Edmond Hamilton

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”