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!"