at once the great line of scout-ships that had hung high above us
and on each side during all the battle so far, awaiting this emergency,
were gathering swiftly high above and then leaping toward the
attraction-ships! Out toward them sprang the thousand serpent-craft
that had risen with the attraction-ships to guard them, and then as
they met our charging scouts there was a fierce, wild struggle high
above us, a struggle that was a tiny replica of the gigantic combat
that was going on below. For now, as we were pulled helplessly upward,
the thousands upon tens of thousands of serpent-ships beneath were
rushing up to attack us, undeterred by the crumpling shafts of force
that shot down to meet them, charging up with death-beams sweeping
through us in great shafts of ghostly light!
Swiftly, I saw, the crews of scores of ships about us were being
annihilated by the whirling beams, that wiped all life from those
ships, though still they drove unguided upward, pulled by the
relentless grip of the attraction-ships high above. Down toward those
glowing disk-ships were racing our gathered scouts but ever as they
charged down the serpent-ships that guarded the attraction-craft leapt
to meet them, fighting with blind courage to hold them back long enough
to encompass the destruction of our main fleet below. Not for much
longer could we continue in that deadly grip if we were to escape, I
knew, since through ever more of our ships were sweeping the deadly
beams from beneath!
Then I saw one of the scout-ships high above charge down through the
opposing serpent-craft in a terrific, headlong plunge, saw it smash
squarely down onto one of the hovering disk-ships, and then both had
buckled and collapsed, were drifting away toward the galaxy in twisted
wrecks of metal. And down in the same way were plunging others of the
scout-ships, a deliberate and awful self-sacrifice of their Andromedan
crews; diving down with all their terrific speed and tearing through
the guarding serpent-ships to crash into and destroy the glowing
attraction-ships that had gripped our main fleet. A moment more and
the last of the attraction-ships and the last of the serpent-ships also
had vanished above us, our scout-ships perishing almost to the last
one, too. But they had saved us for the moment, since now, released
from that deadly grip above, our fleet was massing and swooping down in
turn upon the main body of the serpent-fleet beneath us, whose beams
had been slicing through us!
Down--down--black gloom of space and blazing suns and whirling ships,
all spun about me as our fleet rushed giddily down through the void
toward the massed serpent-fleet beneath; then we were upon them, were
shifting into a long, slender line of ships as my fingers on the keys
flashed another signal, were driving in that line past them, raking
them with all the force-shafts of our cylinders. But as we did so
their own great mass of ships shifted swiftly into a similar long,
slender column, and then they were racing through space beside us, two
tremendously long lines of thousands upon thousands of ships, rushing
through the void toward the galaxy, with pale death-beams and invisible
force-shafts clashing and crossing from line to line as they flashed on!
* * * * *
For the moment, as the two fleets rushed thus side by side toward the
galaxy's suns, so narrow was the gap between their flashing two lines
that it seemed they must needs annihilate each other with their mighty
weapons. Plainly visible in space beside us raced the line of the
serpent-fleet, its beams stabbing thick toward our own ships, and in
that wild moment ships behind and about our own were reeling unguided
away by scores as the pale beams swept through them. Into one another
and into untouched ships about them they crashed, whirling crazily in
all directions; but in the same moments the deadly shafts from our own
cylinders were leaping across the gap between the racing lines also,
and serpent-ships all along their tremendous line were crumpling and
collapsing, the racing ships behind them often crashing into those
twisted wrecks before they could swerve aside from them. On--on--in
a tremendous running fight the vast fleets leapt, a fight that was
annihilating the ships of both fleets by scores and hundreds with each
moment, but which neither of us would turn away from, hanging to each
other and stabbing furiously with our beams and shafts toward each
other as we raced madly on!
On--on--far ahead the galaxy's suns were flaming out in greater
splendor each moment as at all our terrific utmost velocity our ships
and the enemy ships beside us reeled on. Blazing, glorious, those
suns filled the heavens before us, now. We had reeled sidewise in our
first mad struggle and now the Cancer cluster lay to our left ahead, a
stupendous ball of swarming stars at the galaxy's edge, while directly
before us at that edge burned a great star of brilliant green, a mighty
sun toward which at awful speed our two struggling, tremendous lines of
ships were leaping. All about us still the ghostly beams were sweeping
from the great lines of ships to our left, but swiftly the controls
clicked beneath Jhul Din's grasp as he sent our ship racing forward
on a corkscrew, twisting course, evading with miraculous swiftness
and skill the deadly beams; while at the same time from beneath there
came to our ears over the roaring drone of the generators the slap and
clang of the great cylinders as our Andromedan crew shifted their aim,
sending crumpling, devastating shafts of unseen force across the gap
toward the serpent-ships!
But now ahead the great green sun toward which our long, strung-out
fleets were flashing was growing to dazzling size and splendor as we
neared it, neared the galaxy's edge. Like a giant globe of dazzling
green fire it flamed before us, with all about and behind it the awful
blaze of the galaxy's thundering suns, in toward which at terrific and
unabated speed we were racing. Countless thousands upon thousands of
ships, stretched far out in long lines there in space, we were reeling
on at our utmost velocity of millions of light-speeds, stabbing and
striking and falling in wild battle as we plunged madly on. Toward the
right our two flashing lines of ships shifted, as we neared the giant
green sun ahead, for now it was flaming across the firmament before us
like a titanic wall of blinding emerald flame. Still farther to the
right we veered, and then we had reached that sun and it was flaming in
stupendous glory just to our left as we raced along its side!
"We're racing straight into the galaxy!" cried Jhul Din hoarsely as we
thundered on. "It means death to carry this battle in there--our ships
will crash into the suns and worlds at this terrific speed!"
"The serpent-ships will crash then too!" I screamed back to him, above
the roar of the generators and the hissing of beams and force-shafts
about us. "We'll carry this battle to a finish!"
Now as we sped past the giant green sun to the left, the line of
serpent-ships between our own vast line and that sun, their ships
were all but invisible to us against the blinding glare of that sun.
Swiftly they took advantage of this, their pale beams leaping toward
us with renewed fury, while in that dazzling glare our shafts of force
could only be loosed upon them as we chanced to glimpse or guess their
position. I saw ships in our line all about and behind us reeling away
as the beams raked them, and then set my teeth, pressed a single one of
the keys before me. At once all our great line of ships bore toward the
left, against the line of the serpent-ships!
Toward them we slanted, even as we raced with them past the tremendous
green sun, and then our line was pressing against their own, our ships
colliding with theirs, oval ships and flat craft vanishing in great
wrecks of metal as they crashed into each other, beams and force-shafts
leaping thick from line to line as we bore inward against them.
Involuntarily, though, their line gave beneath the terrific pressure
of our own, veered to the left farther to escape that pressure, toward
the great green sun. Then, as it veered too far, that which I had
hoped for came to pass, for at the terrific speed at which they were
moving that inward swerve took a full two thousand of their ships into
the outward-leaping prominences of that sun. Into those gigantic,
outrushing tongues of green flame they blundered, a tiny swarm of
midges in comparison to them, and in the next instant had vanished,
only a few tiny jets of fire from the prominences' sides marking their
end. Then we were past the great sun, were flashing on and into the
galaxy's thronging suns that lay thick in the heavens all about us.
The moments that followed live in my memory now as a mad time of
insane, racing combat, of our two gigantic fleets, strung out still
in their long lines, flashing inward into the galaxy and between its
thundering suns at an unabated, awful speed, striking and soaring and
falling with wild, unceasing fury as they plunged on. For now a score
or more of great suns were looming close before us as we raced forward,
crimson and white and yellow stars between which we reeled crazily and
blindly as we grappled still in our vast running fight. Full before
us a single one of them, a sun of brilliant white, was looming larger
each instant as we sped toward it, and as we almost reached it the
serpent-ships drove us inward toward it, striving to repeat our own
maneuver, pressed us inward until its heat was terrific even through
our insulated walls, until almost we were within the limits of the
glowing, stupendous corona!
One or two of our inmost ships were already shriveling and perishing as
they drove inward too far and plunged into that corona, but as they did
so I had sent our long line heading outward again with a swift flash
signal, crashing against the serpent-fleet's line with a mighty shock
and forcing them outward as in hundreds their ships and ours perished
by collisions and from the death-beams and force-shafts, as our line
struck theirs. The next instant, though, as we forced them outward,
passing the great white sun, there loomed swiftly before us the mighty,
turning planets of that sun--great, far-swinging worlds through which
our two vast fleets were flashing! Then all about us ships of our own
fleet and of the serpent-fleet were crashing into those planets as we
drove wildly on. One of them loomed swiftly before ourselves, a great
turning world of whose mountains and gleaming seas I had a flashing
glimpse, about which a swarm of little space-ships were thronging, like
pigmies rushing to and fro as about and above them raged the colossal
battle of giants. Then in the instant that I glimpsed it, as that world
loomed lightning-like stupendous in size before us, we had flashed
sidewise as Jhul Din shifted the controls and were past it!
Behind us our ships and the serpent-ships were crashing by hundreds,
by thousands, into those turning planets as our two great fleets raged
between and among them, at many millions of miles a second. Then we
were through and past them, racing crazily on, soaring and stabbing at
each other still, serpent-ships and Andromedan ships reeling away or
crumpling and perishing as death-beams or force-shafts reached them.
On--on--farther in among the galaxy's suns, a stupendous mass of great
stars all about us that watched us like gigantic, flaming eyes as we
reeled and ran and struck at each other's great fleet there between
them. Away to the left one of the galaxy's mighty nebulæ stretched,
a stupendous cloud of glowing gas, while far ahead and to the right
the strange, mysterious flaming beauty of one of the giant comets was
visible, driving itself between the stars but at a speed snail-like in
comparison to ours. And there among them all, fiery suns and whirling
worlds, vast nebulæ, and glowing comets, our two tremendous fleets were
battling on!
On--on--it seemed unthinkable that any beings could live in that
stupendous struggle, as we fought and flashed there past thundering
suns and worlds, twisting, turning, swaying to avoid them. It seemed
that we could but keep up our colossal battle until both fleets were
destroyed there inside the galaxy. With a swiftness not of reason but
of instinct I touched the keys before me, holding our fleet still to
its long column-formation as we fought on, while beside me Jhul Din
uttered low, fierce exclamations as he twisted our ship lightning-like
to that side or this, his battle-hungry soul being glutted now
for once; while, beneath, our gaseous Andromedan crew wielded the
force-cylinders like mad beings, they and those in the thousands of
ships behind me striking with all their force at their serpent-enemies,
reeling here in mighty battle with them in a universe strange to both!
* * * * *
Above a great red sun our fleets were driving now, stabbing and
striking still with all their force at each other's long, strung-out
line of ships; then, as we rocketed out into more open space again,
with other mighty flaming suns all about us, I had a flashing glimpse
of a black point far ahead that stood out against one of those suns, a
point that leapt lightning-like to greater size, to a tremendous dark,
round bulk that was driving toward us even as our struggling line of
ships flashed toward it. Then in the next fleeting instant I saw that
it was a giant dark-star, one of the many that roved the galaxy, a
colossal black and burned-out globe toward which our battling line of
ships was racing and which was itself booming on through space toward
us!
But a single instant did I glimpse that great dead sun before it was
upon us, because of our terrific speed, and was looming gigantically
before us! In that instant, though, I had seen our peril, seen the
annihilation of our fleet that would come in another moment as we
crashed into it, and my fingers had shot down upon the keys with
lightning speed, our whole great line of ships swerving instantly to
the right. As we did so the great line of serpent-ships swerved after
us, shooting in pursuit as we seemed to give way before them, never
glimpsing in their hot pursuit the thundering dark-star ahead. And as
they swerved sidewise after us, just as we reached that dark-star, it
was upon them, was crashing straight through their tremendous line of
ships!
A full fifth of their vast, long line of ships that dead sun crashed
through, as though through so many flies, annihilating in that instant
thousands of their ships! Shattered by that awful blow, their fleet
already depleted like ours by the fury of our great battle so far,
the serpent-ships reeled back from us, while we leapt in turn toward
them. But instead of racing on with us they were slowing, were halting,
were massing together, were turning, gathered now in a compact mass,
and were racing back--back toward the Cancer cluster, back toward the
galaxy's edge!
"They're fleeing!" My cry was a great shout of triumph. "We've beaten
them--they're fleeing before us!"
Jhul Din was shouting hoarsely too, now, as I swiftly pressed on the
keys before me, our long line of ships massing instantly together
in close pursuit-formation and then flashing after the fleeing
serpent-fleet. Not many more ships than that fleet did our own number,
even now, yet before us the thousands of serpent-ships, close-massed
together like ourselves, were racing back toward the galaxy's edge at
their utmost speed, between the suns and past the swinging worlds, on
and on. Nearer and nearer with each moment, though, we were drawing
toward them, swiftly overhauling them, until within moments more they
were visible just ahead of us, fleeing still from before us as steadily
we overtook them. Then, as we flashed there between the flaming,
thundering suns, as we seemed about to overtake them entirely, to blast
them with our crumpling shafts of force, I saw a full hundred of their
ships drop behind the rest of their mass; a hundred great oval ships
different from the rest in that the rear portion of their oval had been
truncated, cut squarely off, presenting toward us on each a round, flat
surface that suddenly shone with brilliant red light!
An abrupt instinct of danger flashed through me in that moment, and my
hands flashed down to the keys, to signal to our great mass of ships
to slow our pursuit. But in the moment that they did so the thing had
happened. For as our close-massed fleet raced on, after those hundred
red-glowing ships ahead that lay between us and the serpent-fleet,
it was as though a gigantic hand had in the next moment grasped the
compact mass of our ships and scattered them in all directions like a
handful of sand, throwing Jhul Din and me to the floor as our ship was
hurled blindly away with terrific force, scattering our compact-massed
fleet in a single instant across all the heavens, for millions upon
millions of miles! And as we were flung thus blindly outward I cried
aloud.
"Those red-glowing serpent-ships!" I cried, "They've generated
colossal ether-currents behind them as they fled on--ether-currents
that have shattered our fleet!"
For I knew, even in that desperate instant, that that was the
explanation. Those red-shining ships had been specially designed to
project a great force into the ether behind them that would cause
gigantic currents to whirl through that ether instantly, and the flight
of the serpent-fleet had been feigned to give them a chance to use
those ships! They had loosed the vast ether-currents behind them as
they fled on before us, currents that had flung the ships of our fleet
to all sides like a handful of toys as we raced into them! And now,
with our ships scattered far across the heavens in all directions,
our fleet shattered and disorganized and incapable of resistance, the
massed thousands of serpent-ships ahead had turned and were racing back
toward us!
Back they came, flashing in a close-massed formation still, gathered
thousands of great ships speeding back upon our own ship and upon the
few hundreds of our ships scattered directly about us. In an instant
more they would reach us, and the death-beams of their mighty fleet
would sweep us out of existence, would wipe out our few ships and
proceed onward, annihilating the far-scattered ships of our great fleet
before they could gather to resist! Motionless we hung there in space,
in that instant, as they raced back toward us, the remnant of their
mighty fleet looming vast before us, and I heard as through a great
stillness the clang of the cylinders beneath as our Andromedans swung
them forward, to die fighting to the last!
"It's the end, Dur Nal!" Jhul Din was shouting, and I turned to him, my
eyes meeting his strangely, steadily, in that instant.
"The end for us--and for our universe," I said, softly. Then in the
next instant the mighty serpent-fleet was looming gigantic above and
ahead of us, was flashing down in one titanic swoop upon us!
But what was that? Midway in that swooping plunge the serpent-fleet
had halted, had recoiled! In a daze we looked up toward it, about us,
behind us--and then we were crying out in our excitement. For there
from above and behind us was racing toward us a new, tremendous fleet
of ships, ships that were not oval like the serpent-ships, or long
and flat like our Andromedan craft, but were long and tapering and
cigar-like, as the ships of the Interstellar Patrol had been! In a vast
armada of tens of thousands they were sweeping out from the center of
our galaxy, toward and over us at a speed equal to our greatest speed,
and then from them narrow rays of dazzling red light were springing
out, striking thick among the massed serpent-ships ahead, annihilating
those they struck in bursts of blinding crimson light! And as I saw
that I cried aloud again.
"They're our own galaxy's ships!" My great cry was like a trumpet-call
of faith and hope in that mad moment. "They're the great fleet of ships
the Council Chief said they'd build--and they're striking out now with
us to save our universe!"
_16. From Outside the Universe!_
The moment that followed was one of action and combat on such a scale
as to stun the senses. Even as the great fleet of our galaxy rushed
forward upon the serpent-fleet that had recoiled before it, the
far-scattered ships of our own great armada had had time to rush in
toward me again, to mass behind me. Then, as my fingers flashed down on
the signal-keys, our own Andromedan fleet and the mighty galaxy-fleet
above us were leaping as one toward the serpent-ships! Before those
ships had time to dodge us we were upon them, the galaxy-fleet flashing
above them and our own beneath them, and as we flashed thus above
and beneath them thousands of deadly force-shafts struck up toward
the serpent-ships from beneath, while from above countless brilliant
crimson rays burned down toward them.
It was a scene unimaginable, that, as the three great fleets crossed
and clashed. Three titanic armadas, each of thousands of close-massed
mighty ships, that whirled and struck and ran there in the space
between the crowding stars, three far-distant universes coming at last
to death-grips within one of those universes. Flashing beneath the
serpent-fleet it seemed that in all the firmament above us was but
a single vast mass of oval ships, and as our invisible force-shafts
stabbed up in swift revenge toward those ships they were crumpling here
and there, collapsing and falling, whirling away toward the nearest of
the thundering suns about us, while other ships among and above them
were flaring wildly in great explosions of crimson light and vanishing
as the annihilating rays of the fleet of the Federated Suns struck down
upon them from above.
Thousands of ships, I think, must have gone into annihilation in that
first wild rush of the three fleets, for ships all about our own were
reeling blindly away as the pale beams that whirled down from above
swept through them. Upward and downward those ghostly beams were
leaping thick, finding their mark in many of the ships of our two
fleets, but it was the serpent-fleet that suffered most in that mad
rush. Caught as they were between the deadly fires of both our fleets,
though only in the moment that we flashed past, their ships had yet
vanished by hundreds, by thousands, as force-shaft and red ray flashed
and stabbed among them. I heard Jhul Din shouting with mad joy as we
shot past them beneath, heard, too, the cries of our few followers
among the Andromedan crew beneath and then we were past them, were
pausing in space, as I pressed the keys of the fleet-control, and were
turning to rush back for another blow.
Above us now the great galaxy-fleet was turning likewise, slanting down
beside us, and then our two fleets were leaping together back toward
the serpent-ships. They had courage, the beings in those ships, for
though now the tables were turned and it was we who outnumbered them,
they had turned, massed still closely together, and were racing forward
to meet us. By this time our mighty battle had reeled sidewise toward
one of the near-by suns, a great double yellow star that flamed to our
left in growing, awful glory as we raced across the firmament toward
it; but no thought did we give it in that wild moment, since ahead the
serpent-fleet, forming suddenly into a long wedge, was racing toward
us. On it came, heading straight toward our two fleets that flashed
to meet it, and then just before it reached those fleets it veered
swiftly sidewise, to pass by the side of our own fleet, raking us with
its beams while our own ships should mask them from the rays of the
galaxy-fleet.
In the instant that they had veered, though, I had seen their maneuver,
had pressed lightning-like on the keys before me. Instantly our own
great fleet shot sharply sidewise also, so far sidewise in that moment
that instead of racing past us the serpent-fleet flashed between us and
the galaxy-fleet. And again, as they ran the gauntlet of the terrible
rays and force-shafts of our two fleets, their ships were crumpling and
vanishing in flares of light, through all their mighty mass. Another
such deadly blow and we would have shattered their fleet, I knew, and
as the serpent-ships shot past us and beyond us, their own death-beams
stabbing out sullenly still, our two great armadas were turning again,
were wheeling and flashing back again for another great blow, while to
our side the twin great golden suns toward which we were swaying were
looming now in dazzling grandeur.
Backward, side by side, our two vast fleets shot once more, and before
us the serpent-ships were whirling again upon us! Surely no such
struggle to the death had any universe ever seen as this one, in which
all of our three great fleets seemed intent only on grappling there
until all were destroyed. On toward us the serpent-ships were flashing,
all things before and about us bathed now in the dazzling glare of the
stupendous yellow suns to our left; then, just as their great fleet had
almost reached our own two fleets, racing forward to meet it, they had
dipped, had dived sharply downward to pass beneath us. But in that same
moment, with the same idea, I had pressed the keys before me and our
own fleet, and the galaxy-fleet with us, had dipped down also, rushing
forward; and then in the next wild instant our two great fleets and
that of the serpent-creatures had collided, had crashed head on there
in space!
I had only a blinding vision of those thousands of mighty ships
rushing toward us, and we toward them, and then it seemed that in
all the universe about us was nothing but colliding mighty shapes of
metal, oval and cigar-like and long and flat, as our two massed fleets
crashed into their own. How our own ship escaped, in the van of our
fleet I can not guess, for space about us in that moment was but a
single awful mass of shattered and shattering vessels. Crashing into
each other head on, transformed in an instant from gleaming, leaping
craft to mere twisted wrecks of metal, went the thousands of ships
about us, perishing in thousands in that colossal shock. Before us
there seemed only a single mass of great oval ships leaping toward us,
serpent-pilots plainly visible for a flashing moment in their white-lit
pilot rooms, and then our craft was twisting and swaying and ducking
like a mad thing as Jhul Din shot it this way and that to avoid the
ships before us.
Then, as the impetus of that mighty rush of the three fleets vanished
with their awful crash together, they were hanging there, each
fleet mixed and mingled now with the others in that wild, crashing
moment, no longer three vast organized fleets but a single colossal
mass of countless ships, struggling together, ship to ship, in one
tremendous field of battle there between the suns. It was as though,
in that moment, space about us had become suddenly peopled thick
with struggling ships, before and ahead, to each side and above and
below, striking at each other with red ray or pale beam of invisible
force-shaft, whirling and crashing into each other with inconceivable
fury.
* * * * *
Out of the mass before us a single serpent-ship was rushing head on
toward us. As Jhul Din swerved our ship sharply up to avoid collision
with it, its death-beam leapt toward us, but again we leapt sidewise
and upward to avoid that beam and it shot past us and instantly wiped
the life from one of the cigar-like galaxy-ships behind us. As it did
so, though, our force-shafts were stabbing from their cylinders as our
Andromedans beneath swiftly turned them, and then the ship ahead had
crumpled and vanished; while across and above us shot other pale beams
from beyond as another serpent-ship leapt to take its place.
Crash!--a mighty shock flung us sidewise as our craft reeled over, and
we glimpsed a serpent-ship that had flashed down on us from above,
grazing past us. Our force-shafts leapt from the cylinders toward it,
missed it, and then as its death-beams whirled toward us in passing
there burned past us from behind a brilliant red ray that touched it
and destroyed it in a great burst of crimson light! Then in the next
instant our cylinders were swinging toward a trio of close-ranked
serpent-ships that were rushing toward us, one behind the other. The
death-beams of the foremost leapt out, seared along the edge of our
ship, but at the same moment that foremost ship had crumpled suddenly
beneath our force-shafts, and before the two behind it could swerve
they had crashed into that twisted wreck of metal and into each other.
Then all three buckled, shattered hulks were drifting sidewise from the
battle.
But now all about us an awful glare was growing, and as we whirled
and struck there I looked up to see that our titanic mass of tens of
thousands of struggling ships, whirling on with all their speed and
striking with all their power at each other, were drifting blindly
toward the two flaming yellow suns that loomed now in dazzling size and
splendor just before us! Yet on, on we were whirling, stabbing, soaring
and vanishing, locked still in the colossal death-grip of universes,
on until all about and before us was nothing but thundering, blinding
walls of flame as we reeled sidewise into those two great suns!
Even as we soared and struck there, our force-shafts stabbing in
crumpling death toward the serpent-ships that leapt toward us, I saw
that far away on each side the vast mass of struggling ships, extending
as far as the eye could reach, was reeling sidewise with us, vanishing
already by scores and by hundreds as they reeled into the out-leaping
fiery prominences of the giant golden suns before us. Yet on and on
we were whirling still, all organization and plan gone now, with the
two thundering suns beside us like vast ramparts of blazing fire
across all the heavens, into which we were moving. Then suddenly those
ramparts were all about us, titanic walls of awful flame that seemed to
enclose the great mass of our thousands of struggling ships, and as we
dipped and struck and ran I saw that our great masses were reeling in
_between_ the two suns!
On we went, our gigantic mass of grappling craft staggering into that
narrow gap between the great suns, with their awful roaring fires all
about us, now. Hundreds after hundreds of ships on the edge of our
struggling mass were vanishing in those fires as they reeled too far
to the side, or were licked up by the mighty, outrushing prominences,
only tiny spurts of flame marking their end. Yet still we whirled and
smote at each other, there, until the walls of stupendous fire about
us had dropped back, until we were reeling out from between the suns,
staggering through them, and were swaying on into the space ahead of
us, raging on between the galaxy's thundering suns in our colossal
battle of giants.
Reeling thus onward in mad combat I saw for an instant that now among
the suns before us there stretched the gigantic, glowing mass of the
great nebula we had glimpsed to the left at the battle's beginning, a
tremendous ocean of flaming gas there in the heavens toward which our
vast field of struggling ships was swaying. I saw, too, that but a
score of thousands of ships were left now of each of the three great
mingled struggling fleets, and then all else left my mind as fiercely
toward us swooped again a pair of the serpent-ships about us, one
beneath and one above with their death-beams stabbing up and down
toward us as they drove upon us!
At the instant they did so our cylinders had shot down crumpling death
upon the uprushing ship beneath, and then, as the one above leapt down
toward us before the shafts could be turned on it, Jhul Din whirled our
craft up in a great leap, the sharp prow of our ship ripping through
the rear end of that ship as though through paper, annihilating all in
that ship as the awful cold of airless space rushed into it. An instant
it hung there, all dead in it that instant, and then, before it could
drive aimlessly away, a shaft of red rays stabbing out of the great
mêlée behind us had touched it and destroyed it.
Now before us, as we reeled on in that terrific battle that seemed
to us to have endured for ages, there was glowing a great mass of
light in the heavens, the stupendous cloud of flaming gas that was
the nebula ahead, glowing there among the galaxy's stars that seemed
but tiny sparks beside it. Straight toward its flaming mass our ships
were whirling, locked still in our awful grapple! For the moment I
turned from it, though, as in the struggling mass beside us three
serpent-ships flashed down upon a single galaxy-ship. Our force-shafts
shot out and crumpled one of them even as it flashed down, while at the
same instant the crimson rays of the attacked ship annihilated another.
In the same moment, though, the death-beams of the third ship had
leapt downward, had swept through the galaxy-ship from stem to stern,
annihilating all life inside it and sending it crashing away into the
mass of struggling craft about it, while the third serpent-ship leapt
toward us. But at that moment, over the throb of our generators and
the hiss of our force-shafts, there came to my ears a dull, tremendous
roaring sound that drowned out all else, while about us at the same
time, about all the ships of our onward-reeling mass, was flooding a
vast sea of flaming gas, a fiery ocean into which we were whirling!
"_The battle's going inside the nebula!_" yelled Jhul Din, over the
thunderous roar of flame about us.
"Hold our ship with the rest!" I shouted thickly back to him. "It's
going to be fought to the end this time!"
Now all about us was a single titanic ocean of glowing gas, as our
thousands of struggling ships reeled into the great nebula's raging
fires. Through those fires we could make out dimly the shapes of
the ships about us, whirling and battling on still in that hell of
flame, the heat-resistant hulls of them all enabling them to withstand
the comparatively low temperature of the nebula's sea of flame. On
and on, striking, whirling, grappling, we raged, force-shafts and
death-beams and crimson rays stabbing through the glowing gases that
flooded between us, carrying death and destruction still from ship to
struggling ship. For still ships were flaring crimson and vanishing,
were staggering aimlessly away as the pale beams swept them, or were
crumpling and collapsing as our force-shafts struck them, all life
inside them annihilated as they collapsed by the inrushing sea of
flame, now.
Our titanic battle had reached its height, its climax, I knew,
and with the fierce, desperate fury born of that realization, our
ships were leaping upon the serpent-craft. It was a battle out of
nightmare, that awful struggle, a battle of the thousands of ships
of three great universes that grappled with each other to the death
there in that hell of thundering flame. Gaseous Andromedans in their
long, flat ships, writhing serpent-creatures with their oval craft,
strange, dissimilar shapes from the races of all the galaxy's suns in
their great, cigar-like hulls--all swayed and smote and stabbed there
together in that stupendous struggle, pale beam and red ray and unseen
shaft of force whirling this way and that through the seas of raging
fire through which we reeled. On and on we whirled, all thought of
everything but the enemy ships before us gone as each of the thousands
of ships struck out with all its powers for its races, its universe!
Swiftly now, rocking and grappling there in the nebula's glowing
ocean, with flame above and below and on each side and all about us,
ships around us were vanishing, crashing into each other blindly
amid the roaring fires, taking deadly toll of each other with their
mighty weapons. But ever more swiftly, assailed on all sides by our
terrific attack, the serpent-ships were decreasing in number, and
though our own craft whirled to death about us also I saw that rapidly
the serpent-ships were being annihilated in scores and hundreds as
with the fury of utter reckless single-mindedness we leapt upon them.
Thousands by thousands their ships were vanishing, and though hardly
a score of thousands of ships remained now of our two mighty fleets
the serpent-ships had been reduced to a fourth of that number by our
terrible attack!
Still upon them we sprang, there in the nebula's fires, our
force-shafts and red rays whirling ceaselessly through the thundering
flames about us toward them, though sullenly still their beams sprang
to meet us. Through that inferno of flame, between and through the
whirling ships about us, our own craft leapt, its cylinders still
stabbing forth crumpling death to the oval ships about us, and then
suddenly, in answer to some signal flashed among them, all those oval
craft, those serpent-ships, had driven swiftly upward from the mighty
battle, into the roaring fires above us. In those fires, while we too
drove up through the flaming ocean in pursuit of them, they gathered
for an instant, massing together, and then were flashing away, through
the nebula's flaming sea and out of it into open space once more,
flashing together back toward the galaxy's edge!
"The Cancer cluster!" Jhul Din was screaming, now. "They're in
flight--they're heading back toward the cluster!"
But already I had pressed swiftly on the keys before me, and about us
our ships were massing again, the galaxy-ships with us now; and then
close-massed together we were racing outward, too, out of the mighty
sea of flame about us, bursting out of the titanic nebula into the
open spaces of the galaxy once more, its thronging suns all about us.
Through those suns, back toward the galaxy's edge in swift flight, the
five thousand remaining serpent-ships were flashing, the only surviving
remnant of their vast fleet, that our two armadas had conquered and
all but destroyed. Back toward the Cancer cluster they were fleeing,
upon whose thronging worlds all the hordes of the serpent-races were
massed, and within which those hordes, we knew, would be laboring still
to complete the great cone that now we could destroy. So on after them
our own fleet leapt, a score of thousands of mighty ships in close
formation thundering after our flying enemy.
Past mighty, flaming suns we were racing, in pursuit, past slow-turning
great worlds that moved about those suns and that we raced between and
past, through the galaxy's giant stars toward its edge, toward the
Cancer cluster. On--on--after the fleeing serpent-craft we raced, until
far before us through the crowding suns there came into view the great
cluster toward which they were heading, a gigantic, globular swarm of
suns there at the galaxy's edge. The serpent-ships had reached it, now,
were dropping swiftly down toward it, and as we too flashed above it
we dropped after them in hot pursuit. Down--down--the great ball of
flaming suns was growing swiftly in size as we neared it, the countless
thronging worlds between those suns, packed now with the serpent-races,
visible beneath--down--down--and then suddenly, in obedience to some
unseen order, the serpent-ships fleeing downward beneath us had halted,
had turned, and then were driving straight back up toward us!
* * * * *
So utterly unlooked for was that swift, fierce attack that before we
could swerve aside our downward-rushing thousands of craft had crashed
straight into the uprushing serpent-ships. Then the moment after
that wild shock in which hundreds, thousands of ships had smashed
head-on together, there was battle again there above that mighty ball
of suns, with the giant splendor of our galaxy to one side and the
infinite vault of outer space to the other, a battle such as in sheer,
concentrated intensity none of us had ever yet experienced. Like
senseless mechanisms, with the mad energy of despair, the serpent-ships
drove toward us, flinging away their lives to hold us longer from the
great cluster beneath and its crowded, serpent-peopled worlds, throwing
themselves upon us with such awful fierceness that, outnumbering them
as we did, our fleet reeled and staggered there beneath their blows.
Our ships were falling by the hundreds each moment, but now we gripped
ourselves, sprang upon the attacking serpent-ships with a fury that
matched their own, summoning all the strength of despair ourselves as
the vast battle hung thus in the balance, ourselves leaping down upon
the serpent-ships with a suicidal recklessness that sent them into
annihilation swiftly beneath us. For a single wild moment, it seemed,
their ships and ours alike had gathered their utmost powers for one
last supreme effort, were throwing themselves upon each other with a
last mad burst of strength, and in that moment death-beam and red ray
and unseen force-shafts flashed thick through space from ship to ship.
Then the serpent-ships were thinning in number before us, fewer and
fewer, as regardless of our losses we pressed our fierce attack, until
at last but a scant score of them remained, a score that in the next
moment were gone also, flaring crimson or crumpling and collapsing. A
battered remnant of what had once been two tremendous fleets, but ten
thousand ships left of all our countless thousands, we hung there in
space above the cluster--alone! The serpent-ships were gone at last!
The serpent-fleet was no more!
"We've won!" My cry of triumph was taken up and repeated, by Jhul Din
beside me, by our followers beneath, by all, I knew, in our ships about
us as we hung there. We had won! Had annihilated to the last one the
countless serpent-ships, there in awful battle, reeling with them out
of the outer void and through the galaxy, through thundering suns and
whirling worlds, past dark-star and comet, through the mighty flames
of the great nebula! Had swept the last of their fleet from space and
now were moving down toward the great cluster beneath, toward the
thronging suns and countless worlds among them, where all the hordes of
the serpent-races were massed, dropping down to destroy the last mighty
mechanism with which they had sought to conquer and annihilate us! We
had----
[Illustration: "'We've won!' My cry of triumph was taken up and
repeated."]
But what was that below? Our downward-rushing ships had paused,
millions of miles still above the great cluster, and we were gazing
down toward it, toward a vast, dark shape that was rising from among
its swarming suns! A colossal dark _cone_, that was coming slowly,
deliberately, up among those suns and at sight of which our cries
had died on our lips, our faces masks of blank horror! _It was the
mighty death-beam cone of the serpent-creatures!_ It was the colossal
generator of death that they had brought with them unfinished from
the dying universe, that their serpent-hordes in the cluster beneath
had labored upon while we had fought our mighty battle, and that now,
while the last of the serpent-ships had held us back a moment longer,
they had completed! Up toward us it was coming, slowly rising among
the mighty cluster's suns, ponderously, deliberately, and we knew that
in a moment more it would be rising out of that cluster, would be
annihilating all life in our ships with a single sweep of its colossal
beams of death, would be sailing deliberately on to wipe all the
life from the galaxy's worlds, and give those worlds forever to the
serpent-hordes massed in the cluster beneath! We had not won, but lost!
There was a silence--a silence of death--in that moment, as the
stupendous cone rose up through the ball of suns beneath. Still,
silent, we hung there--our doom rising up beneath us--a moment in
which there whirled through my brain confused, swift visions--our
awful battle in vain--our universe and the Andromeda universe the
serpent-peoples', our races gone forever--and then suddenly into my
whirling brain there penetrated a choking cry. It was from Jhul Din,
and he was at the window, strangling, staggering, pointing out into
the black void of outer space beside us, out to where a little swarm
of great shapes were rushing headlong toward us out of that void! A
hundred great shapes that were like mighty hemispheres of metal, domed
and flatbottomed and gleaming----
"_It's the sun-swinging ships!_" Jhul Din's great cry stabbed into
my dazed brain like a sword of sound. "_It's Korus Kan and the
sun-swinging ships. They escaped from the attraction-ships that
captured them--have come across the void after us----!_"
The sun-swinging ships! The ships that with Korus Kan in them had
been captured and that we had thought destroyed, but that somehow,
in the void outside the Andromeda universe, had escaped from the
attraction-ships that held them, had sped across the void after us
and were now racing in among us, hanging above the giant cluster of
suns beneath, up through which the great cone of doom was rising! Then
from those hundred domed ships hanging there, there sprang downward
vast, broad rays of dark, purple-glowing force, the force with which
the Andromedans had moved all their suns, vast rays that spread out
fanwise as they shot down and that formed a continuous, unbroken wall
of purple-glowing force about all the great cluster beneath, screening
all in that cluster from the gravitational pull of everything outside,
from the pull of the galaxy that alone counterbalanced the attraction
of the cluster's suns toward each other! And as that counterbalancing
pull was shut off, that alone had held the suns of the giant cluster
in their balanced positions, _those suns began slowly to move--to move
toward each other_!
Slowly at first they moved, and then faster and faster, sweeping
majestically in toward each other, the whole giant cluster of swarming
suns contracting, condensing! Inward they moved, and now sun was
crashing into sun, at the cluster's center, sending up towering bursts
of awful flame as they met in titanic shock! Inward the thronging,
blazing suns swept still, crashing now through all the cluster into
each other, worlds that circled about them vanishing in great bursts
of fire as they plunged into or were caught between the suns that
crashed about them! Almost to the great cluster's top had the giant
death-cone reached, as the suns about and below it hurtled inward
to doom, and then we saw two mighty suns on each side of it that
were rushing inward and toward it, converging upon it, annihilating
themselves and it together in the gigantic shock of their collision!
On and on, sun moving into sun, they went, all the worlds about them
vanishing into their fires, annihilating forever all the serpent-hordes
that had massed upon them, all matter and all life inside that cluster
perishing as its thundering suns crashed gigantically into each other!
On and on, until but a single colossal core of fire remained below us,
formed by all the cluster's crashing suns, and that already, as the
domed ships among us turned off their screening force, was beginning
to expand outward, to swell out into a vast nebula of flaming gas! A
mighty nebula there where the great cluster had been! A giant nebula
that held within its fires all that had been the countless invading
serpent-hordes who had swept upon us from--and who had been annihilated
at the last by others from--outside the universe!
_17. Outward Once Again_
Standing outside the mighty tower of the Council of Suns, with the
light of great Canopus brilliant on all about us, Jhul Din, Korus Kan
and I watched, days later, as our Andromedan allies bade us farewell.
Behind us were grouped the massed thousands of the Council, with its
Chief, Serk Haj, beside us, while in close-ranked rows on the ground
before us rested the five thousand Andromedan ships that were all that
remained of the mighty fleet of a hundred thousand that had come across
the void to our universe. From those ships the dozen of the Andromedan
leaders were coming toward us, while in them their crews awaited the
start.
In the intervening days those crews, those thousands of gaseous
Andromedans, had been the recipients of the galaxy's frantic gratitude
at having lifted from it the shadow of doom that had hung upon it, in
all that time when the serpent-creatures, in the Cancer cluster, had
prepared to spread out in their great conquest. Sun had vied with sun,
and world with world, to do the Andromedans honor, for they it was,
as all in the galaxy knew, who had gathered the mighty fleet that had
rushed across the void to our universe's aid. They it was who, with the
galaxy's fleet, had smashed the serpent-armada in such a battle as had
never been known before. And they it was, too, whose great sun-swinging
ships had saved us at the last, had annihilated all the serpent-hordes
and their cone of doom.
And if the galaxy had given to the Andromedans for their aid its
highest honors, it had given no less to us and our followers who had
dared cross the void to seek that aid; to me, who had led that wild
expedition across the gulf and had led the great Andromedan fleet
back to our galaxy and into the colossal battle of universes; to Jhul
Din, who had saved us all, and with us the galaxy's chance of life,
in the serpent-universe; and to Korus Kan, who when captured with the
sun-swinging craft by the attraction-ships had managed to escape them
in the void far out from the Andromeda universe by replacing in an
upward position some of the purple-force projectors of the sun-swinging
ships, blasting the disk-ships that held them with the force of those
projectors and racing back to find our great fleet gone, speeding
across the void after us and flashing in to save us at the last moment.
So great was the gratitude of our galaxy for what we had done that no
reward had been offered, either to us or to the Andromedans. For what
save our universe itself could reward those who had saved that universe?
Now, as the dozen Andromedan leaders came toward us there, the great
Council behind us and the vast throngs about us silent, they paused.
Strange, erect columns of misty green vapor, they poised there,
contemplating us, I knew. Then Serk Haj had reached an arm toward them,
bat-winged being of Deneb with his grasp returned by the misty arms of
the gaseous beings before us, and then they had passed from him to Jhul
Din, and from the big crustacean to Korus Kan, and from his gleaming
metal figure to me. There was a strange tightness across my throat as
I reached a hand out toward them, and they paused as they grasped it,
paused as for the third and for the last time I gripped hands with
these gaseous beings of an alien universe, whose great fleet I had led
through the void from battle to mighty battle. Then they had turned,
were gliding toward their ships.
And now we three turned toward our own long, cigar-like ship that
waited beside us, for we were to pilot them out through our galaxy into
outer space once more. Into our craft we stepped, up into its pilot
room with Korus Kan at the controls once more, and then we were driving
up from the great world beneath, with the five thousand Andromedan
ships behind us, were slanting up and outward--out from that world,
out from great Canopus, until it was dwindling and diminishing behind
us, out through the galaxy's swarming suns and past the great nebula
that had been the Cancer cluster, until we were driving out from the
galaxy's edge into the great void once again.
Our ship and the ships about us slowed, halted. Before us lay the vast
darkness of outer space, infinite in extent. Before us and to the right
in that darkness, far ahead and hardly to be seen, was visible a dim
little flicker of light, the flicker that was the serpent-universe, a
dying universe almost as lifeless as the worlds within it were now. And
to the left and ahead glowed the misty little patch of light that was
the Andromeda universe. Even as our eyes caught it, the ships around us
were moving toward that misty patch, outward into the gulf of space,
passing from about us, their great shapes dwindling swiftly as they
sped out from us, toward their universe. Standing there, shoulder to
shoulder, we three watched them go, until at last they were but tiny
points ahead, were wavering, were vanishing, were gone.
Yet still, though, we stood there unmoving, gazing out after them, with
before us the silence and darkness of the eternal void, and behind us
the galaxy's stars.
THE END
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