Climbing up into the little conning-tower, Hal Kur stepped over beside me, and together we gazed out ahead.

The sun was at the ship's left, for the moment, and the sky ahead was one of deep black, in which the stars, the flaming stars of interplanetary space, shone like brilliant jewels. Directly ahead of us there glowed a soft little orb of misty light, which was growing steadily larger as we raced on toward it. It was our destination, the cloud-veiled little world of Earth, mother-planet of all our race. To myself, who had passed much of my life on the four outer giants, on Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, the little planet ahead seemed insignificant, almost, with its single tiny moon. And yet from it, I knew, had come that unceasing stream of human life, that dauntless flood of pioneers, which had spread over all the solar system in the last hundred thousand years. They had gone out to planet after planet, had conquered the strange atmospheres and bacteria and gravitations, until now the races of man held sway over all the sun's eight wheeling worlds. And it was from this Earth, a thousand centuries before, that there had ventured out the first discoverers' crude little spaceboats, whose faulty gravity-screens and uncertain controls contrasted strangely with the mighty leviathans that flashed between the planets now.

Abruptly I was aroused from my musings by the sharp ringing of a bell at my elbow. "The telestereo," I said to Hal Kur. "Take the controls." As he did so I stepped over to the telestereo's glass disk, inset in the room's floor, and touched a switch beside it. Instantly there appeared standing upon the disk, the image of a man in the blue and white robe of the Supreme Council, a lifesize and moving and stereo-scopically perfect image, flashed across the void of space to my apparatus by means of etheric vibrations. Through the medium of that projected image the man himself could see and hear me as well as I could see and hear him, and at once he spoke directly to me.

"Jan Tor, Captain of Interplanetary Patrol Cruiser 79388," he said, in the official form of address. "The command of the Supreme Council of the League of Planets, to Jan Tor. You are directed to proceed with all possible speed to Earth, and immediately upon your arrival there to report

to the Council, at the Hall of Planets. Is the order heard?"

"The order is heard and will be obeyed," I answered, making the customary response, and the figure on the disk bowed, then abruptly vanished.

I turned at once to a speaking-tube which connected with the cruiser's screen rooms. "Make all speed possible to reach Earth," I ordered the engineer who answered my call. "Throw open all the left and lower screens and use the full attraction of the sun until we are within twenty thousand miles of Earth; then close them and use the attraction of Jupiter and Neptune to brake our progress. Is the order heard?"

When he had acknowledged the command I turned to Hal Kur. "That should bring us to Earth within the hour," I told him, "though the Power alone knows what the Supreme Council wants with a simple patrol-captain."

His laugh rumbled forth. "Why, here's unusual modesty, for you! Many a time I've heard you tell how the Eight Worlds would be run were Jan Tor of the Council, and now you're but 'a simple patrol-captain!' "

With that parting gibe he slid quickly down through the door in the floor, just in time to escape a well-aimed kick. I heard his deep laughter bellow out again as the door clanged shut behind him, and smiled to myself. No one on the cruiser would have permitted himself such familiarity with its captain but Hal Kur, but the big engineer well knew that his thirty-odd years of service in the Patrol made him a privileged character.

As the door slammed shut behind him, though, I forgot all else for the moment and concentrated all my attention on the ship's progress. It was my habit to act as pilot of my own cruiser, whenever possible, and for the time being I was quite alone in the round little pilot-house, or conning-tower, set on top of the cruiser's long, fishlike hull. Only pride, though, kept me from summoning an assistant to the controls, for the sun was pulling the cruiser downward with tremendous velocity, now, and as we sped down past Earth's shining little moon we ran into a belt of meteorites which gave me some ticklish moments. At last, though, we were through the danger zone, and were dropping down toward Earth with decreasing speed, as the screens were

thrown open which allowed the pull of Neptune and Jupiter to check our progresss.

A touch of a button then brought a pilot to replace me at the controls, and as we fell smoothly down toward the green planet below I leaned out the window, watching the dense masses of interplanetary shipping through which we were now threading our way. It seemed, indeed, that half the vessels in the solar system were assembled around and beneath us, so close-packed was the jam of traffic. There were mighty cargoships, their mile-long hulls filled with a thousand products of Earth, which were ponderously getting under way for the long voyages out to Uranus or Neptune. Sleek, long passengerships flashed past us, their transparent upper-hulls giving us brief glimpses of the gay groups on their sunlit decks. Private pleasure-boats were numerous, too, mostly affairs of gleaming white, and most of these were apparently bound for the annual Jupiter-Mars space-races. Here and there through the confusion dashed the local police-boats of Earth, and I caught sight of one or two of the long black cruisers of the Inter-planetary Patrol, like our own, the swiftest ships in space. At last, though, after a slow, tortuous progress through the crowded upper levels, our craft had won through the jam of traffic and was swooping down upon the surface of Earth in a great curve.

In a panorama of meadow and forest, dotted here and there with gleaming white cities, the planet's parklike surface unrolled before me as we sped across it. We rocketed over one of its oceans, seeming hardly more than a pond to my eyes after the mighty seas of Jupiter and the vast ice-fringed oceans of Neptune; and then, as we flashed over land again, there loomed up far ahead the gigantic white dome of the great Hall of Planets, permanent seat of the Supreme Council and the center of government of the Eight Worlds. A single titanic structure of gleaming white, that reared its towering dome into the air for over two thousand feet, it grew swiftly larger as we raced on toward it. In a moment we were beside it, and the cruiser was slanting down toward the square landing-court behind the great dome.

As we came to rest there without a jar, I snapped open a 8 small door in the conning-tower's side, and in a moment had descended to the ground by means of the ladder inset in the cruiser's side. At once there ran forward to meet me a thin, spectacled young man in the red-slashed robe of the Scientists, an owlish-looking figure at whom I stared for a moment in amazement. Then I had recovered from my astonishment and was grasping his hands.

"Sarto Sen!" I cried. "By the Power, I'm glad to see youl I thought you were working in the Venus Laboratories."

My friend's eyes were shining with welcome, but for the moment he wasted no time in speech, hurrying me across the court toward the inner door of the great building.

"The Council is assembling at this moment," he explained rapidly as we hastened along. "I got the chairman, Mur Dak, to hold up the meeting until you arrived."

"But what's it all about?" I asked, in bewilderment. "Why wait for me?"

"You will understand in a moment," he answered, his face grave. "But here is the Council Hall."

By that time we had hastened down a series of long white corridors and now passed through a high-arched doorway into the great Council Hall itself. I had visited the place before—who in the Eight Worlds has not?—and the tremendous, circular room and colossal, soaring dome above it were not new to me, but now I saw it as few ever did, with the eight hundred members of the Supreme Council gathered in solemn session. Grouped in a great half-circle around the dais of the chairman stretched the curving rows of seats, each occupied by a member, and each hundred members gathered around the symbol of the world they represented, whedier that world was tiny Mercury or mighty Jupiter. On the dais at the center stood the solitary figure of Mur Dak, the chairman. It was evident that, as my friend had informed me, the Council had just assembled, since for the moment Mur Dak was not speaking, but just gazing calmly out over the silent rows of members.

In a moment we had passed down the aisle to his dais and stood beneath him. To my salute he returned a word of greeting only, then motioned us to two empty seats which had apparently been reserved for us. As I slipped into mine I wondered, fleetingly, what big Hal Kur would have thought

9 to see his captain thus taking a seat with the Supreme Council itself. Then that thought slipped from my mind as Mur Dak began to speak.

"Men of the Eight Worlds," he said slowly, "I have called this session of the Council for the gravest of reasons. I have called it because discovery has just been made of a peril which menaces the civilization, the very existence, of all our race—a deadly peril which is rushing upon us with unthinkable speed, and which threatens the annihilation of our entire universe!"

He paused for a moment, and a slow, deep hum of surprize ran over the assembled members. For the first time, now, I saw that Mur Dak's keen, intellectual face was white and drawn, and I bent forward, breathless, tensely listening. In a moment the chairman was speaking on.

"It is necessary for me to go back a little," he said, "in order that you may understand the situation which confronts us. As you know, our sun and its eight spinning planets are not motionless in space. Our sun, with its family of worlds, has for eons been moving through space at the approximate rate of twelve miles a second, across the Milky Way. You know, too, that all odier suns, all other stars, are moving through space likewise, some at a lesser speed than ours and some at a speed inconceivably greater. Flaming new suns, dying red suns, cold dark suns, each is flashing through the infinities of space on its own course, each toward its appointed doom.

"And among that infinity of thronging stars is that one which we know as Alto, that great red star, that dying sun, which has been steadily drawing near to us as the centuries have passed, and which is now nearest to us of all the stars. It is but little larger than our own sun, and as you all know, it and our own sun are moving toward each other, rushing nearer each other by thousands of miles each second, since Alto is moving at an unthinkable speed. Our scientists have calculated that the two suns would pass each other over a year from now, and thereafter would be speeding away from each other. There has been no thought of danger to us from the passing of this dying sun, for it has been known that its path through space would cause it to pass us at a distance of billions of miles. And had the star

Alto but continued in that path all would have been well. But now a thing unprecedented has happened.

"Some eight weeks ago the South Observatory on Mars reported that the approaching star Alto seemed to have changed its course a little, bearing inward toward the solar system. The shift was a small one, but any change of course on the part of a star is quite unprecedented, so for the last eight weeks the approaching star has been closely watched. And during those weeks the effect of its shift in course has become more and more apparent. More and more the star has veered from the path it formerly followed, until it is now many millions of miles out of its course, with its deflection growing greater every minute. And this morning came the climax. For this morning I received a telestereo message from the director of the Bureau of Astonomical Science, on Venus, in which he informed me that the star's change of course is disastrous, for us. For instead of passing us by billions of miles, as it would have done, the star is now heading straight toward our own sun. And our sun is racing to meet it!

"I need not explain to you what the result of this situation will be. It is calculated by our astronomers that in less than a j^ear our sun and this dying star will meet head on, will crash together in one gigantic flaming collision. And the result of that collision will be the annihilation of our universe. For the planets of our system will perish like flowers in a furnace, in that titanic holocaust of crashing suns!"

Mur Dak's voice ceased, and over the great hall there reigned a deathlike silence. I think that in that moment all of us were striving to comprehend with our dazed minds the thing that Mur Dak had told us, to realize the existence of the deadly peril that was rushing to wipe out our universe. Then, before that silence could give way to the inevitable roar of surprize and fear, a single member rose from the Mercury section of the Council, a splendid figure who spoke directly to Mur Dak.

"For a hundred thousand years," he said, "we races of man have met danger after danger, and have conquered them, one after another. We have spread from world to world, have conquered and grasped and held until we are

masters of a universe. And now that that universe faces destruction, are we to sit idly by? Is there nothing whatever to be done by us, no chance, however slight, to avert this doom?"

A storm of cheers burst out when he finished, a wild tempest of applause that raged over the hall with cyclonic fury for minutes. I was on my feet with the rest, by that time, shouting like a madman. It was the inevitable reaction from that moment of heart-deadening panic, the uprush of the old will to conquer that has steeled the hearts of men in a thousand deadly perils. When it had died down a little, Mur Dak spoke again.

"It is not my purpose to allow death to rush upon us without an effort to turn it aside," he told us, "and fortune has placed in our hands, at this moment, the chance to strike out in our own defense. For the last three years Sarto Sen, one of our most brilliant young scientists, has been working on a great problem, the problem of using etheric vibrations as a propulsion force to speed matter through space. A chip floating in water can be propelled across the surface of the water by waves in it; then why should not matter likewise be propelled through space, through the ether, by means of waves or vibrations in that ether? Experimenting on this problem, Sarto Sen has been able to make small moBls which can be flashed through space, through the ether, by means of artificially created vibrations in that ether, vibrations which can be produced with as high a frequency as the light-vibrations, and which thus propel the models through space at a speed equal to the speed of light itself.

"Using this principle, Sarto Sen has constructed a small ten-man cruiser, which can attain the velocity of light and which he has intended to use in a voyage of exploration to the nearer stars. Until now, as you know, we have been unable to venture outside the solar system, since even the swiftest of our gravity-screen spaceships can not make much more than a few hundred thousand miles an hour, and at that rate it would take centuries to reach the nearest star. But in this new vibration-propelled cruiser, a voyage to the stars would be a matter of weeks, instead of centuries.

"Several hours ago I ordered Sarto Sen to bring his new cruiser here to the Hall of Planets, fully equipped, and at

this moment it is resting in one of the landing-courts here, manned by a crew of six men experienced in its operation and ready for a trip of any length. And it is my proposal that we send this new cruiser, in this emergency, out to the approaching star Alto, to discover what forces or circumstances have caused the nearing sun to veer from its former path. We know that those forces or those circumstances must be extraordinary in character, thus to change the course of a star; and if we can discover what phenomena are the causes of the star's deflection, there is a chance that we might be able to repeat or reverse those phenomena, to swerve the star again from the path it now follows, and so save our solar system, our universe."

Mur Dak paused for a moment, and there was an instant of sheer, stunned silence in the great hall. For the audacity of his proposal was overwhelming, even to us who roamed the limits of the solar system at will. It was well enough to rove the ways of our own universe, as men had done for ages, but to venture out into the vast gulf beyond, to flash out toward the stars themselves and calmly investigate the erratic behavior of a titanic, thundering sun, that was a proposal that left us breathless for the moment. But only for the moment, for when our brains had caught the magnitude of the idea another wild burst of applause thundered from the massed members, applause that rose still higher when the chairman called Sarto Sen himself to the dais and presented him to the assembly. Then, when the tumult had quieted a little, Mur Dak went on.

"The cruiser will start at once, then," he said, "and there remains but to choose a captain for it. Sarto Sen and his men will have charge of the craft's operation, of course, but there must be a leader for the whole expedition, some quick-thinking man of action. And I have already chosen such a man, subject to your approval, one whose name most of you have heard. A man young in years who has served most of his life in the Interplanetary Patrol, and who distinguished himself highly two years ago in the great space-fight with the interplanetary pirates oif Japetus: Jan Tor!"

I swear that up to the last second I had no shadow of an idea that Mur Dak was speaking of me, and when he turned to gaze straight at me, and spoke my name, I could

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only stare in bewilderment. Those around me, though, pushed me to my feet, and the next moment another roar of applause from the hundreds of members around me struck me in the face like a physical blow. I walked clumsily to the dais, under that storm of approval, and stood there beside Mur Dak, still half-dazed by the unexpectedness of the thing. The chairman smiled out at the shouting members.

"No need to ask if you approve my choice," he said, and then turned to me, his face grave. "Jan Tor," he addressed me, his solemn voice sounding clearly over the suddenly hushed hall, "to you is given the command of this expedition, the most momentous in our history. For on this expedition and on you, its leader, depends the fate of our solar system. It is the order of the Supreme Council, then, that you take command of the new cruiser and proceed with all speed to the approaching star, Alto, to discover the reason for that star's change of course and to ascertain whether any means exist of again swerving it from its path. Is the order heard?"

Five minutes later I strode with Sarto Sen and Hal Kur into the landing-court where lay the new cruiser, its long, fishlike hull glittering brilliandy in the sunlight. A door in its side snapped open as we drew near, and through it there stepped out to meet us one of the six blue-clad engineers who formed the craft's crew. "All is ready for the start," he said to Sarto Sen in reply to the latter's question, standing aside for us to enter.

We passed through the door into the cruiser's hull. To the left an open door gave me a glimpse of the ship's narrow living-quarters, while to the right extended a long room in which other blue-clad figures were standing ready beside the ship's shining, conelike vibration-generators. Directly before us rose a small winding stairway, up which Sarto Sen led the way. In a moment, following, we had reached the cruiser's conning-tower, and immediately Sarto Sen stepped over to take his place at the controls.

He touched a stud, and a warning bell gave sharp alarm throughout the cruiser's interior. There were hurrying feet, somewhere beneath us, and then a long clang as the heavy triple-doors slammed shut. At once began the familiar

throb-throb-throb of the oxygen pumps, already at work replenishing and purifying the air in our hermetically sealed vessel.

Sarto Sen paused for a moment, glancing through the broad window before him, then reached forth and pressed a series of three buttons. A low, deep humming filled the cruiser's whole interior, and there was an instant of breathe less hesitation. Then came a sharp click as Sarto Sen pressed another switch; there was a quick sigh of wind, and instantly the sunlit landing-court outside vanished, replaced in a fraction of a second by the deep, star-shot night of interplanetary space. I glanced quickly down through a side window and had a momentary glimpse of a spinning gray ball beneath us, a ball that dwindled to a point and vanished even in the moment that I glimpsed it. It was Earth, vanishing behind us as we fled with frightful velocity out into the gulf of space.

We were hurtling through the belt of asteroids beyond Mars, now, and then ahead, and to the left, there loomed the mighty world of Jupiter, expanding quickly into a large whitebelted globe as we rocketed on toward it, then dropping behind and diminishing in its turn as we sped past it. The sun behind us had dwindled by that time to a tiny disk of fire. An hour later and another giant world flashed past on our right, the icy planet Neptune, outermost of the Eight Worlds. We had passed outside the last frontier of the solar system and were now racing out into the mighty deeps of space with the speed of light on our mad journey to save a universe.

An hour after we had left the solar system Hal Kur and I still stood with Sarto Sen in the cruiser's conning-tower, staring out with him at the stupendous panorama of gathered stars that lay before us. The sun of our own system had dwindled to a far point of light behind us, by that time, one star among the millions that spangled the deep black heavens around us. For here, even more than between the planets, the stars lay before us in their true glory, un-

dimmed by proximity to any one of them. A host of glittering points of fire, blue and green and white and red and yellow, they dotted the rayless skies thickly in all directions, and thronged like a great drift of swarming bees toward our upper left, where stretched the stupendous belt of the Milky Way. And dead ahead, now, shone a single orb that blazed in smoky, crimson glory, a single great point of red fire. It was Alto, I knew, the sullen-burning star that was our goal.

It was with something of unbelief that I gazed at the red star, for though the dials before me assured me that we were speeding on toward it at close to two hundred thousand miles a second, yet except for the deep humming of the craft's vibratory apparatus one would have thought that the ship was standing still. There was no sound of wind from outside, no friendly, near-by planets, nothing by which the eye could measure the tremendous velocity at which we moved. We were racing through a void whose very immensity and vacancy staggered the mind, an emptiness of space in which the stars themselves floated like dust-particles in air, a gulf traversed only by hurtling meteors or flaring comets, and now by our own frail little craft.

Though I was peculiarly affected by the strangeness of our position, big Hal Kur was even more so. He had traveled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life, and now all of his time-honored rules of interplanetary navigation had been upset by this new cruiser, a craft entirely without gravity-screens, which was flashing from sun to sun propelled by invisible vibrations only. I saw his head wagging in doubt as he stared out into that splendid vista of thronging stars, and in a moment more he left us, descending into the cruiser's hull for an inspection of its strange propulsion apparatus.

When he had gone I plunged at once into the task of learning the control and operation of our craft. The next two hours I spent under the tutelage of Sarto Sen, and at the end of that time I had already learned the essential features of the ship's control. There was a throttle which regulated the frequency of the vibrations generated in the engine-room below, thus increasing or decreasing our speed at will, and a lever and dial which were used to project the pro-

pelling vibrations out at any angle behind us, thus controlling the direction in which we moved. The main requisite in handling the craft, I found, was a precise and steady hand on the two controls, since a mere touch on one would change our speed with lightning swiftness, while a slight movement of the other would send us millions of miles out of our course almost instantly.

At the end of two hours, however, I had attained sufficient skill to be able to hold the cruiser to her course without any large deviations or changes of speed, and Sarto Sen had confidence enough in my ability to leave me alone at the controls. He departed down the little stair behind me, to give a few minutes' inspection to the generators below, and I was left alone in the conning-tower.

Standing there in the dark little room, its only sound the deep humming of the generators below and its only lights the hooded glows which illuminated the dials and switches before me, I gazed intently through the broad fore-window, into that crowding confusion of swarming suns that lay around us, that medley of jeweled fires in which the great star Alto burned like a living flame. For a long time I gazed toward the star that was our goal, and then my thoughts were broken into by the sound of Sarto Sen reascending the stair behind me. I half turned to greet him, then turned swiftly back to the window, stiffening into sudden attention.

My eyes had caught sight of a small patch of deep blackness far ahead, an area of utter darkness which was swiftly expanding, growing, until in less than a second, it seemed, it had blotted out half the thronging stars ahead. For a moment the sudden appearance of it dumfounded me so that I stood motionless, and then my hands leaped out to the controls. I heard Sarto Sen cry out, behind me, and had a glimpse of the darkness ahead, obscuring almost all the heavens. The next moment, before my hands had more than closed upon the levers, all light in the conning-tower vanished in an instant, and we were plunged into the most utter darkness which I have ever experienced. At the same moment the familiar hum of the vibration-generators broke off suddenly.

I think that the moment that followed was the one in which 17

I came first to know the meaning of terror. Every spark of light had vanished, and the silencing of the vibration-generators could only mean that our ship was drifting blindly through this smothering blackness. From the cruiser's hull, below, came shouts of fear and horror, and I heard Sarto Sen feeling his way to my side and fumbling with the controls. Then, with startling abruptness, the lights flashed on again in the conning-tower and through the windows there burst again the brilliance of the starry heavens. At the same moment the vibration-generators began again to give off their deep humming drone.

Sarto Sen turned to me, his face white as my own. Instinctively we turned toward the conning-tower's rear-window, and there, behind us, lay that stupendous area of blackness from which we had just emerged. A vast, irregular area of utter darkness, it was decreasing rapidly in size as we sped on away from it. In a moment it had shrunk to the spot it had been when first I glimpsed it, and then it had vanished entirely. And again we were racing on through the familiar, star-shot skies.

I found my voice at last. "In the name of the Power," I exclaimed, "what was that?"

Sarto Sen shook his head, musingly. "An area without light," he said, half to himself; "and our generators—they, too, could not function there. It must have been a hole, an empty space, in the ether itself."

I could only stare at him in amazement. "A hole in the ether?" I repeated.

He nodded quickly. "You saw what happened? Light is a vibration of the ether, and light was non-existent in that area. Even our generators ceased to give off etheric vibrations, there being no ether for them to function in. It's always been thought that the ether pervaded all space, but apparently even it has its holes, its cavities, which accounts for those dark, lightless areas in the heavens which have always puzzled astronomers. If our tremendous speed and momentum hadn't brought us through this one, the pull of the different stars would have slowed us down and stopped us, prisoning us in that dark area until the end of time."

I shook my head, only half-listening, for the strangeness of the thing had unnerved me. "Take the controls," I told

Sarto Sen. "Meteors are all in the day's work, but holes in the ether are too much for me."

Leaving him to his watch over the ship's flight, I descended to the cruiser's interior, where the engineers were still discussing with Hal Kur the experience through which we had just passed. In a few words I explained to them Sarto Sen's theory, and they went back to their posts with awed faces. Passing into the ship's living-quarters myself, I threw myself on a bunk there and strove to sleep. Sleep came quickly enough, induced by the generators' soothing drone, but with it came torturing nightmares in which I seemed to move blindly onward through endless realms of darkness, searching in vain for an outlet into the light of day.

When I awoke some six hours later, the position of the ship seemed quite unchanged. The steady humming of its generators, the smooth, onward flight, the legions of dazzling stars around us, all seemed as before. But when I ascended again to the conning-tower, to relieve Sarto Sen at the controls, I saw that already the star Alto had increased a little its brilliance, dimming the stars around and behind it. And through the succeeding hours of my watch in the conning-tower, it seemed to me almost that the red orb was expanding before my sight, as we hurtled on toward it. That, though, I knew to be only an illusion of my straining eyes.

But as day followed day—sunless, dawnless days which we could measure only by our time-dials—the crimson star ahead waxed steadily to greater glory. By the time we marked off the twentieth day of our flight Alto had expanded into a moon of crimson flame, whose sullen splendor outrivaled the brilliance of all the starry hosts around us; for by that time we had covered half the distance between our own sun and the dying one ahead, and were now flashing on over the last half of our journey.

Days they were without change, almost without incident. Twice we had sighted vast areas of blackness, great ether-cavities like the one we had first plunged through, but these we were fortunate enough to avoid, swerving far out of our course to pass them by. Once, too, I had glimpsed for a single moment a colossal black globe which flashed beside

our path for an instant and then was left behind by our tremendous speed. Only a glimpse did I get of this dark wanderer, which might have been either a runaway planet or burned-out star. And once our ship blundered directly into a vast maelstrom of meteoric material, a mighty whirlpool of interstellar wreckage spinning there between the stars, and from which we won clear only by grace of Sarto Sen's skillful hands at the controls.

Except for these few incidents, though, our days were monotonous and changeless, days in which the care of the generators and the alternate watches in the conning-tower were our only occupations. And a strange stillness had seized us as we fled onward, a brooding silence that fastened itself upon my friends even as upon myself. Something from the vast, eternal silence through which we moved, some quality out of those trackless infinities of space, seemed to have entered into our inmost souls. We went about our duties like men in a dream. And dreamlike our life had become to us, I think, and still more remote and unreal and dreamlike had become the life of the eight worlds that lay so far behind us.

I had forgotten, almost, the mission upon which we sped, and through the long watches in the conning-tower my eyes followed the steady largening of the red sun ahead with curiosity only. Day by day its fiery disk was creeping farther across the heavens, until at last everything in the cruiser was drenched by the crimson, bloodlike light that streamed in through our sunward windows. Then, at last, my mind came back to consideration of the work that lay before us, for over thirty days of our journey had passed and there remained less than a hundred billion miles between Alto and ourselves.

I gave orders to slow our progress, then, and at a somewhat slackened speed our cruiser began to slant up above the plane of the great sun, for it was my plan to gain a position millions of miles directly above the star and then hover there, accompanying it on its race through space and using the powerful little telescopic windows in the conning-tower for our first observations. So through the next two days the giant sun, a single great sea of crimson fire to our eyes, crept steadily downward across the skies as we

slanted over it. Our outside instruments showed us that its heat was many times less than that of our own sun, for this was a dying star. Even so it was necessary to slide special light-repelling shields over all our windows, so blinding was the star's glare.

On the fortieth day of our journey we had reached our goal. Gathered in the conning-tower, Sarto Sen, Hal Kur and I gazed down through its circular, periscopic under-window at the mighty star beneath. We had reached a spot approximately twenty million miles above the sun and had turned our course, so that we now raced above it at a speed that matched its own, like a fly hovering over a world. Below us there lay only a single vast ocean of crimson flame, that reached almost from horizon to horizon, all but filling the heavens beneath us. It was in an awed silence that we gazed down into this tremendous sea of fire, knowing as we did that only the power of the ship's generators kept it from plunging downward.

"And we are expected to investigate—that!" said Hal Kur, gazing down into the hell of flame below. "They talk of turning that aside!"

I looked at him, hopelessly. Then, before I could speak, there came a sudden exclamation from Sarto Sen, and he beckoned me to his side. He had been staring out through one of the powerful little telescopic windows set in the conning-tower's wall, and as I reached him he pointed eagerly through it, out beyond the rim of the fiery sun beneath. I gazed in that direction, straining my eyes against the glare, and then glimpsed the thing that had attracted his attention. It was a little spot of dun-colored light lying beyond the crimson sun, a buff-colored little ball that hung steady behind the great sun at a distance of perhaps a hundred million miles and that accompanied it on its flight through space.

"A planet!" I whispered, and he. nodded. Then Hal Kur, who had joined us, extended his hand too, with a muttered exclamation, and there, thrice the distance of the first from Alto, there hung another and smaller ball. In a few minutes, using the powerful inset glasses, we had discovered no less than thirteen worlds that spun about the sun beneath us and

that accompanied it on its tremendous journey through *
space. Most seemed to revolve in orbits that were billions
of miles from their parent sun, and none of the others was
as large as that inmost planet which we had first discovered.
It was toward this largest world that we finally decided
to head first; so with Sarto Sen at the controls we slanted
down again from our position over the great sun, arrowing
down at reduced speed toward the inmost world. j

Its color was changing from buff to pale red as we neared it, and its apparent size was increasing with tremendous speed as our craft shot down toward it. Gradually, though, Sarto Sen decreased our velocity until by the time we reached an altitude of a few hundred miles above this world our ship was moving very slowly. And now, from outside, came a thin shrieking of wind, a mounting roar that told us plainly that we were speeding through air again, and that this world had at least an atmosphere. None of us remarked on that, though, all our attention being held by the scene below.

Drenched in the crimson light of the sun behind us, it was a crimson world that lay beneath us, a lurid world whose mountains, plains and valleys were all of the same bloodlike hue as the light that fell upon them, whose very lakes and rivers gave back to the sky the scarlet tinge that pervaded all things here. And as our cruiser swept lower we saw, too, that the redness of the planet beneath was no mere illusion of the crimson sunlight but inherent in itself, since all of the vegetation below, grassy plains and tangled shrubs and stunted, unfamiliar trees, were of that same red tinge that was the color-keynote of this world.

Strange and weird as it appeared, though, there seemed no sign of life on the broad plains and barren hills beneath us, and abruptly Sarto Sen headed the ship across the planet's face, speeding low over its surface while we scanned intently the panorama that unrolled beneath us. For minutes our straining scrutiny was unrewarded; and then, far ahead, a colossal shape loomed vaguely through the dusky crimson light, taking form, as we sped on toward it, as a tremendous, soaring tower. And involuntarily we gasped as our eyes took in the hugeness of its dimensions. It consisted of four slender black columns, each less than fifty feet in thick-

22 ness, which rose from the ground at points a half-mile separated, four mighty pillars which slanted up into the crimson sunlight for fully ten thousand feet, meeting and merging at that distance above the ground and combining to support a circular platform, and on it we could see the shapes of what appeared to be machines, and other shapes that moved about them, though whether these last were human or not could not be distinguished from our height. And then, as my gaze fell toward the mighty tower's base, my cry brought the eyes of the others to follow my pointing finger. For gathered beneath and around the tower and extending away into the surrounding country were the massed buildings of a city. Low and flat-roofed and utterly strange in appearance were those buildings, and the narrow streets that pierced their huddled masses were all of the same smooth blackness as the tower itself—black, deep black, the roofs and streets and walls, laced with crimson parks and gardens that lay against their blackness like splashes of blood. And looming over all, its four tremendous columns rearing themselves above the streets and roofs and gardens like the limbs of a bestriding giant, the mighty tower soared into the crimson sunlight.

Sarto Sen flung an arm down toward the tower's platform,
beneath us, and toward the shapes that moved on that plat-
form. "Inhabited!" he cried. "You see? And that means that
Alto's change in course was----- "

He broke off; uttered a smothered cry. A spark of intense white light had suddenly broken into being on the platform beneath us, a beam of blinding light that stabbed straight up toward us, bathing the cruiser in its unearthly glow. And suddenly our ship was falling!

Sarto Sen sprang to the controls wrenched around the power-lever. "That ray!" he cried. "It's attractive!—it's pulling us down!"

Our ship was vibrating now to the full force of its generators, but still we were falling, plunging headlong down toward the round platform beneath. I glimpsed Sarto Sen working frantically with the controls, and heard a hoarse cry from Hal Kur. There was a blinding glare of light all around us, now, and through the window I saw the platform

below rushing up toward us with appalling speed. It was nearer, now . . . nearer . . . nearer . . . crash!

Ill

I think that in the minute after the crash no one in the conning-tower made a movement. The blinding ray outside had vanished at the moment of our crash, and we were now lying sprawled on the little room's floor, where the shock of the collision had thrown us. In a moment, though, I reached for a support and scrambled to my feet. As I did so there came shouts from the hull beneath us, and then a loud clang as one of the cruiser's lower doors swung open. I sprang to the window, just in time to see our six engineers pour out of the hull beneath me, emerging onto the platform on which our ship rested, and gazing about them with startled eyes.

I ripped open the little door in the conning-tower's side, to shout to them to come back, and even as I did so saw one of the men run back into the cruiser as though in fear. The others were staring fixedly across the broad platform, and in that moment, before I could voice the warning on my lips, their doom struck. There was a quick sigh of wind, and from across the platform there sprang toward them a tiny ball of rose-colored fire, a ball that touched one of the men and instantly expanded into a whirlwind of raging flame. A single moment it blazed there, then vanished. And where the five men had stood was—nothing.

Stunned, stupefied, my eyes traveled slowly across the surface of the great platform. Strange, huge machines stood close-grouped upon it, great shining structures utterly unfamiliar in appearance. At the center of this group of mechanisms stood the largest of them, a great tube of metal fully a hundred feet in length, which was mounted on a strong pedestal which pointed up into the sky like a great telescope. It was none of these things, though, that held my attention in that first horror-stricken moment of inspection. It was the dozen or more grotesque and terrible shapes which stood grouped at the platform's farther edge, returning my gaze.

They were globes, globes of pink, unhealthy-looking flesh 24 more than a yard in diameter, each upheld by six slender, insectlike legs, not more than twelve inches long, and each possessing two similar short, thin limbs which served them as arms and which projected at opposite points from their pink, globular bodies. And between those arms, set directly in the side of the round body itself, were the only features-two round black eyes of large size, browless and pupilless, and a circle of pale skin which beat quickly in and out with their breathing.

Motionless they stood, regarding me with their unhuman eyes, and now I saw that one, a little in advance of the others, was holding extended toward me a thin disk of metal, from which, I divined instantly, the destroying fire had sprung. Yet still I made no movement, staring across the platform with sick horror in my soul.

I heard a thick exclamation from Hal Kur, behind me, as he and Sarto Sen came to my side and gazed out with me. And now the grouped creatures opposite were giving utterance to sounds—speech-sounds with which they seemed to converse—low, deep, thrumming tones which came apparently from their breathing-membranes. They moved toward us, the fire-disk still trained upon us, and then one stopped and motioned from us to the platform on which he stood. He repeated the gesture, and its meaning was unmistakable. Slowly we stepped out of the conning-tower and descended by the ladder in the cruiser's side to the platform itself.

Our captors seemed to pause for a moment, now, and I had opportunity for a quick inspection of our ship. Sucked down as it had been by the attractive ray of those strange creatures, it had yet fallen on a clear space on the platform and seemed to have suffered no serious injury, for it was stoutly built and our fall had been short. The lower door in its side was still open, I saw, and now a half-dozen of the globe-creatures entered this, scurrying forward like quick insects on their six short legs. They disappeared from view inside the cruiser's hull, returning in a moment with their fire disks trained upon the single engineer who had run back into the ship and escaped the doom of his fellows. This man, Nar Lon by name, had been the chief of the six engineers, and as his guards herded him to our side his

face was white with terror. Finding us still alive, though, he seemed to take courage a little.

Now the thrumming conversation of the creatures about us broke off, and one turned to the edge of the platform, touching a stud in the floor there. At once a circular section of the metal floor, some ten feet across, slid aside, revealing a round dark well of the same diameter, which apparently extended down into one of the great tower's four supporting columns. At the top of this shaft hung a small, square metal cage, or elevator, and into this we were shepherded at once, two of our captors entering the cage with us and keeping their fire-disks trained still upon us. There was the click of a switch, then a sudden roar of wind, and instantly the cage was shooting downward with tremendous speed. Only a moment we flashed down through the roaring darkness, and then the cage came to rest and a section of wall beside it slid aside, admitting a floor of dusky, crimson light. At once we stepped out, followed by our two guards.

We were standing at the foot of a mighty column down which we had come, standing on the floor of a great, circular, flat-roofed room, in and out of which were moving scores of the globe-creatures. From the very center of the room, behind us, rose the fifty-foot thickness of the huge pillar, soaring up obliquely and disappearing through the building's roof, two hundred feet above. Except for the pillar and the hurrying figures around us the great room was quite bare and empty, lit only by high, narrow slits in its walls which admitted long, shafting bars of the crimson sunlight. I heard Hal Kur muttering his astonishment at the titanic scale on which all things in this strange world seemed planned, and then there came a thrumming order from our guards, who gestured pointedly toward a high doorway set in the room's wall opposite us. Obediently we started across the floor toward it.

Passing through it, we found ourselves in a long, narrow corridor, apparently a connecting passage between another building and the one we had just left. There were windows on its sides, circular openings in the walls, and as we passed down the hall I glimpsed through these the city that lay around us, a vista of black streets and crimson gardens through which thronged other masses of the globe-creatures.

Then, before I could see more, the corridor ended and we passed into a large anteroom occupied by a half-dozen of the globe-men, all armed with fire-disks which they trained instantly upon us.

There ensued a brief conversation between our guards and these, and then they stood aside, allowing us to pass through a narrow doorway into a smaller room beyond. Its sides were lined with shelves holding what seemed to be models of machines, all quite unfamiliar in appearance. At the far end of the room stood a low, desklike structure whose surface was covered with other models and with white sheets of stiff cloth or paper covered with drawings and designs, and behind this sat another of the globe-men, a little larger than any we had yet seen. As we halted before him he inspected us for a moment with his large, unwinking eyes, then spoke in deep, thrumming inflections to our two guards. The latter answered him at length, and again he considered us.

During the moments that we stood there I had noted that Sarto Sen, beside me, seemed intensely interested in the models and design-covered sheets which lay on the desk before us. Now, as the creature behind the desk seemed to pause, my friend moved forward and picked up one of the sheets, and a metal pencil which lay beside it. In a moment he was drawing on the sheet some design which I could not see, and this done he handed it to the monster behind the desk. The latter reached for it, inspected it closely, and then raised his eyes to Sarto Sen with something of surprize apparent even on his unhuman features. He uttered a short command, then, and instantly one of the two guards motioned Sarto Sen aside, while the other herded Hal Kur, Nar Lon and me again toward the door. As we passed out of the room I glanced back and saw Sarto Sen, still under the watchful eyes of his guard, bending over the desk, intensely interested, sketching another design.

Again we were in the anteroom, in which there lounged still the guard of armed globe-men. Instead of returning to the corridor through which we had come, though, we were conducted through a door on the room's opposite side, and passed down a similar long hall, halted at last by our guard before a low door in its side. This he flung open,

motioning us to enter, and as the death-dealing disk in his grasp was trained full upon us we had no choice but to obey, and passed into a square, solid-walled little room which was but half-lit by a few loopholes in one of its sides. Behind us the door slammed shut, its strong bolts closing with a loud grating of metal. We were prisoners-prisoners on the planet of a distant star.

And now, looking back, it seems to me that the days of imprisonment which followed were the most terrible I have ever known. Action, no matter of what sort, gives surcease at least from mental agony, and it was agony which we suffered there in our little cell. For with the passing of every day, every hour, the crimson sun above was drawing nearer toward our own by millions of miles. And we, who alone had power to find the cause of the red sun's deflection—we lay imprisoned there in the city of the globe-men, watching doom creep upon our universe.

Hour followed hour and day followed day, remorselessly, while we lay there, hours and days which we could measure only by the steady circling of the sunlight that slanted through our tiny windows. With each night came cold, a bitter cold that penetrated to our bones, and for all the red splendor of the dying sun above, the days were far from warm. Twice each day the door opened and a guard cautiously thrust in our food, which consisted of a mushy mixture of cooked vegetables and a bottle of red-tinged, mineral-tasting water.

We spoke but little among ourselves, except to wonder as to the whereabouts of Sarto Sen. We had heard nothing of him since we had left him and could not know even whether our friend was alive or dead. What our own fate was to be we could not guess, nor, in fact, was even that of much interest to us. A few months longer and we would meet death with all on this planet, when Alto and our own sun crashed together. Whether or not we lived until then was hardly a great matter.

Then, ten days after our capture, there came the first break in the monotony of our imprisonment. There was a rattle of bolts at our door; it swung open, and Sarto Sen

stepped inside. As the guards outside closed the door my friend sprang toward me, his face eager.

"You're all right, Jan Tor?" he exclaimed quickly. "They told me you were unharmed, but I worried—"

A phrase in his speech struck me. "They told you?" I repeated. "They?"

He nodded, his eyes holding mine. "The globe-men," he said simply.

We stared at him, and he stepped swiftly to the door, tried it and found it fast, then came back and sat down beside us.

"The globe-men," he repeated solemnly, "those children of Alto, those creatures of hell, who have turned their parent sun from its course to send it crashing into our own, to wipe out our universe."

At our exclamations of stunned surprize he was silent, musing, his eyes seeming to gaze out through somber vistas of horror invisible to us. When he spoke again it was slowly, broodingly, as though he had forgotten our presence.

"I have found what we came here to learn," he was saying; "have discovered the reason for the deflection of this star. Yet even before, I guessed. ... If a star had planets and those planets inhabitants—inhabitants of supreme science, supreme power—would they not use that science and that power to save themselves from death, even though it means death for another universe? And that is what they have done, and what I suspected before.

"It was that suspicion that stood me in good stead when we were examined there by the chief of the globe-men. I had glimpsed on his desk sheets with astronomical designs on them, and so I took a sheet myself and drew on it a simple design which he understood immediately, a design which represented two suns colliding. It convinced him of my knowledge, my intelligence, so that when he sent the rest of you to this cell he retained me for questioning. And for hours afterward I drew other sketches, other designs, while with gestures he interrogated me concerning them. It was slow, fumbling communication, but it was communication, and gradually we perfected a system of signs and drawings by which we were able to exchange ideas. And

29 through the succeeding days our sign-communication continued.

"I informed him, in this way, that we were visitors from another star, but I was too cautious to let him know that we were children of the sun into which Alto was soon to crash. Instead I named Sirius as our native star, explaining that we had come from there in our vibration-cruiser for purposes of exploration. It was the cruiser which interested him most, evidently. The scientists of the globe-people had been examining it, he told me, and he now asked me innumerable questions concerning its design and operation. For though the globemen have gravityrscreen ships, like our own old-fashioned ones, in which they can travel from planet to planet, they have no such star-cruisers as this one of ours. Hence his questions, which I evaded as well as I could, turning the subject to the coming collision of the two suns, which I stated had been foreseen by the astronomers of my own universe. And as I had expected, my news of the coming collision was no surprize to him. For, as he casually explained, that collision was being engineered in fact by his own people, the globe-men, for their own purposes.

"For ages, it seems these globemen have dwelt on the planets of Alto. First they had inhabited the outermost planet, billions of miles from Alto itself, but which was yet warm enough for existence because of their sun's titanic size and immense heat. There they had risen to greatness, had built up their science and civilization to undreamed-of heights. But as the ages passed, that outermost world of theirs was growing colder and colder, since Alto, like all other suns, was slowly but steadily cooling, shrinking and dying, radiating less and less heat. At last there came a time when the planet of the globe-men was fast becoming too cold for existence there, and then their scientists stirred themselves to find a way out. Spurred on by necessity, they hit upon the invention of the gravity screen and with it constructed their first interplanetary space-ships. These they made in vast numbers, and in them the globe-people moved en masse to the next innermost planet, which still received enough heat from Alto to support life. There they settled, and there their civilization endured for further ages.

"But slowly, surely, their sun continued to cool and die, and with the terrible, machinelike inevitability of natural laws there came a day when again their world had grown too cold for their existence. This time, though, they had the remedy for their situation at hand, and again there took place a great migration from their cold planet to a warmer inner one. And so, as the ages passed, they escaped extinction by migrating from planet to planet, moving ever sunward as their sun waned in size and splendor, creeping closer and closer toward its dying fires.

"At last, though, after long ages, there drew down toward them the doom which they had averted for so long. Alto was still shrinking, cooling, and now they were settled upon its warmest, inmost planet, and had no warmer world to which to flee. But a short time longer, as they measured time, and their planet would become a frozen, lifeless world, for their sun would inevitably cool still further until it was one of the countless dark stars, dead and burned-out suns, which throng the heavens. It seemed, indeed, that this time there was to be no escape.

"But now there came forward a party among them which advanced a proposal of colossal proportions. They pointed out that Alto was moving steadily toward another sun, one much the same size as their own but flaming with heat and life, which it would pass closely within a short time. But if, instead of passing each other, the two suns should meet, should crash into each other, what then would be the result? It would be, of course, that the collision would form one new sun instead of the former two—one titanic, flaming sun whose heat would be sufficient to support life on any planet for countless ages. The inmost planets of Alto's system, and virtually all the planets of the other sun's system, would be annihilated by the collision, of course, would perish in that flaming shock of suns. But the outermost planets of Alto, which lay in orbits billions of miles from it, would be safe enough and would take up their orbits around this great new sun in place of Alto. And on these planets the globe-people could exist for eons, supported by the heat of the great new sun. It was a perfect plan, and required only that their own sun, Alto, be swerved

from its path just enough to make it crash into the other sun instead of passing it.

"To accomplish this, to swerve their star from its course, the globemen made use of a simple physical principle. You know that a round, spinning body, moving across or through any medium, changes its direction if the rate of its spinning is changed. A ball that rolls across a smooth table without spinning at all will move in a straight line. But if the ball spins as it rolls it will move in a curved line, the amount and direction of curve depending upon the amount and direction of spin. Now their sun, which had rotated at the same rate for ages, had rolled through the ether for ages on the same great course, never swerving. And so, they reasoned, if their sun's rate of spin or rotation could be increased a little it would curve aside a little from its accustomed course.

"The problem, then, was to increase their sun's rate of spin, and to accomplish this they gathered all their science. A mighty tower was erected over their city, on whose great top-platform were placed machines which could generate an etheric ray or vibration of inconceivable power, a ray which could be directed at will through the great telescopelike projector which they had provided for it.

"This done, they waited until the moment calculated by their astronomers, then aimed the great projector-tube at the edge of their sun that was rotating away from them, and turned on the ray. This was the crucial point of their scheme, for now they were risking their very universe. It was necessary for them to increase their sun's rate of spin just enough to make it swerve aside, but if the rate of spin were increased just a little too much it would mean disaster, since when a sun spins too fast it breaks up like a great flywheel, splits into a double star. It is that process, the process of fission, which has formed the countless double stars and bursted suns in the heavens around us, since each was only a single star or sun which broke up because of its too-great speed of rotation, or spin. And the globe-men knew that it would require but very little increase in their own sun's rate of spin to make it, too, split asunder. So they watched with infinite care while their brilliant ray stabbed up toward the sun's edge, and when, under the terrific

power of that pushing ray, the star began to spin faster, they at once turned off the ray, which was used for a short time only. But it had been effective; for now, as their sun spun faster, it began to swerve a little from its usual course, and they knew that now it would crash into the other approaching sun instead of passing it. So their end was achieved, and so they began their preparations for their great migration out to Alto's outermost planets, a migration which would take place just before the collision. And then —we came.

"We came, and now we have discovered that for which we came, the reason for Alto's change in course. For it was the science and will of the globe-men that turned their sun aside, that threatens now the annihilation of the Eight Worlds. Doom presses upon them, and to escape that doom they are destroying our sun, our planets, our very universe!"

I do not remember that any of us spoke, when Sarto Sen's voice had ceased. And yet, stunned as we were by the thing he had told us, our knowledge was in some ways a relief. We had discovered, at least, what had swerved Alto from its course, and if science and intelligence alone could cause the sun to veer from its path, science and intelligence might steer it back into that path.

When I said as much to Sarto Sen his face lit up. "You are right, Jan Tor!" he exclaimed. "There's a chance! And even as Mur Dak predicted, that chance depends on us. For if we can escape from here and get back to the Eight Worlds, we can come back with a greater force and crush these globe-men, and use their own force-projector to swerve their sun out of its present path."

"But why go back to the Eight Worlds?" objected Hal Kur. "Why not get up to that platform, if we escape, and use the projector ourselves?"

Sarto Sen shook his head. "It's impossible," he told the big engineer. "If we escape from here at all it will be by night, for by day the rooms and corridors outside are thronged with globe-men. And by night we could do nothing, for

Alto, the sun itself, would not then be in the sky. Nor could we wait for its rising, there on the platform, since our escape would soon be discovered, and we should be attacked there. Our only chance is to get out of here by night, make our way up to the platform, and make a dash for our ship. If we can do that we can flash back to our own universe and get the help we need to crush these globe-people."

"But when shall we make the attempt?" I asked, and my heart leaped at Sarto Sen's answer. "Tonight! The sooner we get out the better. A few hours after dark we'll try it."

He went on, then, to unfold his plan for escape, and we listened intently, while big Hal Kur's eyes gleamed at the prospect of action. Our plan was simple enough, and likely enough to fail, we knew, but it was our only chance. What course we would follow after getting free of our cell we did not even discuss. There was nothing for it but to make our break and trust to luck to bring us through the thousand obstacles that lay between us and the tower-platform which held our ship.

The remaining hours of that day were the longest I have ever experienced. The slanting shafts of light from the loopholes seemed to move across the room with infinite slowness, while we awaited impatiently the coming of night. At last the light-bars darkened, disappeared, as the dying crimson sun sank beyond the rim of the world outside. Darkness had descended on that world, now, and here and there among the buildings, and streets of the weird city outside flared points of red light. Still we waited, until the vague, half-heard sounds of soft movement and thrumming speech outside had lessened, ceased, until at last, the only sound to be heard was an occastional shuffling movement of the guard outside the door.

Sarto Sen rose, making to us a signal of readiness, and then threw himself flat on the floor of the room's center. At the farther side of the cell lay Hal Kur and Nar Lon, as though sleeping, with a thick roll of garments between them which resembled another sleeping figure. These preparations made, I stepped to the door and stationed myself directly ins-de it, to one side, my heart pounding now as the moment for action approached.

All was ready, and seeing this, Sarto Sen began his part. Lying there on the floor he gave utterance to a low, deep groan. There was silence for a moment, and then another low moan arose from him, and now I heard a shuffling movement outside the door as the guard there approached to listen. Again Sarto Sen groaned, terribly, and after a moment's pause there came a rattling of bolts as the guard slid them aside. I flattened myself back against the wall, and in a second the door opened.

Even in the darkness, glancing sidewise, I could make out the round, globular form of the guard, his eyes peering into our cell and his fire-disk held out in cautious readiness. A moment he paused, peering at the three dim figures lying across the room; then, as if satisfied, turned his eyes back upon Sarto Sen, at the same moment taking a step inside the door. And with a single bound I was upon'him.

Of all the fights in my career I place that struggle there in the darkness with our globe-man guard as the most horrible. I had leaped with the object of wresting the deadly lire-disk from him before he could make use of it, and fortunately the force of my spring had knocked it from his grasp. His short, thin arms clutched at me with surprizing power, though, while the insect-like lower limbs grasped my own and pulled me instantly to the floor. A moment I rolled there in mad combat, striving to gain a hold on my opponent's smooth, round body, and then a thing happened (he memory of which sickens me even now. For as my hands clutched for a hold on the sleek, cold, globular body, I hat body suddenly collapsed beneath my weight breaking like a skinful of water and spurting out a mass of semi-liquid jellylike substance which flowed across the floor in a shining, malodorous mass. Fleshlike as they were in appearance, these creatures were but globular shells of ooze.

Sick to my very soul I rose to my feet, looking wildly at the others, who had rushed to aid me. There had been no cry from our guard during that moment of combat and I lie silence around us was unchanged. Sarto Sen was already nt the door, peering down the corridor, and in a moment we were out of the cell and making our way stealthily down the long hall. As we left the cell, though, my foot

struck against something, and reaching down I picked up the little fire-disk of our guard. As we crept down the long corridor I clutched it tightly in my hand.

The long hall, dimly lit by a few red flares set in its walls, seemed quite deserted. Ahead, though, shone a square of brighter light, and we knew this to be the spot where the corridor crossed the anteroom of the guards. Nearer we crept toward it, even more stealthily, until at last we crouched at the edge of the open doorway, staring into the bright-lit anteroom.

There were but four of the globemen guards in it now, and three of these were apparently sleeping, resting with closed eyes on a long, low seat against the wall. The other, though was moving restlessly about the room, the deadly fire-disk in his grasp ready for action. We must cross this room, I knew, to reach the hall of the great pillar, yet it would mean instant death to attempt it beneath the eyes of this creature.

A moment we crouched there, undecided whether or not to chance all in a rush for the one wakeful guard, when the entire matter was suddenly taken out of our hands. The globe-man, in his pacing about the room, had come within a few feet of the doorway outside which we crouched, and at that very moment the silence around us was shattered by a sound which came to my ears like the thunder of an explosion. Hal Kur had sneezed!

With the sound the pacing guard wheeled instantly and confronted us, uttering a thrumming cry which brought the other three instantly to their feet. We were evenly matched, four to four, and before they had time to use their deadly disks we were upon them. The next moment was one of wild confusion, a whirling of men and globular bodies about the little room, a babel of hoarse shouts and thrumming cries. Clinging desperately to one of the slippery creatures I had a momentary glimpse of Hal Kur raising one of the guards bodily into the air and crashing him down on the hard floor like a smashed egg. Then a powerful twist of my opponent flung me sidewise out of the combat.

I staggered to my feet and saw that one guard lay broken and dead on the floor while the other three had

slipped from our clutches and were retreating through the doorway by which we had come. Abruptly they paused, mid the arm of one came up with a fire-disk trained full upon us.

In that moment I became aware of something in my hand to which I had clung through all the mêlée, something round and thin and hard, with a raised button on its side. Instinctively, entirely without thought, I raised the thing toward the three guards opposite, pressing the button on its side. A little ball of rosy fire seemed to leap out from my hand with the action, flicking sighingly through the air and striking the group of globe-men squarely. There was a roar of flame, a moment's flaring up of raging pink fire, and I lien flame and guards alike had vanished.

I turned, staggered with my friends toward the door. From far behind, now, we heard deep, thrumming cries, and the shuffle of quick feet. Our escape was discovered, we knew, and our only chance lay in reaching the great pillar and its cage-lift before we were cut off, so we raced on down the corridor with our utmost speed, sparing no breath for speech. The cries behind were growing swiftly louder and nearer, and somewhere near by there was a sudden clamor of gongs. But now we were bursting recklessly into (he great hall, finding it quite empty, its deep shadows dispelled only by a few feeble points of light. Into the upper darkness loomed the vast bulk of the great, slanting column, and with the last of our strength we reeled across the floor toward it.

The door in the pillar's side was open, and through it we tumbled hastily into the little cage-elevator inside. The clamor of pursuit was growing rapidly in volume, now. Frantically I fumbled with the studs in the cage's side, with which I had seen our captors operate it. There was a moment of heart-breaking delay, and then, just as the uproar of pursuit seemed about to burst into the great hall, a switch clicked beneath my fingers and instantly our cage was shooting up the shaft with tremendous speed, toward the platform above.

A moment of this thundering progress and then the car slowed, stopped. We were in absolute darkness, but before sliding aside the section of platform over us I whispered

tensely to the others. "There will be guards on the platform," I told them, "but we must make away with them at once and get to the ship. It's our only chance, for there must be cage-lifts in the other pillars too, and they'll come up those after us."

With the words I touched the lever which swung aside the section of floor above us, and instantly it slid back with a metallic jarring sound that made my heart stand still. There was no sound of alarm, though, from above, so after a moment of tense waiting we rose silently from the cage and stepped out upon the platform itself.

We were standing near the edge of the platform, which was partly illuminated by splashes of ruddy light from a few flares suspended over it. Far below in the darkness lay the city of the globe-men, outlined only by a sparse peppering of twinkling crimson lights. Above stretched the splendid, star-jeweled skies, in which I could discern the brilliant yellow orb that was the sun of the Eight Worlds. And now I turned my attention back to the platform, and glancing beyond the dark, enigmatic mechanisms which loomed around us, I saw the long, gleaming bulk of our cruiser, lying still in the clear space where it had fallen. Beside it a suspended flare poured down its red light, and under the light were gathered three of the globe-men, examining intently some small mechanism on the floor.

I wondered, momentarily, whether these creatures had yet discovered the secret of our cruiser's design and operation, and then forgot my wonder as we began to creep stealthily toward them. As we crawled past a Httle heap of short, thick metal bars, each of us grasped one, and then crept on again. In a moment we were within a dozen paces of the unsuspecting globe-men, and at once we sprang to our feet and charged down upon them with uplifted maces.

So unexpected and so swift was our attack that the three had time only to turn toward us, half-raising their fire-disks, and then our heavy clubs had crashed down through their round, soft bodies, sending them to the floor in a sprawling oozing mass. We dropped our weapons and sprang toward the cruiser.

Its lower door was open, and instantly we were inside it 38

At once Sarto Sen sprang up the stair toward the conning-tower, while Hal Kur and Nar Lon raced into the generator-room. I paused to slam shut the heavy door, its closing automatically starting the throbbing oxygen pumps, and then hastened up the stair also. Even as I did so there began the familiar humming of the vibration-generators, droning out with swiftly gathering power. And now I had reached the conning-tower, where Sarto Sen was working swiftly with the controls.

At the moment that I burst into the little room there came a sudden harsh grating of metal from outside, and then a score of high-pitched, thrumming cries. I sprang to the window, and there, across the red lit platform, a mass of dark, globular figures had suddenly poured up onto the platform's surface, from another of its pillar-lifts. They ran toward us, heard the humming of the cruiser's generators, and then stopped short. Their fire-disks swept up and a dozen balls of Ihe destroying flame leapt toward us. But at the moment that they did so there was a swift clicking of switches beneath the hands of Sarto Sen, a sudden roar of wind, and then the red-lit platform and all on it had vanished from sight as our ship flashed out again into the void of space.

Always, now, I remember the weeks of our homeward llight as a seemingly endless time during which we flashed on and on through space, struggling against our own desire to sleep. For now there were but four of us to operate the cruiser, and the generators alone required the constant care of two of our number, while another must stand watch in the conning-tower. That meant that each of us could grasp hut a few hours of sleep at irregular intervals, while our ship fled on. Even so I do not think that we could have managed with any other engineer than Nar Lon, for he, who had been chief of the engineers, was equal to three men in his knowledge and vigilance.

So we sped on, while Alto dwindled in size behind us, and the bright star that was our own sun burned out in waxing glory ahead. And through the long hours of my watches in

the conning-tower I watched red star and yellow with an unceasing, growing tearfulness, for well I knew that with each second they were leaping closer and closer toward each other, and toward the doom of the Eight Worlds.

On and on our cruiser hummed, at its highest speed, fleeing through the void toward our own sun with the velocity of light. And surely never was voyage so strange as ours, since time began. A voyage from star to star, in a ship flung forward by unseen vibrations, its crew four haggard and burning-eyed men who were racing against time to carry the news on which depended the fate of our universe. Dreamlike had been our outward voyage, but this homeward flight resembled an endless torturing nightmare.

At last, though, its end drew in sight, and gradually we slackened speed as we flashed nearer toward our own universe. By the time we received our first telestereo challenge from an Interplanetary Patrol cruiser outside Neptune we were moving at a scant million miles an hour. When we announced our identity, though, a peremptory order was flashed across the solar system for all interplanetary traffic to clear the space-lanes between ourselves and Earth, so that we were able to hurtle on toward the green planet at full speed without danger of collisions. And so, at last, our ship was slanting down again over the great Hall of Planets, into the very landing-court from which we had made the start of our momentous voyage.

Fighting against the fatigue which threatened to overwhelm me, I staggered out of the cruiser into the waiting hands of those in the landing-court, and five minutes later I was stumbling onto the dais where Mur Dak faced the hastily assembled Council. Standing there, swaying a little from sheer exhaustion, I spoke to Mur Dak and to the Council, relating in concise phrases the events of our voyage and the discovery we had made. When I had finished, saluting and slumping into a chair, there was an utter, deathlike silence over the great hall, and then a sigh went up as Mur Dak stepped forward to speak.

"You have heard the report of Jan Tor," he said, his voice calm and even as ever, "and you know now what doom threatens us and what chance we have to avert that doom. And now you must make decision. As you know, during the

40 past weeks our scientists have been engaged in the construction of many hundreds of new vibration-cruisers like the one used by Jan Tor in his voyage. Soon, now, these cruisers will be complete, and they can be used by us in either of two ways.

"We can use them to save a fragment of our people, since in these ships a few thousand of us can escape to another star, though all the rest of us must inevitably perish with our universe when the two suns meet. Or we can use them for battle, instead of flight, speeding out in them to this planet of Alto's, attacking these globe-people and using their own force-ray projector in an attempt to swerve Alto aside before it destroys us. And that is the decision which you must make, a decision on which rests the fate of the races of man. Shall a few of us flee in these star-cruisers to another universe, allowing the oncoming sun to destroy our own, or shall we go out in them to Alto and make a single desperate attempt to swerve the approaching sun aside, and save the Eight Worlds?"

And now again there was silence, a thick and heavy silence, fateful with the doom of universes, the destiny of suns. I felt sleep overwhelming me, now, and though I struggled to keep my tired eyelids open I was slipping farther and farther down into drowsy depths of oblivion. Dimly, as though from an infinite distance, I heard a mighty shouting rising from the massed members around me. Then, just before complete unconsciousness descended on me, the roaring lessened for a single moment, and in that moment I heard the voice of Mur Dak, strong and vibrant.

"You have made decision," he was saying, "and when the cruiser-fleet is completed it shall start at once—for Alto!"

The three weeks that elapsed between our return and the sailing of the great fleet were undoubtedly the most frenzied in the history of the Eight Worlds. Our own scientists had calculated that if we were to save our universe, Alto must be swerved from its course within the next fifty days, since after that it would be too late, for even if swerved aside after that time the dying sun would still crash through at least part of our solar system, wrecking it completely. We must reach the ray-projector on Alto's planet and use it

before the end of the fiftieth day, or it would be too late.

So through the first twenty of those fifty days all other work throughout the Eight Worlds had been abandoned and every effort was concentrated upon the completion of the cruisers. Each planet was furnishing its own contingent for the fleet, and on each of the Eight Worlds men toiled to exhaustion in laboratory and factory, while others stood ready to take their places. Swiftly the cruisers, more than a thousand in number, approached completion, and now were being equipped with the weapon our scientists had devised for them, a deadly blue ray which had the power of stimulating atomic movement in every molecule of matter it touched to such a point that whatever matter was struck by it vanished beneath its touch, splitting instantly into its original atoms.

And through the nights, now, the men of every planet could see over their heads, like a great menace in the heavens, the fiery orb of Alto, growing, growing, dripping a crimson radiance upon the Eight Worlds, hanging in the heavens like a great seal of blood. And beneath that sign of death the work went madly on. And on all our planets laughter in sunlight and joy and freedom seemed things gone forever. For over the Eight Worlds lay the gigantic, shadowing wings of fear. . . .

One event stands out in my memory against that time of terror, one which occurred on the third day after our return. Mur Dak had summoned us again in the Hall of Planets, this time to his office, and there, in the name of the Council, he formally tendered me the post of commander-in-chief of the great fleet which was even then preparing. No greater honor could have been accorded anyone in the Eight Worlds, and I could only stammer a few words of thanks. And then the chairman turned to Sarto Sen with the information that he had been named second in command. To our surprize, though, my friend made no answer, turning away from us for a moment and staring out of a window. When he turned back to us it was to say quietly, "I can't accept the post."

We regarded him in astonishment, and Mur Dak asked, "Your reason?"

"I can't say—now," replied my friend, and the astonishment in our expressions deepened.

Then Mur Dak's face became suddenly bleak, and his eyes scornful. "Is it possible that you are afraid?" he asked.

A deep flush rose over Sarto Sen's face but he did not answer, meeting our gaze for a moment and then turning toward the door. The spell of surprize that had held me broke then and I ran toward him, held his arm.

"Sarto Sen!" I cried, and could voice no other word.

He half turned toward me, his face softening a little, and then abruptly wheeled and passed out of the door, leaving me standing there motionless.

The others were regarding me with a certain compassion, but seeing the misery on my face they made no comments on what had just occurred, and without further remark Hal Kur was named as my lieutenant. Later that day I learned that Sarto Sen, with Nar Lon and a few others of his assistants, had left in our original cruiser for his Venus laboratories.

If time had been mine I would have sought him out there, but now the cruisers of our fleet were almost complete, and all my time was taken up by the business of training the pilots who were to operate them. Luckily their controls were simple, differing but little in practise from those of our ordinary interplanetary space-ships, so that short as was the time at our disposal it proved enough for the training of the selected men. And so at last there came the twentieth day after our return, and on that night the great fleet made the start of its momentous voyage.

We had planned for the cruisers from each planet to proceed in separate groups out past Neptune, where all would rendezvous and take up their flight for Alto. And so that night the Earth contingent of ships made its start, from a great plain beyond the Hall of Planets. Crowds from over all Earth had assembled there to watch our departure—vast, silent crowds who watched our ships with the knowledge written plain on their faces that we held in our hands their only hope of life. And high above them gleamed the little spot of blood-red light that was Alto, the sun that was our goal.

Standing with Hal Kur and my pilot in the conning-tower 43 of my flagship, I watched the ground sinking away beneath us as we rose smoothly up from Earth, with ever-increasing speed. As the gray old planet drew away beneath us my heart twisted with the thought that Sarto Sen was left behind, this time. And then our accompanying ships had slanted up beneath us and we were arrowing out through the solar system to the rendezvous beyond Neptune. When we had reached the appointed spot we paused, our cruisers hovering just beyond the icy world. A few minutes we waited and then a cloud of dark spots appeared behind us, sweeping smoothly up and resolving into a formation of cruisers which fell into place behind us. It was the fleet from Mars and it was followed in quick succession by the contingents from Uranus and Venus. Out from arctic Neptune, behind us, there came now that worlds's ships, taking their place with us just ahead of the group from ringed Saturn. Then, last and at the same time, came the final two contingents, one a small one of few cruisers from Mercury, the other the mighty fleet from Jupiter. More than a thousand cruisers in all we hovered there, the massed forces of the Eight Worlds.

I gave a telestereo order which flashed through all the fleet, and the huge armada at once arranged itself in the form of a great triangle, a thousand miles wide at its base, with my own cruiser at the triangle's apex. Another order, and the whole vast fleet moved smoothly forward at uniform speed, a speed that mounted quickly as we flashed on through the ether toward the red star ahead with more and more power. The forces of man had gathered themselves and were moving out toward their supreme struggle, sailing out into the interstellar void to grapple with their doom, risking on one great throw of dice the life or death of their universe.

Standing beside our pilot in my flagship's conning-tower, Hal Kur and I peered through the broad fore-window, watching Alto broaden again across the heavens as we raced on toward it. Already it burned in the sky ahead like a great fire, since for four long weeks our fleet had hummed on toward it at highest speed. And now, on the thirtieth day of our

44 flight, its end was at last in sight and we were preparing for our descent on the city of the globe-men.

The plan which we had formed was simple enough. We were to swoop suddenly upon the city, and while it was being attacked by the greater part of our fleet a picked few ships would land upon the great tower-platform, taking possession of the projector there. This our own scientists would train upon Alto in an effort to swerve the sun again from its course. It must be done soon, I knew, for this was the fiftieth day, which was our time-limit; and unless we made our stroke at the great sun before the tenth hour, it had been calculated, Alto would still come close enough to the solar system to cause collisions between its own far-swinging planets and our own sun and worlds, wrecking our solar system. Less than twelve hours remained to us.

Now, as we swept on toward the lurid, immense sun ahead, it was concerning my own courage that I felt most in doubt. The strange defection of Sarto Sen had already unsettled my mind, and as I glanced back through the rear window and glimpsed the far points of light which were all that was to be seen of the great fleet following, I felt with deepening anxiety the immensity of my responsibilities as commander.

How long I brooded there at the window I can not guess, but I was finally aroused by a sudden sharp exclamation from Hal Kur. The big engineer was gazing out through the front telescopic window toward the fiery disk of the sun ahead, amazement on his face. In a moment he beckoned me to his side, and I gazed out with him through the telescopic glass.

Even through the light-repelling shields which had been swung over all our windows the glare of the mighty sun ahead was almost blinding, but my eyes quickly became accustomed to it, and then I gave a catch of indrawn breath. For I had glimpsed against the crimson disk of Alto a little cloud of dark specks, a tiny swarm that seemed to be growing steadily larger. Breathlessly we watched them, and now we could not doubt that they were drawing nearer, increasing swiftly in size as we raced to meet them. And now they were taking definite shape, seen through our

45 magnifying window, taking shape as smooth, long, fishlike hulls-Hal Kur whirled around to me, a flame leaping into his eyes. "They're ships!" he cried. "Star-cruisers like our ownl Those globe-men—they have our own cruiser!"

Something seemed to check the beating of my own heart at that cry. The cruisers ahead could only come from Alto, could only be manned by the globe-men of Alto's planets. While we lay imprisoned they had studied the design of our own cruiser, had understood and copied it, and during our homeward flight they had built their own great fleet of star-cruisers, guessing that our escape meant an attack on themselves later on. And now they had come out to meet that attack, there in the interstellar void, and the two great fleets were rushing headlong toward a battle that would be fought between the stars!

A moment I stood there, stunned, then turned to the te-lestereo which transmitted my orders to the fleet. "All ships prepare for battle," I announced, as calmly as possible. "Reduce speed gradually to one hundred miles an hour, holding the same formation until further order."

From our own cruiser, below me, there came now a running of feet and a shouting of hoarse voices, while there was a jarring and clanging of metal as the ray-tubes in the cruiser's sides were quickly made ready for action. Our speed was swiftly decreasing, now, and as I glanced ahead I saw that the globe-men's ships were apparently slackening speed also, advancing toward us more slowly and moving now in two short columns. They knew, as well as we, that if both fleets used their maximum speed they would be unable to make contact with eath other, and they sought a decision no less than we.

Slowly, now, ever more slowly, the two fleets were moving toward each other. I could now plainly observe the approaching enemy cruisers, very similar in design to our own but with shorter, thicker hulls, their globe-men pilots plainly visible in their bright-lit conning-towers. Headlong they came toward us, and headlong we advanced to meet them. Then, when the two fleets were almost at the point of collid-

ing, there leaped out toward us from the oncoming cruisers a multitude of balls of destroying pink fire.

I had been expecting this, and at the moment they fired I spoke a single word into the telestereo. Instantly our own cruiser and the whole vast fleet behind it slanted sharply upward, while the globe-men craft and their balls of fire passed harmlessly beneath us. And as we swept over them there burned down from our own cruisers the blue de-atomizing ray, striking more than a score of ships in the fleet below and annihilating them instantly. In a moment we had passed them and at once we circled, massed, and then sped back to strike another blow at the enemy fleet, which had also circled and was coming to meet us.

Again the two fleets were racing toward each other, and as they neared each other, rosy fire and blue ray crossed and clashed from fleet to fleet. I saw the flame-balls strike cruisers around and behind us, cruisers that vanished in whirling storms of fire, though fire it could not have been that raged so fiercely there in the airless void. In the other fleet, ship after ship was flashing into blinding blue light and disappearing, as our rays struck them. Then the two fleets had met, had mixed and mingled, so that the battle changed suddenly to myriad individual combats between cruisers, whirling and striking and falling there in the great gulf between the coldly smiling stars, flaring into pink flame or blue light and vanishing from sight.

Toward us flashed an enemy cruiser, but as its rosy flame leapt toward us we veered sharply to one side, while at the same moment there came from the hull beneath me the hiss of released rays. They struck the tail of the other, which had swerved a moment too late, and the next moment it flared to a blue-lit wreck, then vanished. But now two enemy cruisers were swooping down on us from above, ramming headlong toward us. There was no time for us to twist aside from that fierce plunge, but before they could loose their flame upon us the blue ray of a ship beyond us stabbed across and struck one of the two, and in the moment that it hovered there, luminous with its own destruction, the other smashed squarely into it and then both had flared and vanished.

As they did so a racing cruiser struck us a glancing blow 47 from beneath and our ship reeled and spun, throwing those of us in the conning-tower violently to one side. When Hal Kur and I scrambled to our feet the pilot lay motionless on the floor, stunned, and at once I leapt to the controls. That moment in which our ship had been pilotless had driven us up above the battle, which lay stretched below us as a mighty field of circling, striking ships, burned across by pink flame and livid blue light. And now I was slanting our own ship down again, swooping headlong down through space while the hissing rays from our own hull seared down toward the enemy ships below. A wild exultation thrilled through me, now, that sheer joy of battle which will ever last in the heart of man, no matter what centuries of peace are his, and I laughed crazily as we rose and circled and swooped again upon the whirling ships below. Of all the battles in the long history of man's battles, surely this was the most glorious of all. What ancient struggles on earth, or on the seas, or between the planets themselves, could equal this mighty grappling of two fleets in the void between the stars, with a mighty sun at their backs and the fate of a universe at stake?

But now, as our cruiser soared again above the fighting ships, I saw that the craft of the globe-men were perishing in increasing numbers, assailed by the blue rays from our own. They seemed to halt, waver for a moment, and then each of the globe-men's cruisers had ceased fighting and had suddenly dropped down a full hundred miles, massing together there and racing away toward Alto. They were in flight!

I had no need to command a pursuit, for at sight of the fleeing craft our own ships turned and leapt eagerly after them, my own cruiser in the van. Swiftly our speed mounted, until the two fleets were flashing toward Alto at full speed, the enemy ships managing to keep just out of striking distance ahead of us, while we strained our generators to the utmost to close the gap between us. On and on they fled, at the speed of light, with our own fleet close at their heels, on toward the crimson sun ahead, which filled half the sky as we raced toward it. Suddenly a black blot appeared against that sun, largening with terrific speed, and

48 in a moment the fleeting cruisers ahead had disappeared inside it, vanished inside the great ether-cavity which loomed now before ourselves. But our own ships never faltered, speeding straight on, and in a second we, too, were plunging into darkness unutterable as we raced straight into the vast ether-cavity after the fleeing ships. The droning of our generators ceased and we drifted for a torturing moment through the blackness, then burst out again into the red glare of the great sun ahead. And ahead still fled the globe-men's cruisers, heading directly toward their own sun.

Straight after them we raced, speeding over the great sun in turn. Then, just when the greater part of our fleet was flashing directly above the sun, the humming of our generators faltered and died. And instantly our ship was falling, plunging headlong down into the fiery ocean of Alto, ten million miles beneath!

The ships of our fleet were falling with us, like wind-tossed leaves, and now I cried out and pointed upward, even as we whirled down to the fiery death below. Far, far above there hung a little group of cruisers from which broad rays of purple light were stabbing down toward us, bathing our ships in a weird glow. "They've trapped us!" I cried despairingly. "Those ships—that purple ray—it's neutralizing the vibrations of our generators—they led us over this sun and we're falling—"

Below yawned the fiery ocean of red flame that was Alto, stretching from horizon to horizon, its tongues and prominences licking hungrily up toward us. Even through the super-insulation of the cruiser's walls we felt the growing, stifling heat of the sun below. And then I cried out and pointed upward once more. A score of cruisers at the tail of our fleet had escaped the fate of the rest of us by swerving aside in time, and instantly they had turned and slanted upward, then circled once and plunged down toward the hovering ray-ships. They never even used the blue ray but made sure of their enemies by their own deaths, plunging into the enemy cruisers in a score of swift, shattering collisions, and then the purple rays around us had vanished, while the shattered wrecks above whirled down into the crimson sun beneath us. With the vanishing of the rays our generators took up again dieir familiar humming drone, and the ships of our fleet slanted sharply up, to escape the fiery doom , below.

The remaining ships of the globe-men's fleet had disappeared, now, and glancing at our time-dials I gave an order through the telestereo. Our fleet, still over five hundred cruisers strong, sped away from the great sun toward the buff-colored little ball that was its inmost planet. Swiftly its color deepened again to crimson as we arrowed down toward it, and I glanced anxiously again at the time-dials, for less than a quarter-hour remained now in which to get the ray-tube in action on the whirling sun behind us. Meteorlike our ships split the air of the red planet as we shot across its surface, and in a moment we were slanting down toward the city of the globe-men, toward the massed black roofs and streets above which loomed the mighty tower.

As we dropped down toward it there rose to meet us fully fifty star-cruisers like our own, the last remnants of the globe-men's fleet which we had pursued in past their sun. With suicidal determination they flashed straight up toward us, and the next minute was one of swift, terrific battle, the air around us a hell of blue light and pink flame, leaping and burning from ship to ship, while scores of wrecks whirled down into the black city below. Five minutes after that fierce attack we had lost a full hundred of our ships, but we had accounted for the last cruiser of the globe-men, or so we thought.

And now my own flagship and the designated few agreed on were dipping swiftly toward the great tower-platform, where stood the ray-projector which we had fought our way from universe to universe to reach. We were dropping lower, gradually decreasing our speed as we neared the platform, lower, lower. . . .

A cry of fierce rage rang through the hull beneath me, and at the same moment I was aware of a long, dark shape that suddenly flashed down past us from above, a last cruiser of the globe-men which must have hovered high above us until that moment. It dropped below us with lightning speed, then hovered ominously beside the tower-platform for a single moment. In that moment a hundred shafts of blue light from our own ships leapt down toward

50 it, but even as they did so there spurted from its side globe after globe of the annihilating pink flame, striking the broad platform and the four mighty supporting columns of the tower in a score of places. The enemy cruiser itself flashed into nothingness beneath the rays of our ships, but a great cry went up from us as we saw that its work was done, for the fire-balls that struck the tower blazed fiercely up for a moment and then vanished; and then the mighty tower was swaying, falling, crumbling, crashing down to the ground in a mighty avalanche of broken wreckage, raining its mighty fragments upon the city far beneath. The tower was gone! The ray-projector was annihilated!

And now our ships hung motionless, stunned, even as I was stunned, gazing through the window stupidly at the wreckage far below. We had lost! For when I finally raised my eyes I saw that the pointer on the time-dial before me had passed the tenth hour. Even had we had another ray-projector of our own, it would have been too late. Nothing now could save the Eight Worlds, nothing could swerve the mighty sun aside in time to save our universe. We races of men had risked our lives, our universe, in one great cast of the dice, and—we had lost.

Suddenly Hal Kur seemed to go insane, there beside me in the conning-tower. He choked, uttered incoherent exclamations, pointed a trembling hand up through our telescopic window toward the thundering red sun above. I did not raise my eyes, and he clutched my arm, pulling me to the window, his upward-pointing hand trembling violently, his eyes staring.

I looked up. There, beside the very rim of the mighty sun, was a tiny black spot, a long, dark speck that hung steady, playing a beam of brilliant light upon Alto. For a moment I did not understand, but gazed dazedly, trying to comprehend what I saw. That little black spot, that long, black shape—

"Look!" Hal Kur was screaming, like one gone mad. "It's"—he choked, staggered— "It's our old cruiser! It's Sarto Sen!"

Sarto Sen! The name seared across my brain like living fire. That ray—he was playing it upon the edge of Alto

even as the globe-men had done—was spinning the great sun faster, faster—

"But it's too late!" I cried, throwing an anguished hand out toward the time-dial.

Too late! Nothing could swerve the sun aside in time to save the Eight Worlds, now. Too—

I stopped, a thick silence settling over us. And in that silence Hal Kur and I gazed up together, awe falling upon our faces, such awe as had never been felt by man before.

For there, across the face of the mighty crimson sun, had appeared a thin black line, a line that thickened, widened, with every second. And now it was a gap, a narrow gap between the two cleft halves of the great red star, a gap that swiftly was widening. Alto was splitting! Splitting into two great halves, into two masses of crimson flame which swept ever wider from each other. Splitting like a great flywheel, when the ray of Sarto Sen increased its spinning to such a rate that it could no longer hold together. Beside it, its brilliant ray playing upon the dividing sun until the last moment, hung the little cruiser, and then it had vanished from sight as the right half of the sun, an ocean of raging fires, swept over it.

But Sarto Sen had won! Farther and farther apart swept the two halves of the divided sun, diverging each to follow its separate course, moving away on either side, slowly, majestically. Between them, now, there shone forth the yellow star that was our own sun, the doom that had threatened it vanishing now as the two halves of Alto moved away from each other, each receding farther and farther from each other and from our own sun. And below us, now, the red planet that had been Alto's was moving away also, hurtling toward the right half of the cleft sun and disappearing inside it with a great burst of flame. Planet after planet was vanishing in right sun or left, until at last our cruisers hovered alone in the void between the two receding suns.

In our own cruiser, now, and in all the ships around me, I knew, was rising a babel of hoarse shouts of joy, of insane, frenzied gladness, and Hal Kur beside me was shouting like a madman. The races of man had won, had conquered the

greatest menace that had ever threatened them, had split a sun and wrecked a universe to save their own.

But for myself, in that moment, I knew only that my friend was dead.

It was night when the last of our fleet came to Earth once more. We had sped in from the long days of our homeward flight, pausing at each planet to allow the cruisers from that planet to leave us. And few enough were the ships that returned to each world, of the hundreds that had gone out, yet they were welcomed by such mighty, shouting crowds as no man had seen before. For the Eight Worlds had gone mad with joy.

So, at last, the dozen battered cruisers which were all that survived of Earth's contingent were dropping down again toward the Hall of Planets. Brilliant lights flared around it, and beneath them, it seemed, was collected half the population of Earth, a mighty, shouting throng. Slowly our ships slanted down over them, sinking down into the inner landing-courl of the great building, and there it was that we were met by Mur Dak and the members of the Council.

The chairman was the first to wring my hand, and it was from him that I learned first how Sarto Sen had planned to save us, duplicating in his own laboratories the force-ray of the globe-men and speeding out with it in our old cruiser to Alto, accompanied only by Nar Lon and his devoted assistants. He carried out his plan under the imputation of cowardice, as Mur Dak told me with working face, because he knew that that plan meant death for himself and knew that I would have insisted on sharing that death.

But now the shouting of the great throng outside the Hall of Planets was becoming insistent, and they were calling for Jan Tor. Already the Council members were passing out of the landing-court with the crews of the surviving cruisers, passing through the building to the crowd outside, which greeted them with a mighty roar of applause. Mur Dak alone remained, with Hal Kur and me, and in a moment he left us also, with our promise to follow in a few minutes. I could not, just then, face those rejoicing, welcoming masses. Beside me, T knew, there would have stood, invisible to them, the shade of another, the shadow of a thin, spectacled

youth to whom all this was due. So I stood in the quiet landing-court, gazing up into the jeweled skies once more-gazing up toward two tiny spots of red light, far-separated already, which gleamed above us.

A mist seemed to come across my eyes, blurring and obscuring the two far points of light at which I gazed. From beside me, then, came the deep voice of Hal Kur.

"I know, Jan Tor," he was saying. "He was my friend, too." He gestured toward the battered cruisers beside us, then up into the light-jeweled heavens.

"It was from this Earth that the first man went out, Jan Tor. Out to planet after planet, until a universe was theirs. And now that Sarto Sen has saved that universe, and has given us these cruisers, how far will man go, I wonder? Out— out—universe after universe, star after star, constellations, nebulae—out—out—out. . . ."

He paused, a dark, erect figure beside me there, his arm flung up in superb, defiant promise toward the brilliant, thronging stars.

THE STAR STEALERS

As i stepped into the narrow bridgeroom the pilot at the controls there turned toward me, saluting.

"Alpha Centauri dead ahead, sir," he reported.

"Turn thirty degrees outward," I told him, "and throttle down to eighty light-speeds until we've passed the star."

Instantly the shining levers flicked back under his hands, and as I stepped over to his side I saw the arrows of the speed-dials creeping backward with the slowing of our flight. Then, gazing through the broad windows which formed the room's front side, I watched the interstellar panorama ahead shifting sidewise with the turning of our course.

The narrow bridgeroom lay across the very top of our ship's long, cigarlike hull, and through its windows all the brilliance of the heavens around us lay revealed. Ahead flamed the great double star of Alpha Centauri, two mighty blazing suns which dimmed all else in the heavens, and

which crept slowly sidewise as we veered away from them. Toward our right there stretched along the inky skies the far-flung powdered fires of the galaxy's thronging suns, gemmed with the crimson splendors of Betelgeuse and the clear brilliance of Canopus and the hot white light of Rigel. And straight ahead, now, gleaming out beyond the twin suns we were passing, shone the clear yellow star that was the sun of our own system.

It was the yellow star that I was watching, now, as our ship fled on toward it at eighty times the speed of light; for more than two years had passed since our cruiser had left it, to become a part of that great navy of the Federation of Stars which maintained peace over all the Galaxy. We had gone far with the fleet, in those two years, cruising with it the length and breadth of the Milky Way, patrolling the space-lanes of the Galaxy and helping to crush the occasional pirate ships which appeared to levy toll on the interstellar commerce. And now that an order flashed from the authorities of our own solar system had recalled us home, it was with an unalloyed eagerness that we looked forward to the moment of our return. The stars we had touched at, the peoples of their worlds, these had been frjendly enough toward us, as fellow-members of the great Federation, yet for all their hospitality we had been glad enough to leave them. For though we had long ago become accustomed to the alien and unhuman forms of the different stellar races, from the strange brain-men of Algol to the birdlike people of Sirius, their worlds were not human worlds, not the familiar eight little planets which swung around our own sun, and toward which we were speeding homeward now.

While I mused thus at the window the two circling suns of Alpha Centauri had dropped behind us, and now, with a swift clicking of switches, the pilot beside me turned on our full speed. Within a few minutes our ship was hurtling on at almost a thousand light-speeds, flung forward by the power of our newly invented de-transforming generators, which could produce propulsion-vibrations of almost a thousand times the frequency of the light-vibrations. At this immense velocity, matched by few other craft in the Galaxy, we were leaping through millions of miles of space each

second, yet the gleaming yellow star ahead seemed quite unchanged in size.

Abruptly the door behind me clicked open to admit young Dal Nara, the ship's second-officer, descended from a long line of famous interstellar pilots, who grinned at me openly as she saluted.

"Twelve more hours, sir, and we'll be there," she said.

I smiled at her eagerness. "You'll not be sorry to get back to our little sun, will you?" I asked, and she shook her head.

"Not I! It may be just a pinhead beside Canopus and the rest, but there's no place like it in the Galaxy. I'm wondering, though, what made them call us back to the fleet so suddenly."

My own face clouded, at that. "I don't know," I said, slowly. "It's almost unprecedented for any star to call one of its ships back from the Federation fleet, but there must have been some reason—"

"Well," she said cheerfully, turning toward the door, "it doesn't matter what the reason is, so long as it means a trip home. The crew is worse than I am—they're scrapping the generators down in the engineroom to get another light-speed out of them."

I laughed as the door clicked shut behind her, but as I turned back to the window the question she had voiced rose again in my mind, and I gazed thoughtfully toward the yellow star ahead. For as I had told Dal Nara, it was a well-nigh unheard-of thing for any star to recall one of its cruisers from the great fleet of the Federation. Including as it did every peopled star in the Galaxy, the Federation relied entirely upon the fleet to police the interstellar spaces, and to that fleet each star contributed its quota of cruisers. Only a last extremity, I knew, would ever induce any star to recall one of its ships, yet the message flashed to our ship had ordered us to return to the solar system at full speed and report at the Bureau of Astronomical Knowledge, on Neptune. Whatever was behind the order, I thought, I would learn soon enough, for we were now speeding over the last lap of our homeward journey; so I strove to put the matter from my mind for the time being.

With an odd persistence, though, the question continued to trouble my thoughts in the hours that followed, and when

56 we finally swept in toward the solar system twelve hours later, it was with a certain abstractedness that I watched the slow largening of the yellow star that was our sun. Our velocity had slackened steadily as we approached that star, and we were moving at a bare one light-speed when we finally swept down toward its outermost, far-swinging planet, Neptune, the solar system's point of arrival and departure for all interstellar commerce. Even this speed we reduced still further as we sped past Neptune's single circling moon and down through the crowded shipping-lanes toward the surface of the planet itself.

Fifty miles above its surface all sight of the planet beneath was shut off by the thousands of great ships which hung in dense masses above it—that vast tangle of interstellar traffic which makes the great planet the terror of all inexperienced pilots. From horizon to horizon, it seemed, the ships crowded upon each other, drawn from every quarter of the Galaxy. Huge grain-boats from Betelgeuse, vast, palatial liners from Arcturus and Vega, ship-loads of radium ores from the worlds that circle giant Antares, long, swift mailboats from distant Deneb—all these and myriad others swirled and circled in one great mass above the planet, dropping down one by one as the official traffic-directors flashed from their own boats the brilliant signals which allowed a lucky one to descend. And through occasional rifts in the crowded mass of ships could be glimpsed the interplanetary traffic of the lower levels, a swarm of swift little boats which darted ceaselessly back and forth on their comparatively short journeys, ferrying crowds of passengers to Jupiter and Venus and Earth, seeming like little toy-boats beside the mighty bulks of the great interstellar ships above them.

As our own cruiser drove down toward the mass of traffic, though, it cleared away from before us instantly; for the symbol of the Federation on our bows was known from Canopus to Fomalhaut, and the cruisers of its fleet were respected by all the traffic of the Galaxy. Arrowing down through this suddenly opened lane we sped smoothly down toward the planet's surface, hovering for a moment above its perplexing maze of white buildings and green gardens, and then slanting down toward the mighty flat-roof-

57 ed building which housed the Bureau of Astronomical Knowledge. As we sped down toward its roof I could not but contrast the warm, sunny green panorama beneath with the icy desert which the planet had been until two hundred thousand years before, when the scientists of the solar system had devised the great heat-transmitters which catch the sun's heat near its blazing surface and fling it out as high-frequency vibrations to the receiving-apparatus on Neptune, to be transformed back into the heat which warms this world. In a moment, though, we were landing gently upon the broad roof, upon which rested scores of other shining cruisers whose crews stood outside them watching our arrival.

Five minutes later I was whirling downward through the building's interior in one of the automatic little cone-elevators, out of which I stepped into a long white corridor. An attendant was awaiting me there, and I followed him down the corridor's lenpth to a high black door at its end, which he threw open for me, closing it behind me as I stepped inside.

It was an ivory-walled, high-ceilinged room in which I found myself, its whole farther side open to the sunlight and breezes of the green gardens beyond. At a desk across the room was sitting a short-set man with gray-streaked hair and keen, inquiring eyes, and as I entered he sprang up and came toward me.

"Ran Rarak!" he exclaimed. "You've come! For two days, now, we've been expecting you."

"We were delayed off Aldebaran, sir, by generator trouble," I replied, bowing, for I had recognized the speaker as Hums Hoi, chief of the Bureau of Astronomical Knowledge. Now, at a motion from him, I took a chair beside the desk while he resumed his own seat.

A moment he regarded me in silence, and then slowly spoke. "Ran Rarak," he said, "you must have wondered why your ship was ordered back here to the solar system. Well, it was ordered back for a reason which we dared not state in an open message, a reason which, if made public, would plunge the solar system instantly into a chaos of unutterable panic!"

He was silent again for a moment, his eyes on mine, and

then went on. "You know, Ran Rarak, that the universe itself is composed of infinite depths of space in which float great clusters of suns, star-clusters which are separated from each other by billions of light-years of space. You know, too, that our own cluster of suns, which we call the Galaxy, is roughly disklike in shape, and that our own particular sun is situated at the very edge of this disk. Beyond lie only those inconceivable leagues of space which separate us from the neighboring star-clusters, or island-universes, depths of space never yet crossed by our own cruisers or by anything else of which we have record.

"But now, at last, something has crossed those abysses, is crossing them; since over three weeks ago our astronomers discovered that a gigantic dark star is approaching our Galaxy from the depths of infinite space—a titanic, dead sun which their instruments showed to be of a size incredible, since, dark and dead as it is, it is larger than the mightiest blazing suns in our own Galaxy, larger than Canopus or Antares or Betelgeuse—a dark, dead star millions of times larger than our own fiery sun—a gigantic wanderer out of some far realm of infinite space, racing toward our Galaxy at a velocity inconceivable!

"The calculations of our scientists showed that this speeding dark star would not race into our Galaxy but would speed past its edge, and out into infinite space again, passing no closer to our own sun, at the edge, than some fifteen billion miles. There was no possibility of collision or danger from it, therefore; and so though the approach of the dark star is known to all in the solar system, there is no idea of any peril connected with it. But there is something else which has been kept quite secret from the peoples of the solar system, something known only to a few astronomers and officials. And that is that during the last few weeks the path of this speeding dark star has changed from a straight path to a curving one, that it is curving inward toward the edge of our Galaxy and will now pass our own sun, in less than twelve weeks, at a distance of less than three billion miles, instead of fifteen! And when this titanic dead sun passes that close to our own sun there can be but one result. Inevitably our own sun will be caught by the powerful gravitational grip of the giant dark star and carried out" with

59 all its planets into the depths of infinite space, never to return!"

Hums Hoi paused, his face white and set, gazing past me with wide, unseeing eyes. My brain whirling beneath the stunning revelation, I sat rigid, silent, and in a moment he went on.

"If this thing were known to all," he said slowly, "there would be an instant, terrible panic over the solar system, and for that reason only a handful have been told. Flight is impossible, for there are not enough ships in the Galaxy to transport the trillions of the solar system's population to another star in the four weeks that are left to us. There is but one chance—one blind, slender chance—and that is to turn aside this onward-thundering dark star from its present inward-curving path, to cause it to pass our sun and the Galaxy's edge far enough away to be harmless. And it is for this reason that we ordered your return.

"For it is my plan to speed out of the Galaxy into the depths of outer space to meet this approaching dark star, taking all of the scientific apparatus and equipment which might be used to swerve it aside from this curving path it is following. During the last week I have assembled the equipment for the expedition and have gathered together a force of fifty star-cruisers which are even now resting on the roof of this building, manned and ready for the trip. These are only swift mail-cruisers, though, specially equipped for the trip, and it was advisable to have at least one battle-cruiser for flag-ship of the force, and so your own was recalled from the Federation fleet. And although I shall go with the expedition, of course, it was my plan to have you yourself as its captain.

"I know, however, that you have spent the last two years in the service of the Federation fleet; so if you desire, another will be appointed to the post. It is one of danger-greater danger, I think, than any of us can dream. Yet the command is yours, if you wish to accept it."

Hurus Hoi ceased, intently scanning my face. A moment I sat silent, then rose and stepped to the great open window at the room's far side. Outside stretched the greenery of gardens, and beyond them the white roofs. of buildings, gleaming beneath the faint sunlight. Instinctively my eyes

went up to the source of light, the tiny sun, small and faint and far, here, but still-the sun. A long moment I gazed up toward it, and then turned back to Hurus Hoi. "I accept, sir," I said.

He came to his feet, his eyes shining. "I knew that you would," he said, simply, and then: "All has been ready for days, Ran Rarak. We start at once."

Ten minutes later we were on the broad roof, and the crews of our fifty ships were rashing to their posts in answer to the sharp alarm of a signal bell. Another five minutes and Hurus Hoi, Dal Nara and I stood in the bridgeroom of my own cruiser, watching the white roof drop behind and beneath as we slanted up from it. In a moment the half-hundred cruisers on that roof had risen and were racing up behind us, arrowing with us toward the zenith, massed in a close, wedge-shaped formation.

Above, the brilliant signals of the traffic-boats flashed swiftly, clearing a wide lane for us, and then we had passed through the jam of traffic and were driving out past the incoming lines of interstellar ships at swiftly mounting speed, still holding the same formation with the massed cruisers behind us.

Behind and around us, n$)w, flamed the great panorama of the Galaxy's blazing stars, but before us lay only darkness—darkness inconceivable, into which our ships were flashing out at greater and greater speed. Neptune had vanished, and far behind lay the single yellow spark that was all visible of our solar system as we fled out from it. Out—out—out—rocketing, racing on, out past the boundaries of the great Galaxy itself into the lightless void, out into the unplumbed depths of infinite space to save our threatened sun.

Twenty-four hours after our start I stood again in the bridgeroom, alone except for the silent, imperturbable figure of my ever-watchful wheelman, Nal Jak, staring out with him into the black gulf that lay before us. Many an hour we had stood side by side thus, scanning the interstellar

spaces from our cruiser's bridgeroom, but never yet had my eyes been confronted by such a lightless void as lay before me now.

Our ship, indeed, seemed to be racing through a region where light was all but non-existent, a darkness inconceivable to anyone who had never experienced it. Behind lay the Galaxy we had left, a great swarm of shining points of light, contracting slowly as we sped away from it. Toward our right, too, several misty little patches of light glowed faintly in the darkness, hardly to be seen; though these, I knew, were other galaxies or star-clusters like our own—titanic conglomerations of thronging suns dimmed to those tiny flickers of light by the inconceivable depths of space which separated them from ourselves.

Except for these, though, we fled on through a cosmic gloom that was soul-shaking in its deepness and extent, an infinite darkness and stillness in which our ship seemed the only moving thing. Behind us, I knew, the formation of our fifty ships was following close on our track, each ship separated from the next by a five hundred mile interval and each flashing on at exactly the same speed as ourselves. But though we knew they followed, our fifty cruisers were naturally quite invisible to us, and as I gazed now into the tenebrous void ahead the loneliness of our position was overpowering.

Abruptly the door behind me snapped open, and I half turned toward it as Hurus Hoi entered. He glanced at our speed-di: Is and his brows arched in surprize.

"Good enough," he commented. "If the rest of our ships can hold this pace it will bring us to the dark star in six days."

I nodded, gazing thoughtfully ahead. "Perhaps sooner," I estimated. "The dark star is coming toward us as a tremendous velocity, remember. You will notice on the tele-chart—"

Together we stepped over to the big telechart, a great rectangular plate of smoothly burnished silvery metal which hung at the bridgeroom's end-wall, the one indispensable aid to interstellar navigation. Upon it were accurately reproduced, bv means of projected and reflected rays, the positions and progress of all heavenly bodies near the ship.

Intently we contemplated it now. At the rectangle's lower edge there gleamed on the smooth metal a score or more of little circles of glowing light, of varying sizes, representing the suns of the edge of the Galaxy behind us. Outermost of these glowed the light-disk that was our own sun, and around this Hurus Hoi had drawn a shining line or circle lying more than four billion miles from our sun, on the chart. He had computed that if the approaching dark star came closer than that to our sun its mighty gravitational attraction would inevitably draw the latter out with it into space; so the shining line represented, for us, the danger line. And creeping down toward that line and toward our sun, farther up on the blank metal of the great chart, there moved a single giant circle of deepest black, an ebon disk a hundred times the diameter of our glowing little sun-circle, which was sweeping down toward the Galaxy's edge in a great curve.

Hurus Hoi gazed thoughtfully at the sinister dark disk, and then shook his head. "There's something very strange about that dark star," he said, slowly. "That curving path it's moving in is contrary to all the laws of celestial mechanics. I wonder if—"

Before he could finish, the words were broken off in his mouth. For at that moment there came a terrific shock, our ship dipped and reeled crazily, and then was whirling blindly about as though caught and shaken by a giant hand. Dal Nara, the pilot, Hurus Hoi and I were slammed violently down toward the bridgeroom's end with the first crash, and then I clung desperately to the edge of a switch-board as we spun dizzily about. I had a flashing glimpse, through the windows, of our fifty cruisers whirling blindly about like wind-tossed straws, and in another glimpse saw two of them caught and slammed together, both ships smashing like eggshells beneath the terrific impact, their crews instantly annihilated. Then, as our own ship dipped crazily downward again, I saw Hurus Hoi creeping across the floor toward the controls, and in a moment I had slid down beside him. Another instant and, we had our hands on the levers, and were slowly pulling them back into position.

Caught and buffeted still by the terrific forces outside, our cruiser slowly steadied to an even keel and then leapt

suddenly forward again, the forces that held us seeming to lessen swiftly as we flashed on. There came a harsh, grating sound that brought my heart to my throat as one of the cruisers was hurled past us, grazing us, and then abruptly the mighty grip that held us had suddenly disappeared and we were humming on through the same stillness and silence as before.

I slowed our flight, then, until we hung motionless, and then we gazed wildly at each other, bruised and panting. Before we could give utterance to the exclamations on our lips, though, the door snapped open and Dal Nara burst into the bridgeroom, bleeding from a cut on her forehead.

"What was that?" she cried, raising a trembling hand to her head. "It caught us there like toys—and the other ships—"

Before any of us could answer her a bell beside me rang sharply and from the diaphragm beneath it came the voice of our message-operator.

"Ships 37, 12, 19 and 44 reported destroyed by collisions, sir," he announced, his own voice tremulous. "The others report that they are again taking up formation behind us."

"Very well," I replied. "Order them to start again in three minutes, on Number One speed-scale."

As I turned back from the instrument I drew a deep breath. "Four ships destroyed in less than a minute," I said. "And by what?"

"By a whirlpool of ether-currents, undoubtedly," said Hur-us Hoi. We stared at him blankly, and he threw out a hand in quick explanation. "You know that there are currents in the ether—that was discovered ages ago—and that those currents in the Galaxy have always been found to be comparatively slow and sluggish, but out here in empty space there must be currents of gigantic size and speed, and apparently we stumbled directly into a great whirlpool or maelstrom of them. We were fortunate to lose but four ships," he added soberly.

I shook my head. "I've sailed from Sirius to Rigel," I said, "and I never met anything like that. If we meet another—"

The strangeness of our experience, in fact, had unnerved me, for even after we had tended to our bruises and were again racing on through the void, it was with a new fear-

fulness that I gazed ahead. At any moment, I knew, we might plunge directly into some similar or even larger maelstrom of ether-currents, yet there was no way by which we could avoid the danger. We must drive blindly ahead at full speed and trust to luck to bring us through, and now I began to understand what perils lay between us and our destination.

As hour followed hour, though, my tearfulness gradually lessened, for we encountered no more of the dread maelstroms in our onward flight. Yet as we hummed on and on and on, a new anxiety came to trouble me, for with the passing of each day we were putting behind us billions of miles of space, and were flashing nearer and nearer toward the mighty dark star that was our goal. And even as we fled on we could see, on the great telechart, the dark disk creeping down to meet us, thundering on toward the Galaxy from which, unless we succeeded, it would steal a star.

Unless we succeeded! But could we succeed? Was there any force in the universe that could turn aside this oncoming dark giant in time to prevent the theft of our sun? More and more, as we sped on, there grew in my mind doubt as to our chance of success. We had gone forth on a blind, desperate venture, on a last slender chance, and now at last I began to see how slender indeed was that chance. Dal Nara felt it, too, and even Hums Hoi, I think, but we spoke no word to each other of our thoughts, standing for hours on end in the bridgeroom together, and gazing silently and broodingly out into the darkness where lay our goal.

On the sixth day of our flight we computed, by means of our telechart and flight-log, that we were within less than a billion miles of the great dark star ahead, and had slackened our speed until we were barely creeping forward, attempting to locate our goal in the dense, unchanged darkness ahead.

Straining against the windows, we three gazed eagerly forward, while beside me Nal Jak, the wheelman, silently regulated the ship's speed to my orders. Minutes passed while we sped on, and still there lay before us only the deep darkness. Could it be that we had missed our way, that our calculations had been wrong? Could it be—and then the

wild speculations that had begun to rise in my mind were cut short by a low exclamation from Dal Nara, beside me. Mutely she pointed ahead.

At first I could see nothing, and then slowly became aware of a feeble glow of fight in the heavens ahead, an area of strange, subdued light which stretched across the whole sky, it seemed, yet which was so dim as to be hardly visible to our straining eyes. But swiftly, as we watched it, it intensified, strengthened, taking shape as a mighty circle of pale luminescence which filled almost all the heavens ahead. I gave a low-voiced order to the pilot which reduced our speed still further, but even so the fight grew visibly stronger as we sped on.

"Light!" whispered Hurus Hoi. "Light on a dark star! It's impossible—and yet—"

And now, in obedience to another order, our ship began to slant sharply up toward the mighty circle's upper limb, followed by the half-hundred ships behind us. And as we lifted higher and higher the circle changed before our eyes into a sphere—a tremendous, faintly glowing sphere of size inconceivable, filling the heavens with its vast bulk, feebly luminous like the ghost of some mighty sun, rushing through space to meet us as we sped up and over it. And now at last we were over it, sweeping above it with our little fleet at a height of a half-million miles, contemplating in awed silence the titanic dimensions of the faint-glowing sphere beneath us.

For in spite of our great height above it, the vast globe stretched from horizon to horizon beneath us, a single smooth, vastly curving surface, shining with the dim, unfamiliar light whose source we could not guess. It was not the light of fire, or glowing gases, for the sun below was truly a dead one, vast in size as it was. It was a cold light, a faint but steady phosphorescence like no other light I had ever seen, a feeble white glow which stretched from horizon to horizon of the mighty world beneath. Dum-foundedly we stared down toward it, and then, at a signal to the pilot, our ship began to drop smoothly downward, trailed by our forty-odd followers behind. Down, down, we sped, slower and slower, until we suddenly started as there came from outside the ship a highpitched hissing shriek.

"Air!" I cried. "This dark star has an atmosphere! And 66 that light upon it-see!" And I flung a pointing hand toward the surface of the giant world below. For as we dropped swifdy down toward that world we saw at last that the faint light which illuminated it was not artificial light, or reflected light, but light inherent in itself, since all the surface of the mighty sphere glowed with the same phosphorescent light, its plains and hills and valleys alike feebly luminous, with the soft, dim luminosity of radio-active minerals. A shining world, a world glowing eternally with cold white light, a luminous, titanic sphere that rushed through the darkness of infinite space like some pale gigantic moon. And upon the surface of the glowing plains beneath us rose dense and twisted masses of dark leafless vegetation, distorted tree-growths and tangles of low shrubs that were all of deepest black in color, springing out of that glowing soil and twisting blackly and grotesquely above its feeble light, stretching away over plain and hill and valley like the monstrous landscape of some undreamed-of hell!

And now, as our ship slanted down across the surface of the glowing sphere, there gleamed ahead a deepening of that glow, a concentration of that feeble light which grew stronger as we raced on toward it. And it was a city! A city whose mighty buildings were each a truncated pyramid in shape, towering into the air for thousands upon thousands of feet, a city whose every building and street and square glowed with the same faint white light as the ground upon which they stood, a metropolis out of nightmare, the darkness of which was dispelled only by the light of its own great glowing structures and streets. Far away stretched the mass of these structures, a luminous mass which covered square mile upon square mile of the surface of this glowing world, and far beyond them there lifted into the dusky air the shining towers and pyramids of still other cities.

We straightened, trembling, turning toward each other with white faces. And then, before any could speak, Dal Nara had whirled to the window and uttered a hoarse shout. "Look!" she cried, and pointed down and outward toward the titanic, glowing buildings of the city ahead; for from their truncated summits were rising suddenly a swarm of long black shapes, a horde of long black cones which were racing straight up toward us.

I shouted an order to the pilot, and instantly our ship was turning and slanting sharply upward, while around us our cruisers sped up with us. Then, from beneath, there sped up toward us a shining little cylinder of metal which j struck a cruiser racing beside our own. It exploded instantly \ into a great flare of blinding light, enveloping the cruiser it '1 had struck, and then the light had vanished, while with it had vanished the ship it had enveloped. And from the ' cones beneath and beyond there leapt toward us other of the metal cylinders, striking our ships now by the dozens, flaring and vanishing with them in great, silent explosions of light.

"Etheric bombs!" I cried. "And our ship is the only battle-cruiser—the rest have no weapons!"

I turned, cried another order, and in obedience to it our own cruiser halted suddenly and then dipped downward, racing straight into the ascending swarm of attacking cones. Down we flashed, down, down, and toward us sprang a score of the metal cylinders, grazing along our sides. And then, from the sides of our own downward-swooping ship there sprang out brilliant shafts of green light, the deadly de-cohesion ray of the ships of the Federation Fleet. It struck a score of the cones beneath and they flamed with green light for an instant and then flew into pieces, spilling downward in a great shower of tiny fragments as the cohesion of their particles was destroyed by the deadly ray. And now our cruiser had crashed down through the swarm of them and was driving down toward the luminous plain below, then turning and racing sharply upward again while from all the air around us the black cones swarmed to the attack.

Up, up, we sped, and now I saw that our blow had been struck in vain, for the last of our ships above were vanishing beneath the flares of the etheric bombs. One only of our cruisers remained, racing up toward the zenith in headlong flight with a score of the great cones in hot pursuit. A moment only I glimpsed this, and then we had turned once more and were again diving down upon the attacking cones, while all around us the etheric bombs filled the air with the silent, exploding flares. Again as we swooped downward our green rays cut paths of annihilation across the swarming cones

beneath; and then I heard a cry from Hums Hoi, whirled to the window and glimpsed above us a single great cone that was diving headlong down toward us in a resistless, ramming swoop. I shouted to the pilot, sprang to the controls, but was too late to ward off that deadly blow. There was a great crash at the rear of our cruiser; it spun dizzily for a moment in midair, and then was tumbling crazily downward like a falling stone toward the glowing plain a score of miles below.

Ill

I think now that our cruiser's mad downward plunge must have lasted for minutes, at least, yet at the time it seemed over in a single instant. I have a confused memory of the bridgeroom spinning about us as we whirled down, of myself throwing back the controls with a last, instinctive action, and then there came a ripping, rending crash, a violent shock, and I was flung into a corner of the room with terrific force.

Dazed by the swift action of the last few minutes I lay there motionless for a space of seconds, then scrambled to my feet. Hums Hoi and Dal Nara were staggering up likewise, the latter hastening at once down into the cruiser's hull, but Nal Jak, the wheelman, lay motionless against the wall, stunned by the shock. Our first act was to bring him back to consciousness by a few rough first-aid measures, and then we straightened and gazed about us.

Apparently our cruiser's keel was resting upon the ground, but was tilted over at a sharp angle, as the slant of the room's floor attested. Through the broad windows we could see that around our prostrate ship lay a thick, screening grove of black tree-growths which we had glimpsed from above, and into which we had crashed in our mad plunge downward. As I was later to learn, it was only the shock-absorbing qualities of the vegetation into which we had fallen, and my own last-minute rush to the controls, which had slowed our fall enough to save us from annihilation.

There was a buzz of excited voices from the crew in the hull beneath us, and then I turned at a sudden exclamation from Hums Hoi, to find him pointing up through the ob-

servation windows in the bridgeroom's ceiling. I glanced up, then shrank back. For high above were circling a score or more of the long black cones which had attacked us, and which were apparently surveying the landscape for some clue to our fate. I gave a sharp catch of indrawn breath as they dropped lower toward us, and we crouched with pounding hearts while they dropped lower toward us, and while they dropped nearer. Then we uttered simultaneous sighs of relief as the long shapes above suddenly drove back up toward the zenith, apparently certain of our annihilation, massing and wheeling and then speeding back toward the glowing city from which they had risen to attack us.

We rose to our feet again, and as we did so the door clicked open to admit Dal Nara. She was a bruised, disheveled figure, like the rest of us, but there was something like a grin on her face.

"That cone that rammed us shattered two of our rear vibration-projectors," she announced, "but that was all the damage. And outside of one man with a broken shoulder the crew is all right."

"Good!" I exclaimed. "It won't take long to replace the broken projectors."

She nodded. "I ordered them to put in two of the spares," she explained. "But what then?"

I considered for a moment. "None of our other cruisers escaped, did they?" I asked.

Dal Nara slowly shook her head. "I don't think so," she said. "Nearly all of them were destroyed in the first few minutes. I saw Ship 16 racing up in an effort to escape, heading back toward the Galaxy, but there were cones hot after it and it couldn't have got away."

The quiet voice of Hums Hoi broke in upon us. "Then we alone can take back word to the Federation of what is happening here," he said. His eyes suddenly flamed. "Two things we know, he exclaimed. "We know that this dark star's curving path through space, which will bring it so fatally near to our own sun in passing, is a path contrary to all the laws of astronomical science. And we know now, too, that upon this dark star world, in those glowing cities yonder, live beings of some sort who possess,

apparently, immense intelligence and power."

My eyes met his. "You mean-" I began, but he interrupted swiftly.

"I mean that in my belief the answer to this riddle lies in that glowing city yonder, and that it is there we must go to find that answer."

"But how?" I asked. "If we'take the cruiser near it they'll sight us and annihilate us."

"There is another way," said Hurus Hoi. "We can leave the cruiser and its crew hidden here, and approach the city on foot—get as near to it as possible—learn what we can about it."

I think that we all gasped at that suggestion, but as I quickly revolved it in my mind I saw that it was, in reality, our only chance to secure any information of value to take back to the Federation. So we adopted the idea without further discussion and swiftly laid our plans for the venture. At first it was our plan for only us three to go, but at Dal Nara's insistence we included the pilot in our party, the more quickly because I knew her to be resourceful and quick-witted.

Two hours we spent in sleep, at the suggestions of Hurus Hoi, then ate a hasty meal and looked to our weapons, small projectors of the decohesion ray similar to the great ray-tubes of the cruiser. Already the ship's two shattered vibration-projectors had been replaced by new spares, and our last order was for the crew and under-officers to await our return without moving beyond the ship in any event. Then the cruiser's hull-door snapped open and we four stepped outside, ready for our venture.

The sandy ground upon which we stood glowed with the feeble white light which seemed to emanate from all rock and soil on this strange world, a weird light which beat upward upon us instead of down. And in this light the twisted, alien forms of the leafless trees around us writhed upward into the dusky air, their smooth black branches tangling and intertwining far above our heads. As we paused there Hurus Hoi reached down for a glowing pebble, which he examined intently for a moment.

"Radio-active," he commented. "All this glowing rock and 71 soil." Then he straightened, glanced around, and led the way unhesitatingly through the thicket of black forest into which our ship had fallen.

Silently we followed him, in single file, across the shining soil and beneath the distorted arches of the twisted trees, until at last we emerged from the thicket and found ourselves upon the open expanse of the glowing plain. It was a weird landscape which met our eyes, a landscape of glowing plains and shallow valleys patched here and there with the sprawling thickets of black forest, a pale, luminous world whose faint light beat feebly upward into the dusky, twilight skies above. In the distance, perhaps two miles ahead, a glow of deeper light flung up against the hovering dusk from the massed buildings of the luminous city, and toward this we tramped steadily onward, over the shining plains and gullies and once over a swift little brook whose waters glowed as they raced like torrents of rushing light. Within an hour we had drawn to within a distance of five hundred feet from the outermost of the city's pyramidal buildings, and crouched in a little clump of dark tree-growths, gazing fascinatedly toward it.

The scene before us was one of unequaled interest and activity. Over the masses of huge, shining buildings were flitting great swarms of the long black cones, moving from roof to roof, while in the shining streets below them moved other hordes of active figures, the people of the city. And as our eyes took in these latter I think that we all felt something of horror, in spite of all the alien forms which we were familiar with in the thronging worlds of the Galaxy.

For in these creatures was no single point of resemblance to anything human, nothing which the appalled intelligence could seize upon as familiar. Imagine an upright cone of black flesh, several feet in diameter and three or more in height, supported by a dozen^-or more smooth long tentacles which branched from its lower end—supple, boneless octopus-arms which held the cone-body upright and which served both as arms and legs. And near the top of that cone trunk were the only features, the twin tiny orifices which were the ears and a single round and red-rimmed white eye, set between them. Thus were these beings in appearance, black tentacle-creatures, moving in unending swirling throngs

through streets and squares and buildings of their glowing city.

Helplessly we stared upon them, from our place of concealment. To venture into sight, I knew, would be to court swift death. I turned to Hurus Hoi, then started as there came from the city ahead a low, waxing sound-note, a deep, powerful tone of immense volume which sounded out over the city like die blast of a deep-pitched horn. Another note joined it, and another, until it seemed that a score of mighty horns were calling across the city, and then they died away. But as we looked now we saw that the shining streets were emptying, suddenly, that the moving swarms of black tentacle-creatures were passing into the pyramidal buildings, that the cones above were slanting down toward the roofs and coming to rest. Within a space of minutes the streets seemed entirely empty and deserted, and the only sign of activity over all the city was the hovering of a few cones that still moved restlessly above it. Astounded, we watched, and then the explanation came suddenly to me.

"It's their sleep-period!" I cried. "Their night! These things must rest, must sleep, like any living thing, and as there's no night on this glowing world those horn-notes must signal the beginning of their sleep-period."

Hurus Hoi was on his feet, his eyes suddenly kindling. "It's a chance in a thousand to get inside the city!" he exclaimed.

The next moment we were out of the shelter of our concealing trees and were racing across the stretch of ground which separated us from the city. And five minutes later we were standing in the empty, glowing streets, hugging closely the mighty sloping walls of the huge buildings along it.

At once Hurus Hoi led the way directly down the street toward the heart of the city, and as we hastened on beside him he answered to my question, "We must get to the city's center. There's something there which I glimpsed from our ship, and if it's what I think—"

He had broken into a run, now, and as we raced together down the bare length of the great, shining avenue, I, for one, had an unreassuring presentiment of what would

happen should the huge buildings around us disgorge their occupants before we could get out of the city. Then Hurus Hoi had suddenly stopped short, and at a motion from him we shrank swiftly behind the corner of a pyramid's slanting walls. Across the street ahead of us were passing a half-dozen of the tentacle-creatures, gliding smoothly toward the open door of one of the great pyramids. A moment we crouched, holding our breath, and then the things had passed inside the building and the door had slid shut behind them. At once we leapt out and hastened on.

We were approaching the heart of the city, I judged, and ahead the broad, shining street we followed seemed to end in a great open space of some sort. As we sped toward it, between the towering luminous lines of buildings, a faint droning sound came to our ears from ahead, waxing louder as we hastened on. The clear space ahead was looming larger, nearer, now, and then as we raced past the last great building on the street's length we burst suddenly into view of the opening ahead and stopped, staring dumfoundedly toward it.

It was no open plaza or square, but a pit—a shallow, circular pit not more than a hundred feet in depth but all of a mile in diameter, and we stood at the rim or edge of it. The floor was smooth and flat, and upon that floor there lay a grouped mass of hundreds of half-globes or hemispheres, each fifty feet in diameter, which were resting upon their flat bases with their curving sides uppermost. Each of these hemispheres was shining with light, but it was very different light from the feeble glow of the buildings and streets around us, an intensely brilliant blue radiance which was all but blinding to our eyes. From these massed, radiant hemispheres came the loud droning we had heard, and now we saw, at the pit's farther edge, a cylindrical little room or structure of metal which was supported several hundred feet above the pit's floor by a single slender shaft of smooth round metal, like a great bird-cage. And toward this cage-structure Hurus Hoi was pointing now, his eyes flashing.

"It's the switch-board of the thing!" he cried. "And these 74 brilliant hemispheres—the unheard-of space-path of this dark star—it's all clear now! All—"

He broke off, suddenly, as Nal Jak sprang back, uttering a cry and pointing upward. For the moment we had forgotten the hovering cones above the city, and now one of them was slanting swiftly downward, straight toward us.

We turned, ran back, and the next moment an etheric bomb crashed down upon the spot where we had stood, exploding silently in a great flare of light. Another bomb fell and flared, nearer, and then I turned with sudden fierce anger and aimed the little ray-projector in my hand at the hovering cone above. The brilliant little beam cut across the dark shape; the black cone hovered still for a moment, then crashed down into the street to destruction. But now, from above and beyond, other cones were slanting swiftly down toward us, while from the pyramidal buildings beside us hordes of the black tentacle-creatures were pouring out in answer to the alarm.

In a solid, resistless swarm they rushed upon us. I heard a yell of defiance from Dal Nara, beside me, the hiss of our rays as they clove through the black masses in terrible destruction, and then they were upon us. A single moment we whirled about in a wild mêlée of men and cone-creatures, of striking human arms and coiling tentacles; then there was a shout of warning from one of my friends, something hard descended upon my head with crushing force, and all went black before me.

Faint light was filtering through my eyelids when I came back to consciousness. As I opened them I sat weakly up, then fell back. Dazedly I gazed about me. I was lying in a small, square room lit only by its own glowing walls and floor and ceiling, a room whose one side slanted steeply upward and inward, pierced by a small barred window that was the only opening. Opposite me I discerned a low door of metal bars, or grating, beyond which lay a long, glowing-walled corridor. Then all these things were suddenly blotted out by the anxious face of Hurus Hoi, bending down toward me.

"At this moment their astronomers came forward with the announcement that their dark-star world, plunging on through empty space, would soon pass a great star-cluster or Galaxy of suns at a distance of some fifteen billion miles. They could not invade the worlds of this Galaxy, they knew, for they had discovered that upon those worlds lived countless trillions of intelligent inhabitants who would be able to repel their own invasion, if they attempted it. There was but one expedient left, therefore, and that was to attempt to jerk a sun out of this Galaxy as they passed by it, to steal a star from it to take out with them into space, which would revolve around their own mighty dark world and supply it with the heat they needed.

"The sun which they fixed on to steal was one at the Galaxy's very edge, our own sun. If they passed this at fifteen billion miles, as their course then would cause them to do, they could do nothing. But if they could change then-dark star's course, could curve inward to pass this sun at some three billion miles instead of fifteen, then the powerful gravitational grip of their own gigantic world would grasp this sun and carry it out with it into space. The sun's planets, too, would be carried out, but these they planned to crash into the fires of the sun itself, to increase its size and splendor. All that was needed, therefore, was some method of curving their world's course inward, and for this they had recourse to the great gravity-condensers which they had already used to shift their own planets.

"You know that it is gravitational force alone which keeps the suns and planets to their courses, and you know that the gravitational force of any body, sun or planet, is radiated out from it in all directions, tending to pull all things toward that body. In the same way there is radiated outward perpetually from the Galaxy that combined attractive gravitational force of all its swarming suns, and a tiny fraction of this outward-radiating force, of course, struck the dark star, pulling it weakly toward the Galaxy. If more of that outward-radiating force could strike the dark star, it would be pulled toward the Galaxy with more power, would be pulled nearer toward the Galaxy's edge, as it passed.

"It was just that which their gravity-condenser accom-78 plished. In a low pit at the heart of one of their cities— this city, in fact—they placed the condenser, a mass of brilliant hemispherical ray-attracters which caused more of the Galaxy's outward-shooting attractive force to fall upon the dark star, thereby pulling the dark star inward toward the Galaxy's edge in a great curve. When they reached a distance of three billion miles from the Galaxy's edge they planned to turn off the great condenser, and their dark star would then shoot past the Galaxy's edge, jerking out our sun with it, from that edge, by its own terrific gravitational grip. If the condenser were turned off before they came that close, however, they would pass the sun at a distance too far to pull it out with them, and would then speed on out into space alone, toward the freezing of their world and their own extinction. For that reason the condenser, and the great cage-switch of the condenser, were guarded always by hovering cones, to prevent its being turned off before the right moment.

"Since then they have kept the great gravity-condenser in unceasing operation, and their dark star has swept in toward the Galaxy's edge in a great curve. Back in our own solar system I saw and understood what would be the result of that inward curve, and so we came here—and were captured. And in those weeks since we were captured, while you have lain here unconscious and raving, this dark star has been plunging nearer and nearer toward our Galaxy and toward our sun. Ten more days and it passes that sun, carrying it out with it into the darkness of boundless space, unless the great condenser is turned off before then. Ten more days, and we lie here, powerless to warn any of what forces work toward the doom of our sun!"

There was a long silence when Hurus Hoi's voice had ceased—a whispering, brain-crushing silence which I broke at last with a single question.

"But Nal Jak—?" I asked, and the faces of my two companions became suddenly strange, while Dal Nara turned away. At last Hurus Hoi spoke.

"It was after the tentacle-scientists had examined me," he said gently, "that they brought Nal Jak down to examine. I think that they spared me for the time being because

of my apparently greater knowledge, but Nal Jak they— vivisected."

There was a longer hush than before, one in which the brave, quiet figure of the wheelman, a companion in all my service with the fleet, seemed to rise before my suddenly blurring eyes. Then abruptly I swung down from the narrow bunk on which I lay, clutched dizzily at my companions for support, and walked unsteadily to the square, barred little window. Outside and beneath me lay the city of the dark-star people, a mighty mass of pyramidal, glowing buildings, streets thronged with their dark, gliding figures, above them the swarms of the racing cones. From our little window the glowing wall of the great pyramid which held us slanted steeply down for fully five hundred feet, and upward above us for twice that distance. And as I raised my eyes upward I saw, clear and bright above, a great, far-flung field of stars—the stars of our own Galaxy toward which this world was plunging. And burning out clearest among these the star that was nearest of all, the shining yellow star that was our own sun.

I think now that it was the sight of that yellow s'-ar, largening steadily as our dark star swept on toward it, which filled us with such utter despair in the hours, the days, that followed. Out beyond the city our cruiser lay hidden in the black forest, we knew, and could we escape we might yet carry word back to the Federation of what was at hand, but escape was impossible. And so, through the long days, days measurable only by our own time-dials, we waxed deeper into an apathy of dull despair.

Rapidly my strength came back to me though the strange food supplied us once a day by our captors was almost uneatable. But as the days fied by, my spirits sank lower and lower, and less and less we spoke to each other as the doom of our sun approached, the only change in any thing around us being the moment each twenty-four hours when the signal-horns called across the city, summoning the hordes in its streets to their four-hour sleep-period. At last, though, we woke suddenly to realization of the fact that nine days had passed since my awakening, and that upon the next day the dark star would be plunging past the burning yellow star above us and jerking it into its grip. Then, at last, all

our apathy dropped from us, and we raged against the walls of our cells with insensate fury. And then, with startling abruptness, came the means of our deliverance.

For hours there had been a busy clanging of tools and machines somewhere in the great building above us, and numbers of the tentacle-creatures had been passing our barred door carrying tools and instruments toward some work being carried out overhead. We had come to pay but little attention to them, in time, but as one passed there came a sudden rattle and clang from outside, and turning to the door we saw that one of the passing creatures had dropped a thick coil of slender metal chain upon the floor and had passed on without noticing his loss.

In an instant we were at the door and reaching through its bars toward the coil, but through we each strained our arms in turn toward it the thing lay a few tantalizing inches beyond our grasp. A moment we surveyed it, baffled, fearing the return at any moment of the creature who had dropped it, and then Dal Nara, with a sudden inspiration, lay flat upon the floor, tirrusting her leg out through the grating. In a moment she had caught the coil with her foot, and in another moment we had it inside examining it.

We found that though it was as slender as my smallest finger the chain was of incredible strength, and when we roughly estimated the extent of its thick-coiled length we discovered that it would be more than long enough to reach from our window to the street below. At once, therefore, we secreted the thing in a corner of the room and impatiently awaited the sleep-period, when we could work without fear of interruption.

At last, after what seemed measureless hours of waiting, the great horns blared forth across the city outside, and swiftly its streets emptied, the sounds in our building quieting until all was silence, except for the humming of a few watchful cones above the great condenser, and the deep droning of the condenser itself in the distance. At once we set to work at the bars of our window.

Frantically we chipped at the rock at the base of one of the metal bars, using the few odd bits of metal at our command, but at the end of two hours had done no more

than scratch away a bare inch of the glowing stone. Another hour and we had laid bare from the rock the lower end of the bar, but now we knew that within minutes the sleep-period of the city outside would be ending, and into the streets would be swarming its gliding throngs, making impossible all attempts at escape. Furiously we worked, dripping now with sweat, until at last when our time-dials showed that less than half an hour remained to us I gave over the chipping at the rock and wrapped our chain firmly around the lower end of the bar we had loosened. Then stepping back into the cell and bracing ourselves against the wall below the window, we pulled backward with all our strength.

A tense moment we strained thus, the thick bar holding fast, and then abruptly it gave and fell from its socket in the wall to the floor, with a loud, ringing clang. We lay in a heap on the floor, panting and listening for any sound of alarm, then rose and swiftly fastened the chain's end to one of the remaining bars. The chain itself we dropped out of the window, watching it uncoil its length down the mighty building's glowing side until its end trailed on the empty glowing street far below. At once I motioned Hurus Hoi to the window, and in a moment he had squeezed through its bars and was sliding slowly down the chain, hand under hand. Before he was ten feet down Dal Nara was out and creeping downward likewise, and then I too squeezed through the window and followed them, downward, the three of us crawling down the chain along the huge building's steeply sloping side like three flies.

I was ten feet down from the window, now, twenty feet, and glanced down toward the glowing, empty street, five hundred feet below, and seeming five thousand. Then, at a sudden sound from above me, I looked sharply up, and as I did so the most sickening sensation of fear I had ever experienced swept over me. For at the window we had just left, twenty feet above me, one of the tentacle-creatures was leaning out, brought to our cell, I doubted not, by the metal bar's ringing fall, his white, red-rimmed eye turned full upon me.

I heard sighs of horror from my two companions beneath me, and for a single moment we hung motionless along the

chain's length, swinging along the huge pyramid's glowing side at a height of hundreds of feet above the shining streets below. Then the creature raised one of its tentacles, a metal tool in its grasp, which he brought down in a sharp blow on the chain at the window's edge. Again he repeated the blow, and again.

He was cutting the chain!

For a space of seconds I hung motionless there, and then as the tool in the grasp of the creature above came down on the chain in another sharp blow the sound galvanized me into sudden action.

"Slide on down!" I cried. They didn't, however, but followed me up the chain, though Dal Nara and I alone came to grips with the horrible dead-star creature. I gripped the links with frantic hands, pulling myself upward toward the window and the creature at the window, twenty feet above me.

Three times the tool in his hand came down upon the chain while I struggled up toward him, and each time I expected the strand to sever and send us down to death, but the hard metal withstood the blows for the moment, and before he could strike at it again I was up to the level of the window and reaching up toward him.

As I did so, swift black tentacles thrust out and gripped Dal Nara and me, while another of the snaky arms swept up with the tool in its grasp for a blow on my head. Before it could fall, though, I had reached out with my right hand, holding to the chain with my left, and had grasped the body of the thing inside the window, pulling him outside before he had time to resist. As I did so my own hold slipped a little, so that we hung a few feet below the window, both clinging to the slender chain and both striking futilely at each other, he with the metal tool and I with my clenched fist.

A moment we hung there, swaying hundreds of feet above the luminous stone street, and then the creature's tentacle coiled swiftly around my neck, tightening, choking me.

Hanging precariously to our slender strand with one hand I struck out blindly with the other, but felt consciousness leaving me as that remorseless grip tightened. Then with a last effort I gripped the chain firmly with both hands, doubled my feet under me, and kicked out with all my strength. The kick caught the cone-body of my opponent squarely, tearing him loose from his own hold on the chain, and then there was a sudden wrench at my neck and I was free of him, while beneath Dal Nara and I glimpsed his dark body whirling down toward the street below, twisting and turning in its fall along the building's slanting side and then crashing finally down upon the smooth, shining street below, where it lay a black little huddled mass.

Hanging there I looked down, panting, and saw that Hur-us Hoi had reached the chain's bottom and was standing in the empty street, awaiting us. Glancing up I saw that the blows of the creature I had fought had half severed one of the links above me, but there was no time to readjust it; so with a prayer that it might hold a few moments longer Dal Nara and I began our slipping, sliding progress downward.

The sharp links tore our hands cruelly as we slid downward, and once it seemed to me that the chain gave a little beneath our weight. Apprehensively I looked upward, then down to where Hurus Hoi was waving encouragement. Down, down we slid, not daring to look beneath again, not knowing how near we might be to the bottom. Then there was another slight give in the chain, a sudden grating catch, and abruptly the weakened link above snapped and we dropped headlong downward—ten feet into the arms of Hurus Hoi.

A moment we sprawled in a little heap there on the glowing street and then staggered to our feet. "Out of the city!" cried Hurus Hoi. "We could never get to the condenser-switch on foot—but in the cruiser there's a chance. And we have but a few minutes now before the sleep-period ends!"

Down the broad street we ran, now, through squares and avenues of glowing, mighty pyramids, crouching down once as the ever-hovering cones swept by above, and then racing on. At any moment, I knew, the great horns might blare across the city, bringing its swarming thousands into its streets, and our only chance was to win free of it before

that happened. At last we were speeding down the street by which we had entered the city, and before us lay that street's end, with beyond it the vista of black forest and glowing plain over which we had come. And now we were racing over that glowing plain, a quarter-mile, a half, a mile. . . .

Abruptly from far behind came the calling, crescendo notes of the mighty horns, marking the sleep-period's end, bringing back into the streets the city's tentacle-people. It could be but moments now, we knew, before our escape was discovered, and as we panted on at our highest speed we listened for the sounding of the alarm behind us.

It came! When we had drawn to within a half-mile of the black forest where our cruiser lay hidden, another great tumult of horn-notes burst out over the glowing city behind, high and shrill and raging. And glancing back we saw swarms of the black cones rising from the pyramidal buildings' summits, circling, searching, speeding out over the glowing plains around the city, a compact mass of them racing straight toward us.

"On!" cried Hurus Hoi. "It's our last chance—to get to the cruiser!"

Staggering, stumbling, with the last of our strength we sped on, over the glowing soil and rocks, toward the rim of the black forest which lay now a scant quarter-mile ahead. Then suddenly Hurus Hoi stumbled, tripped and fell. I halted, turned toward him, then turned again as Dal Nara shouted thickly and pointed upward. We had been sighted by the speeding cones above and two of them were driving straight down toward us.

A moment we stood there, rigid, while the great cones dipped toward us, waiting for the death that would crash down upon us from them. Then suddenly a great dark shape loomed in the ah- above and behind us, from which sprang out swift shafts of brilliant green light, the dazzling de-cohesion ray, striking the two swooping cones and sending them down in twin torrents of shattered wreckage. And now the mighty bulk behind us swept swiftly down upon us, and we saw that it was our cruiser.

Smoodily it shot down to the ground, and we stumbled 85 to its side, through the waiting open door. As I staggered up to the bridgeroom the third officer was shouting in my ear. "We sighted you from the forest," he was crying. "Came out in the cruiser to get you—"

But now I was in the bridgeroom, brushing the wheelman from the controls, sending our ship slanting sharply up toward the zenith. Hurus Hoi was at my side, now, pointing toward the great telechart and shouting something in my. ear. I glanced over, and my heart stood still. For the great dark disk on the chart had swept down to within an inch of the shining line around our sun-circle, the danger-line.

"The condenser!" I shouted. "We must get to that switch —turn it off! It's our only chance!"

We were racing through the air toward the luminous city, now, and ahead a mighty swarm of the cones was gathering and forming to meet us, while from behind and from each side came other swarms, driving on toward us. Then the door clicked open and Dal Nara burst into the bridgeroom.

"The ship's ray-tubes are useless!" she cried. "They've used the last charge in the ray-tanks!"

At the cry the controls quivered under my hands, the ship slowed, stopped. Silence filled the bridgeroom, filled all the cruiser, the last silence of despair. We had failed. Weaponless our ship hung there, motionless, while toward it from all directions leaped the swift and swarming cones, in dozens, in scores, in hundreds, leaping toward us, long black messengers of death, while on the great telechart the mighty dark star leapt closer toward the shining circle that was our sun, toward the fateful fine around it. We had failed, and death was upon us.

And now the black swarms of the cones were very near us, and were slowing a little, as though fearing some ruse on our part, were slowing but moving closer, closer, while we awaited them in a last utter stupor of despair. Closer they came, closer, closer. . . .

A ringing, exultant cry suddenly sounded from somewhere in the cruiser beneath me, taken up by a sudden babel of voices, and then Dal Nara cried out hoarsely, beside me, and pointed up through our upper observation-windows toward a long, shining, slender shape that was driving

down toward us out of the upper air, while behind it drove a vast swarm of other and larger shapes, long and black and mighty.

"It's our own ship!" Dal Nara was shouting, insanely. "It's Ship 16! They escaped, got back to the Galaxy—and look there—behind them—it's the fleet, the Federation fleet!"

There was a wild singing of blood in my ears as I looked up, saw the mighty swarm of black shapes that were speeding down upon us behind the shining cruiser, the five thousand mighty battle-cruisers of the Federation fleet.

The fleet! The massed fighting-ships of the Galaxy, cruisers from Antares and Sirius and Regulus and Spica, the keepers of the Milky Way patrol, the picked fighters of a universe! Ships with which I had cruised from Arcturus to Deneb, beside which I had battled in many an interstellar fight. The fleet! They were straightening, wheeling, hovering, high above us, and then they were driving down upon the massed swarms of cones around us in one titanic, simultaneous swoop.

Then around us the air flashed brilliant with green ray and bursting flares, as de-cohesion rays and etheric bombs crashed and burst from ship to ship. Weaponless our cruiser hung there, at the center of that gigantic battle, while around us the mighty cruisers of the Galaxy and the long black cones of the tentacle-people crashed and whirled and flared, swooping and dipping and racing upon each other, whirling down to the glowing world below in scores of shattered wrecks, vanishing in silent flares of blinding light. From far away across the surface of the luminous world beneath, the great swarms of cones drove on toward the battle, from the shining towers of cities far away, racing fearlessly to the attack, sinking and falling and crumbling beneath the terrible rays of the leaping ships above, ramming and crashing with them to the ground in sacrificial plunges. But swiftly, now, the cones were vanishing beneath the brilliant rays.

Then Hums Hoi was at my side, shouting and pointing down toward the glowing city below. "The condenser!" he cried, pointing to where its blue radiance still flared on. "The dark star—look!" He flung a hand toward the telechart, where the dark star disk was but a scant half-inch from

the shining line around our sun-circle, a tiny gap that was swiftly closing. I glanced toward the battle that raged around us, where the Federation cruisers were sending the cones down to destruction by swarms, now, but unheeding of the condenser below. A bare half-mile beneath us lay that condenser, and its cage-pillar switch, which a single shaft of the green ray would have destroyed instantly. And our ray-tubes were useless!

The wild resolve flared up in my brain and I slammed down the levers in my hands, sent our ship racing down toward the condenser and its upheld cage like a released thunderbolt of hurtling metal. "Hold tight!" I screamed as we thundered down. "I'm going to ram the switch!"

And now up toward us were rushing the brilliant blue hemispheres of the pit, the great pillar and upheld cage beside them, toward which we flashed with the speed of lightning. CrashI— and a tremendous shock shook the cruiser from stem to stern as its prow tore through the upheld metal cage, ripping it from its supporting pillar and sending it crashing to the ground. Our cruiser spun, hovered for a moment as though to whirl down to destruction, then steadied, while we at the window gazed downward, shouting.

For beneath us the blinding radiance of the massed hemispheres had suddenly snapped out! Around and above us the great battle had died, the last of the cones tumbling to the ground beneath the rays of the mighty fleet, and now we turned swiftly to the telechart. Tensely we scanned it. Upon it the great dark-star disk was creeping still toward the line around our sun-circle, creeping slower and slower toward it but still moving on, on, on. . . . Had we lost, at the last moment? Now the black disk, hardly moving, was all but touching the shining line, separated from it by only a hair's-breadth gap. A single moment we watched while it hovered thus, a moment in which was settled the destiny of a sun. And then a babel of incoherent cries came from our lips. For the tiny gap was widening!

The. black disk was moving back, was curving outward again from our sun and from the Galaxy's edge, curving out once more into the blank depths of space whence it had come, without the star it had planned to steal. Out, out, out—and we knew, at last, that we had won.

And the mighty fleet of ships around us knew, from their own charts. They were massing around us and hanging motionless while beneath us the palely glowing gigantic dark star swept on, out into the darkness of trackless space until it hung like a titanic feeble moon in the heavens before us, retreating farther and farther from the shining stars of our Galaxy, carrying with it the glowing cities and the hordes of the tentacle-peoples, never to return. There in the bridge-room, with our massed ships around us, we three watched it go, then turned back toward our own yellow star, serene and far and benignant, that yellow star around which swung our own eight little worlds. And then Dal Nara flung out a hand toward it, half weeping now.

"The sun!" she cried. "The sun! The good old sun, that we fought for and saved! Our sun, till the end of time!"

It was on a night a week later that Dal Nara and I said farewell to Hurus Hoi, standing on the roof of that same great building on Neptune from which we had started with our fifty cruisers weeks before. We had learned, in that week, how the only survivor of those cruisers, Ship 16, had managed to shake off the pursuing cones in that first fierce attack and had sped back to the Galaxy to give the alarm, of how the mighty Federation fleet had raced through the Galaxy from beyond Antares in answer to that alarm, speeding out toward the approaching dark star and reaching it just in time to save our own ship, and our sun.

The other events of that week, the honors which had been loaded upon us, I shall not attempt to describe. There was little in the solar system which we three could not have had for the asking, but Hurus Hoi was content to follow the science that was his life-work, while Dal Nara, after the manner of her sex through all the ages, sought a beauty parlor, and I asked only to continue with our cruiser in the service of the Federation fleet. The solar system was home to us, would always be home to us, but never, I knew, would either of us be able to break away from the fascination of the great fleet's interstellar patrol, the flashing from sun to sun,

the long silent hours in cosmic night and stellar glare. We would be star-rovers, she and I, until the end.

So now, ready to rejoin the fleet, I stood on the great building's roof, the mighty black bulk of our cruiser behind us and the stupendous canopy of the Galaxy's glittering suns over our heads. In the streets below, too, were other lights, brilliant flares, where thronging crowds still celebrated the escape of their worlds. And now Hurus Hoi was speaking, more moved than ever I had seen him.

"If Nal Jak were here—" he said, and we were all silent for a moment. Then his hand came out toward us and silently we wrung it, turning toward the cruiser's door.

As it slammed shut behind us we were ascending to the bridgeroom, and from there we glimpsed now the great roof dropping away beneath us as we slanted up from it once more, the dark figure of Hurus Hoi outlined for a moment at its edge against the lights below, then vanishing. And the world beneath us was shrinking, vanishing once more, until at last of all the solar system behind us there was visible only the single yellow spark that was our sun.

Then about our outward-racing cruiser was darkness, the infinite void's eternal night—night and the unchanging, glittering hosts of wheeling, flaming stars.

WITHIN THE NEBULA

Standing at the controls, beside me, the silent steersman raised his hand for a moment to point forward through the pilot room's transparent wall.

"Canopus at last," he said, and I nodded. Together, and in silence, we gazed ahead.

Before and around us there stretched away the magnificent panorama of interstellar space, familiar enough to our eyes but ever new, a vast reach of deep black sky dotted thickly with the glittering hosts of stars. The blood-red of Antares, the pale green of great Sirius, the warm, golden light of Capella, they flamed in the firmament about us like spendid jewels of light. And dead ahead there shone the

one orb that dwarfed and dimmed all the others, a titanic radiant white sun whose blazing circle seemed to fill the heavens before us, the mighty star of Canopus, vastest of all the Galaxy's thronging suns.

For all that I had visited it many times before, it was with something of awe that I contemplated the great white sun, as our ship flashed on toward it. Its colossal blazing bulk, I knew, was greater far than the whole of our own little solar system, millions of times larger than our own familiar little star, infinitely the most glorious of all the swarming suns. It seemed fitting, indeed, that at Canopus had been located the seat of the great Council of Suns of which I was myself a member, representing our own little solar system in that mighty deliberative body whose members were drawn from every peopled star.

In thoughtful silence I gazed toward the mighty sun ahead, and for a time there was no sound in the bridgeroom except for the deep humming of the ship's generators, whose propulsion-vibrations flung us on through space. Then, against the dazzling glare of the gigantic star ahead, there appeared a tiny black dot, expanding swiftly in size as we raced on toward it. Around and beyond it other dots were coming into view, also, changing as we flashed on to disks, to globes, to huge and swarming planets that spun in vast orbits about their mighty parent sun. And it was toward the largest and inmost of these whirling worlds, the seat of the great Council, that our ship was now slanting swiftly downward.

Beneath us I could see the great planet rapidly expanding and broadening, until its tremendous coppery sphere filled all the heavens below. By that time our velocity had slackened to less than a light-speed, and even this speed decreased still further as we entered the zone of traffic about the great planet. For a few moments we dropped cautiously downward through the swarming masses of interstellar ships which jammed the upper levels, and then had swept past the busy traffic-boats into one of the great descension-lanes, and were moving smoothly down toward the planet's surface.

Around us there swarmed all the myriads of inbound ships that filled the descension-lane, drawn from every

quarter of the Galaxy toward Canopus, the center and capital of our universe. Long cargo-ships from far Spica there were, laden with all the strange merchandise of that sun's circling worlds; luxurious passenger-liners from Regulus and Altair, filled with tourists eager for their first sight of great Canopus; swift little boats from the thronging suns and worlds of the great Hercules cluster; battered tramps which owned no sun as home, but cruised eternally through the Galaxy, carrying chance cargoes from star to star; and here and there among the swarms of alien ships a human-manned craft from our own distant little solar system. All these and a myriad others raced smoothly beside and around us as we shot down toward the mighty world beneath.

Swiftly, though, the traffic about us branched away and thinned as we dropped nearer to the planet's surface. Beneath the light of the immense white sun above, its landscape lay clearly revealed, a far-sweeping panorama of smoothly sloping plains and valleys, parklike in its alternation of lawn and forest. Here and there on the surface of this world sprawled its shining cities, over whose streets and towers our cruiser sped as we flashed on. Then, far ahead, a single mighty gleaming spire became visible against the distant horizon, growing as we sped on toward it into a colossal tower all of two thousand feet square at its base, and which aspired into the radiant sunlight for fully ten thousand feet. On each side of it there branched away a curving line of smaller buildings, huge enough in themselves but dwarfed to toylike dimensions by the looming grandeur of the stupendous tower. And it was down toward the smooth sward at the tower's base that our ship was slanting now, for this was the seat of the great Council of Suns itself.

Down we sped toward the mighty structure's base, down over the great buildings on either side which housed the different departments of the Galaxy's government, down until our ship had come smoothly to rest on the ground a hundred feet from the tower itself. Then the ship's hull-door was clanging open, and a moment later I had stepped onto the ground outside and was striding across the smooth sward toward the mighty tower. Through its high-arched doorway I passed, and down the tremendous corridor inside toward the huge doors at its end, which automatically

slid smoothly sidewise as I approached. The next moment I had passed through them and stood in the Hall of the Council itself.

Involuntarily, as always, I paused on entering, so breathtaking was the immensity of the place. A single vast circular room, with a diameter of near two thousand feet, it covered almost all the mighty tower's first floor. From the edge of the great circle the room's floor sloped gently down toward its center, like a vast shallow bowl, and at the center stood the small black platform of the Council Chief. Out from that platform back clear to the great room's towering walls were ranged the countless rows of seats, just filling now with the great Council's thousands of members.

Beings there were among those thousands from every peopled sun in all the Galaxy's hosts, drawn here like myself each to represent his star in this great Council which ruled our universe. Creatures there were utterly weird and alien in appearance, natives of the whirling worlds of the Galaxy's farthest stars—creatures from Aldebaran, turtle-men of the amphibian races of that star; fur-covered and slow-moving beings from the planets of dying Betelgeuse; great octopus-creatures from mighty Vega; invertebrate insect-men from the races of Procyon; strange, dark-winged bat-folk from the weird worlds of Deneb; these, and a thousand others, were gathered in that vast assemblage, forms utterly different from each other physically, but able to mix and understand each other on the common plane of intelligence.

Within another moment I had passed down the broad aisle and had slipped into my own seat, and now I saw that on the black platform at the room's center there stood silent the Council Chief. A strange enough figure he made, for he was of the races of Canopus, natives of this giant star-system, a great, unhuman head with no body and with but a single staring eye, carrying himself on tiny, pipe-stem limbs. Silently he stood there, contemplating the gathering members. Within another minute all had taken their seats, and then a sudden hush swept over them as the Council Chief stepped forward and began to speak, in the tongue that has become universal throughout the Galaxy, his strange, high voice carried to every end of the vast room by the

great amplifiers which make every whisper in it clearly heard.

"Members of the Council," he said, "I have called this meeting, have summoned you here to Canopus, each from his native star, because I have to place before you a matter of the utmost importance. I have summoned you here because there has risen to face us the most vital problem that has yet confronted us in our government of the Galaxy— the greatest and most terrible danger, in fact, that has ever threatened our universe!

"Other dangers, other problems, have faced us in the past, and all these we have overcome, by massing all our knowledge and science, have ruled with more and more power over the inanimate matter of our universe, our Galaxy. We have saved planets and their peoples from extinction, by shifting them from dying old suns to flaming new ones. We have succeeded in breaking up and annihilating some of the great comets whose headlong flights were carrying destruction across the Galaxy. We have even dared to change the course' of suns, to prevent collisions between them that would have annihilated their circling worlds. It might seem, indeed, that we, the massed peoples of the Galaxy, have risen to such power that all things in it are subject to our will, obedient to our commands. But we have not. One thing alone in the Galaxy remains beyond our power to change or alter, one thing beside which all our power and our science are as nothing. And that is the nebula.

"A nebula is the vastest thing in all our universe, and the most mysterious. A gigantic mass of glowing gas that stretches across countless billions of miles of space, its mighty bulk flames in the heavens like a universe on fire. Beside its vast dimensions all the suns of the Galaxy are but as sparks beside a great, consuming blaze. Here and there in our Galaxy lie these mighty mysteries, these flaming nebulae, and mightiest of all is that one which we call the Orion Nebula, that gigantic globe of flaming gas which measures light-years in diameter, burning in giant splendor at the Galaxy's heart. We know that the great nebula is growing slowly smaller, that through the eons it contracts to form new blazing stars, but what its constitution may be, what mysteries it may hide, has never been known, since it would be annihilation for any ship to approach too near

to its fiery splendor, and all our interstellar traffic has de-toured always far around its flaming mass. Because of that inaccessibility no large attention has ever been paid to the great nebula, nor would there be now, had not something been discovered but now by our scientists regarding it which seems to herald the end of our universe.

"As I have said, this nebula, this gigantic globe of flaming gas, lies practically motionless in space at the heart of our Galaxy. A few weeks ago, however, it was discovered by our astronomers that the great flaming sphere of the nebula had begun slowly to revolve, to spin, and that as the days went by it was spinning faster and faster. Through the weeks since then our astronomers have watched it closely, and ever faster it has spun, until now it is revolving at a terrific rate, a rate that is still steadily increasing. And that accelerating spin of the huge nebula must result, inevitably, in the doom of our universe.

"For our scientists have calculated that within two more weeks the nebula's rate of spin will have become so great that it will no longer be able to hold together, that it will disintegrate, break up, its gigantic masses of incandescent gases flying off in all directions like the pieces of a bursting fly-wheel. And those colossal clouds of flaming gas, flying out through our Galaxy, our universe, will inevitably sweep over and destroy countless thousands of our suns and worlds, annihilating the worlds like midgets in candle-flame, changing the suns into nebulous masses of flaming gas like themselves, smashing gigantically through and across the Galaxy and destroying the gravitational balance of its whirling suns and worlds until in a great chaos of crashing stars and planets our universe ends as a vast, cosmic wreck, our organizations and our civilizations gone forever!"

The Council Chief paused for a moment, and in that moment there was silence over all the great hall, a silence unnatural, terrible, unbroken by any slightest sound. I saw •the members about me leaning forward, gazing tensely toward the Council Chief, and when he spoke again his words seemed to come to us through that strained silence as though from some remoteness of distance.

"Terrible as this peril is," he was saying, "we must face it. Flight is impossible, for where could we flee? We have but

one chance to save ourselves, our universe, and that is to halt the spinning of the great nebula before the few days left us have passed, before this cosmic cataclysm takes place. Some extraordinary force or forces have set the great nebula to spinning thus, and if we could venture out to the nebula, discover the nature of those forces, we might be able to counteract them, to stop the nebula's spin and save our suns and worlds.

"It is impossible, of course, for any of our ordinary interstellar ships to attempt this, since any that approached the great nebula would perish instantly in its flaming heat. It chances, however, that some of our scientists here have been working for months on the problem of devising new heat-resistant materials, materials capable of resisting temperatures which would destroy other substances. They have worked on the principle that heat-resistance is a matter of atomic structure. Steel, for instance, resists heat and fire better than wood because its atomic structure, and arrangement of its atoms, is more stable, less easily broken up. And following this principle they have devised a new metallic compound or alloy whose atomic structure is infinitely more stable than that of any material known to us previously, and which is able to resist temperatures of thousands of degrees.

"Of this heat-resistant material an interstellar cruiser was constructed, a cruiser which could venture into regions of heat where other ships would perish instantly. It had been the intention to use this cruiser to explore solar coronas, but at my order it has been brought here to the Council Hall, equipped for action. For it is my intention to use this cruiser to venture out close to the great nebula's flaming fires, which it alone can do, and make a last effort to discover and counteract whatever force or forces there are causing the accelerating spin of the nebula that means doom to us.. The cruiser itself is not a large one, and with its present equipment can hold but three for this trip, three on whom must rest all the chances for escape of our universe. And these three I intend to choose now from among you, three whose past careers and interstellar experience make them best fitted for this hazardous and all-important trip."

He paused again, and over the massed members there 96 swept now a whisper of excitement, a low babel of a thousand unlike voices that stilled suddenly as the Council Chief again spoke, his high, clear voice sounding across the great room like a whipcrack. "Sar Than of Arcturus!"

As he called the name a single figure rose from among the members to my left, a bulbous body supported above the ground by four powerful thick tentacles of muscle which served both as arms and legs, while set upon the body was the round, neckless head, with its two quick, intelligent eyes and narrow mouth. A moment the Arcturian paused on rising, then stepped out into the aisle and down toward the central platform. And now the voice of the Council Chief cut again across the rising clamor of the members.

"Jor Dahat of Capella!"

Before me now another figure rose, one of the strange plant-men of Capella, of the people who had evolved to intelligence and power from the lower plant-races there; his body an upright cylinder of smooth, fibrous flesh, supported by two short, thick legs and with a pair of powerful upper arms, above which was the conical head whose two green-pupiled eyes and close-set ears and mouth completed the figure. In a moment he too had strode down toward the platform, and then, over the tumultuous shouts of those in the great hall, which had risen now to a steady roar of voices, there came the clear voice of the Council Chief, with the third name.

"Ker Kal of Sun-828!"

For a moment I sat silent, my brain whirling, the words of the Council Chief drumming in my ears, and then heard the excited voices of the members about me, felt myself stumbling to my feet and down the aisle in turn toward the platform. Beating in my dazed ears now was the tremendous shouting clamor of all the gathered members, and beneath that surging thunder of thousands of voices I sensed but dimly the things about me, the Arcturian and Capellan beside me, the figure of the Council Chief on the platform beyond them. Then I saw the latter raise a slender arm, felt the uproar about me swiftly diminishing, until complete si-

lence reigned once more. And then the Council Chief was speaking again, this time to us.

"Sar Than, Jor Dahat and Ker Kal," he addressed us, "you three are chosen to go where only three can go, to approach the nebula and make a final effort to discover and counteract whatever force or forces there are causing this cataclysm that threatens us. Your cruiser is ready and you will start at once, and to you I have no orders to give, no instructions, no advice. My only word to you is this: If you fail in this mission, where failure seems all but inevitable, indeed, our Galaxy meets its doom, die countless trillions of our races their deaths, the civilizations we have built up in millions of years annihilation. But if you succeed, if you find what forces have caused the spinning of the mighty nebula and are able to halt that spin, then your names shall not die while any in the Galaxy live. For then you will have done what never before was done or dreamed of, will have stayed with your hands a colossal cosmic wreck, will have saved a universe itself from death!"

As the door of the little pilot room clicked open behind me I half turned from my position at the controls, to see my two companions enter. And as the Arcturian and Capellan stepped over to my side I nodded toward the broad fore-window.

"Two more hours and we'll be there," I said.

Side by side we three gazed ahead. About us once more there stretched the utter blackness of the great void, ablaze with its jeweled suns. Far behind shone the brilliant white star that was Canopus, and to our right the great twin suns of Castor and Pollux, and above and beyond them the yellow spark that was the sun of my own little solar system. On each side and behind us hung the splendid starry canopy, but ahead it was blotted out by a single vast circle of glowing light that filled the heavens before us, titanic, immeasurable, the mighty nebula that was our goal.

For more than ten days we had watched the vast 98 globe of flaming gas largening across the heavens as we raced on toward it, in the heat-resistant cruiser that had been furnished us by the Council. Days they were in which our generators had hummed always at their highest power, propelling our craft forward through space with the swiftness of thought, almost—long, changeless days in which the alternate watches in the pilot room and the occasional inspection of the throbbing generators had formed our only occupations.

On and on and on we had flashed, past sun after sun, star system after star system. Many times we had swerved from our course as our meteorometers warned us of vast meteor swarms ahead, and more than once we had veered to avoid some thundering dark star which our charts showed near us, but always the prow of our craft had swung back toward the great nebula. Ever onward toward it we had raced, day after day, watching its glowing sphere widen across the heavens, until now at last we were drawing within sight of our journey's end, and were flashing over the last few billions of miles that separated us from our goal.

And now, as we drew thus nearer toward the nebula's fiery mass, we saw it for the first time in all its true grandeur. A vast sphere of glowing light, of incandescent gases, it flamed before us like some inconceivably titanic sun, reaching from horizon to horizon, stunning in its very magnitude. Up and outward from the great fiery globe there soared vast tongues of flaming gas, mighty prominences of incalculable length, leaping out from the gigantic spinning sphere. For the sphere, the nebula, was spinning. We saw that, now, and could mark the turning of its vast surface by the position of those leaping tongues, and though that turning seemed slow to our eyes by reason of the nebula's very vastness, we knew that in reality it was whirling at a terrific rate.

For a long time there was silence in the little pilot room while we three gazed ahead, the glowing light from the vast nebula before us beating in through the broad window and illuminating all about us in its glare. At last Sar Than, beside me, spoke.

"One sees now why no interstellar ship has ever dared 99 to approach the nebula," he said, his eyes on the colossal sea of flame before us.

I nodded at the Arcturian's comment. "Only our own ship would dare to come as close as we are now," I told him. "The temperature outside is hundreds of degrees, now." And I pointed toward a dial that recorded the outside heat.

"But how near can we go to it?" asked Jor Dahat. "How much heat can our cruiser stand?"

"Some thousands of degrees," I said, answering the plant-man's last question first. "We can venture within a few thousand miles of the nebula's surface without danger, I think. But if we were to go farther, if we were to plunge into its fires, even our ship could not resist the tremendous heat there for long, and would perish in a few minutes. We will be able, though, to skim above the surface without danger."

"You plan to do that, to search above the nebula's surface for the forces that have set it spinning?" asked the Capellan, and I nodded.

"Yes. There may be great ether-currents of some kind there which are responsible for this spin, or perhaps other forces of which we know nothing. If we can only find what is causing it, there will be at least a chance—" And I was silent, gazing thoughtfully toward the far-flung raging fires ahead.

Now, as our ship raced on toward that mighty ocean of flaming gas, the pointer on the outside-heat dial was creeping steadily forward, though the ship's interior was but slightly warmer, due to the super-insulation of its walls. We were passing into a region of heat, we knew, that would have destroyed any ship but our own, and that thought held us silent as our humming craft raced on. And now the sky before us, a single vast expanse of glowing flame, was creeping downward across our vision as the cruiser's bow swung up. Minutes more, and the whole vast flaming nebula lay stretched beneath us, instead of before us, and then we were dropping smoothly down toward it.

Down we fell, my hand on the control lever gradually decreasing our speed, now moving at a single lightspeed, now at half of that, and still slower and slower, until at last

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our craft hung motionless a scant thousand miles above the nebula's flaming surface, a tiny atom in size compared to the colossal universe of the fire above which it hovered. For from horizon to horizon beneath us, now, stretched the nebula, in terrible grandeur. Its flaming sea, we saw, was traversed by great waves and currents, currents that met here and there in gigantic fiery maelstroms, while far across its surface we saw, now and then, great leaping prominences of geysers of flaming gas, that towered for an instant to immense heights and then rushed back down into the fiery sea beneath. To us, riding above that burning ocean, it seemed at that moment that in all the universe was only flame and gas, so brain-numbing was the fiery nebula's magnitude.

Hanging there in our little cruiser we stared down at it, the awe we felt reflected in each other's eyes. I saw now by the dial that the temperature about us was truly terrific, over a thousand degrees, and what it might be in the raging fires below I could not guess. But nowhere was there any sign of what might have set the great nebula to spinning, for our instruments recorded no ether-disturbances around the surface, nor any other phenomena which might give us a clue. And, looking down, I think that we all felt, indeed, that nothing was in reality capable of affecting in any way this awesome nebula, the vastest thing in all our universe. *

At last I turned to the others. "There's nothing here," I said. "Nothing to show what's caused the nebula's spinning. We must go on, across its surface—"

With the words I reached forward toward the control levers, then abruptly whirled around as there came a sudden cry from Sar Than, at the window.

"Look!" cried the Arcturian, pointing down through the window, his eyes staring. "Below us—look!"

I gazed down, then felt the blood drive from my heart at what I saw. For directly beneath us one of the vast prominences of flaming gas was suddenly shooting up from the nebula's surface, straight toward us, a gigantic tongue of fire beside which our ship was but as a midge beside a great blaze. I shouted, sprang to the control, but even as I laid hands on the levers there was a tremendous rush of blinding flame all about our ship, and then we three had

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been flung violently into a corner of the pilot room and the cruiser was being whirled blindly about with lightning speed by the vast current of flaming gas that had gripped it.

All about us was the thunderous roaring of the fires that held us, and now as we sprawled helpless on the room's floor I sensed that our ship was falling, plunging down with the downward-sinking geyser of flame that held it. Struggling to gain my feet, while the pilot room spun dizzily about me, I glimpsed through the shifting fires outside the window the nebula's flaming surface, just below us, a raging sea of fiery gas toward which we were dropping plummetlike. Then, as a fresh gyration of the plunging ship flung me once more to the floor, I heard the thundering roar about us suddenly intensified, terrible beyond expression, while now through the window was visible only a single solid mass of blinding flame, and while our cruiser at the same moment rocked and whirled crazily beneath the impetus of a dozen different forces. And as understanding of what had happened flashed across my brain I cried out hoarsely to my two companions.

"The nebula!" I cried. "The current that held us has sucked us down into the nebula itself!'"

All about us now was only one tremendous sheet of fire, whose heat was rapidly penetrating through even our heat-resistant walls and windows. Swiftly the air in the little pilot room was becoming hot, suffocating, and already the walls were burning to the touch. The ship, I knew, could not stand such heat for many minutes more, yet every moment was taking us farther into the nebula's fiery depths, whirling us wildly on with velocity inconceivable. Borne by its mighty interior currents we were sweeping on and on into that universe of flame, its vast fires roaring about us like the thunder of doom, deafening, awful, a cosmic, bellowing clamor that was like the mighty shouting of a universe rnade vocal.

On and on it roared, about us, and on and on we whirled into the depths of those mighty fires, toward our doom. The air had become stifling, unbreathable, and the walls were beginning to glow dully. Now, with a last effort, I dragged myself from support to support until I had clutched the control levers, opening them to the last notch. Yet

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though the generators beneath hummed with highest power it was as though they were silent, for in the grip of the nebula's giant fire-currents the cruiser plunged madly on. And as its whirling catapulted me again to the room's corner, where my two companions clung, I felt my lungs scorching with each panting breath, felt my senses leaving me.

Then, through the unconsciousness that was creeping upon me, I heard a grating wrench from somewhere in the cruiser's walls, a loud and ominous cracking, and knew that under the terrific fires around us those walls were already warping, giving way. Another wrenching crack came, and another, sounding loud in my ears above the thunderous roar of the flames about us. In a moment the walls would give completely, and in the rushing fires of the nebula about us we would meet the end. In a moment—

But what was that? The thunderous clamor about us had suddenly dwindled, ceased, and at the same moment our ship had righted itself, was humming serenely on. Slowly I raised my head, then stared in utter astonishment. The fires outside the windows, the terrific sea of flame about us, had vanished, and we were again flashing on through open space. And now Jor Dahat beside me had seen also, and was rising to his feet.

"We're out of the nebula!" he cried. "That current must have taken us back up to the surface—back out into space again—"

He was at the window now, gazing eagerly out, while I struggled up in turn. And as I did so I saw awe falling upon his face as he gazed, and heard from him a whispered exclamation of utter astonishment. Then I, too, was on my feet, with Sar Than, and we were at the window beside him, staring forth in turn.

My first impression was of vast space, a colossal reach of space that stretched far away before us, and into which our ship was racing on. And then I saw, with sudden awe and wonder, that this vast space was not the unlimited, unbounded space we were accustomed to, but was limited, was bounded, bounded by a colossal sheet of flowing flame that hemmed it in in all directions. Above and below and before and behind us stretched this mighty wall of flame,

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a gigantic shell of fire that enclosed within itself the vast space in which our cruiser raced, a space large enough to hold within it a dozen solar systems like my own. Stunned, we gazed out into that mighty flame-bounded space, and then I flung out a hand toward it in sudden comprehension.

"We're inside the nebula!" I cried. "It's hollow! This vast open space lies at its heart, and those currents carried us down into it!"

For I saw now that this was the explanation. Unsuspected by any in the Galaxy the mighty nebula was hollow, its gigantic globe of flaming gas holding at its heart this mighty empty space, a space mighty in extent to our eyes, but small compared to the thickness of the great shell of fire that enclosed it. And down through that fire, that vast ocean of flame, the currents of the nebula had brought us, from its outer surface, down into this great space at its heart of which none had ever dreamed, and into which we had been the first in all the Galaxy to penetrate.

While we gazed across it, stunned, our cruiser was racing on into this vast hollow, away from the wall of flame behind us from which we had just emerged. And now, as we flashed on, Sar Than cried out too and pointed ahead. There,, standing out black against the encircling walls of fire in the' distance, was a small round spot, a spot that was growing to a black globe as we hurtled on toward it, a globe that hung motionless at the center of this mighty space, here at the nebula's heart. We were racing straight into the great cavity toward it and now there came a low exclamation from Jor Dahat, beside me, as his eyes took in the great globe ahead.

"A planet!" he whispered. "A planet here—within the nebula!"

My own eyes were fixed upon it, and slowly I nodded, but made no other answer as we flashed on toward the object of our attention, the black sphere ahead. And now as we swept on we saw that it was a sphere of truly titanic dimensions, larger by far than any of the Galaxy's countless worlds, and that as it hung there, at the nebula's heart, it was slowly revolving, spinning, as fast or faster than the nebula itself. Black and mighty it hung there, while all around it, millions of miles from it, there flamed the nebula's encircling

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fires. On and on we raced toward it, and for all those minutes of flashing flight none of us spoke, and there was no sound in the pilot room but the throbbing drone of the generators below. I think that we all felt instinctively that in the grim, colossal globe ahead lay the answer to what we had come to solve, and as we hurtled on toward it we watched it broadening before us in tense silence.

Larger and larger it was becoming, larger until its great black circle filled half the heavens before us. By then I had decreased our speed to a fraction of its former figure, and as we swept in toward the giant world I lessened it still further. Slowly, ever more slowly we moved, and now were circling above the great black planet, were beginning to drop cautiously down toward it. Eagerly we watched as the mighty world's surface changed from convex to concave, and as we dropped on we saw the needle of our atmosphere-pressure dial moving steadily forward, to show that this strange world had air, at least. Then all else was forgotten as our eyes took in the scene below.

I think that we had all half expected to see some evidence of life and civilization on this strange world, some building or group of buildings, at least. But there was none such. Beneath us lay only a smooth black plain, extending from horizon to horizon, devoid of hill or stream or valley, in so far as we could see, unnaturally smooth and level. And as we dropped nearer, ever nearer, the surprize we felt rapidly intensified, until when at last we hung motionless a hundred feet above the surface of this world exclamations of utter astonishment broke from us. For seen thus near, the surface of this mighty planet was as utterly smooth and level as it had seemed from high above, a black, gleaming plain without an inch-high elevation or depression, an inconceivably strange smooth expanse of black metal, that stretched evenly away in every direction to the horizon, smoothly covering this colossal world.

We looked at each other, a little helplessly, then down again toward the smooth and gleaming surface below. In that surface was no visible opening, no sign of joint or crack, even, nothing but the smooth blank metal. Then with sudden resolution I thrust forward the levers in my hands, sent our cruiser racing low across the surface of the giant, metal-

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sheathed planet, while we gazed intently across that surface in search of any sign that might explain the enigma of its existence. On we sped, while beneath us flashed back the smooth metal plain, mile after endless mile. Then, gazing ahead, my eyes suddenly narrowed and I raised a pointing hand. For there, far ahead, I had glimpsed an opening in the gleaming surface, a round black opening that was resolving itself into a vast circular pit as our cruiser raced on toward it.

Nearer and nearer we flashed toward it, with Sar Than and Jor Dahat beside me gazing forward, their interest as tense as my own. And now we saw that the pit was of gigantic size, its circular mouth all of five miles in diameter, and that from its center there drove up toward the zenith a flickering beam of pale and ghostlike white light, so pale as hardly to be visible, a livid white ray that stabbed straight up toward the fires of the nebula far above. We were very near to the pale beam, now, flashing above the huge pit straight toward it. I had a glimpse of the great pit's perpendicular black metal walls, dropping down for miles into depths inconceivable, of something in those dusky depths that burned like a great white star of light, and then Jor Dahat suddenly uttered a choking cry, flinging an arm out toward the livid ray before us.

"That ray!" he cried. "It's not light—it's force! The nebula —stop the ship!"

At that cry my hand flew out to the levers, but a moment too late. For before I could throw them back, could slow or stay our progress, we had raced straight into the great pale beam. The next moment there came a terrific crash, as though we had collided with a solid wall; our ship rocked drunkenly in midair for a single instant, and then was whirling crazily downward into the depths of the mighty pit below us.

Ill

My only memory now of that mad plunge downward is of the pilot room spinning about me, and of the whistling roar of winds outside caused by the speed of our fall. The

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shock of our collision had apparently silenced our generators, and it was moments before I could struggle up to the controls and make an effort to start them. I jerked open the switches and there came a hum of power from beneath; but the next moment with a jarring, grinding shock our cruiser had met the great pit's floor, flinging us once more to the floor.

For a moment we lay motionless there, and in that moment I became aware of sounds outside, soft rustling sounds that were hardly audible, as of soft-footed creatures moving about. The second shock had again silenced the vibration-mechanism, which I had started the moment before our crash, but I had no doubt that it was only that last-minute action on my part that had slowed our fall enough to save our ship and ourselves from annihilation. Now, staggering to my feet, I reached for the switch of the pilot room's little emergency door, sending it sliding back, admitting a rush of warm, fresh air, and then with my two companions behind me stared dazedly forth.

Our battered cruiser was resting now on the great pit's floor, a vast circular plain of smooth metal five miles in diameter, enclosed on all sides by vertical cliffs of gleaming metal that loomed for miles above us. A dusky twilight reigned here at the great shaft's bottom, but we saw now that that bottom was covered with countless great machines, enigmatic, shining mechanisms that covered the pit's floor completely except for a round clearing at its center, at the edge of which our cruiser rested. From each of the massed machines around us ran a slender tube-connection, and all of these tubes, thousands in number, combined to form a thick black metal cable which led into a huge object at the clearing's center. This was a giant squat cylinder of metal, its height no more than fifty feet but its diameter a full thousand, into the side of which the thick black cable led and whose upper surface shone with a vast brilliant white light that half dispelled the shadows here at the vast pit's bottom. It was from this brilliant upper surface of the cylinder that there sprang upward the great livid ray, a flickering beam of pale light that stabbed straight up toward the glowing fires of the nebula far above.

It was not on the great cylinder or on the massed ma-107 chines around us, though, that our eyes first rested, but on the shapes, the creatures, who had gathered about our cruiser and stood before us. They were creatures of surpassing strangeness and horror, even to ourselves, unlike in form as we were. Each of them was simply a shapeless mass of plastic white flesh, several feet in thickness, a formless thing of pale flesh without limbs or features of any kind, the only distinguishing mark being a round black spot on the body or mass of each. A dozen or more of them had gathered before us, a dozen shapeless masses of flesh resting on the smooth metal floor there, each with the black spot on his body turned up toward us like some strange eye, which, we knew instinctively, it in reality was.

As we watched them in horror, we saw one of them suddenly move toward us across the smooth metal. A limbless mass of flesh, he glided across the level floor as a snake might glide, the flesh of him flexing and twisting to bear him smoothly forward. Just beneath us he stopped, and there was a moment of tense silence while the whole scene impressed itself indelibly on my brain—the vast, metal-walled pit, the great ghostly ray that clove up through its shadowy dusk toward the nebula far above, the weird white masses of flesh before us. Then up from the creature below us there shot a long, slender arm, an arm that formed itself out of the flesh of his—body—like the pseudopod of a jellyfish, reaching swiftly upward toward us.

That sight was enough to break the spell of horror that had held us, and with a strangled cry I fell back from the door, reached toward the controls to send our ship slanting up out of this place of horror. But as I did so there came a shout from my two companions, and I whirled around to see a half-dozen pseudopod arms reach in through the open door, and then by that grip six or more of the weird creatures had drawn themselves up into the pilot room, and were upon us.

I felt cold, boneless arms twine swiftly around my neck and body, struck out in blind rage against the twisting masses of flesh that held me, and then felt my arms gripped also, felt myself being carried toward the door. The next moment I had been swung smoothly down to the metal floor below and released there, standing panting with my

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two companions while our strange captors surveyed us. Several of them held in pseudopod arms little square boxes of metal which they held toward us, and one of them, as if for an object lesson, turned his toward a little pile of metal bars not far away, and touched a switch in its handle. Instantly a narrow little jet of what resembled thick blue smoke sprang out of the thing toward the pile of bars, and as it touched them I saw them instantly crumbling and disintegrating like sugar in water, disappearing entirely in a moment. The meaning of the action was plain enough, and with a half-dozen of the deadly things trained full upon us we gave up all thoughts of a dash back to the cruiser.

Now the foremost of the creatures seemed to undergo a series of swift changes in shape, his plastic body twisting and changing from one strange form to another with inconceivable rapidity. After a moment of this protean changing his body settled back into its former shapeless mass, but as it did so three of the creatures behind him came forward toward us, as though in answer to a silent command. I was later to learn what I half guessed at the moment, that it was by these swift changes in bodily shape that the creatures communicated with each other, each such change, however slight, carrying to them as much meaning as a change of accent in spoken speech does to us.

The three that had come forward each held in a pseudopod arm one of the deadly box-weapons, and now they placed themselves around us, one in front and the other two behind us. Then they motioned eloquently toward the left, and after a moment's hesitation we set off in that direction, around the clearing's edge. Past the looming machines we went, my own eyes intent on the huge cylinder in the clearing beside us, from which arose the great ray of impenetrable force into which our ship had crashed. Through the twilight that reigned about us I saw that only a handful of these nebula-creatures were to be seen on all the pit's floor, and wondered momentarily at the smallness of their numbers. Then my speculations were driven from my mind as our guards suddenly halted us, several hundred feet around the clearing's edge from our cruiser.

Before us there yawned a round, dark opening in the smooth floor, a small, shaftlike pit some ten feet in diameter,

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its sides disappearing down into a dense darkness. As we stared, the guard before us glided to the shaft's edge and suddenly swung himself over that edge, disappearing from view. And as we stepped closer we saw that he was lowering himself down the shaft's smooth metal wall by means of metal pegs inset every few feet in that wall, dropping from peg to peg in smooth, effortless descent. Now our two remaining guards raised their weapons significantly, motioning toward the shaft. Choice of action there was none, so after a moment's involuntary hesitation I stepped to the edge and grasped the highest peg, swinging myself over the edge and down until I had found a foot-hold on a lower peg, then shifting my grasp to swing down again in the same manner. After me came Jor Dahat, and after him the plant-man Sar Than, who swung easily down by grasping the pegs with all of his four limbs. Then the two guards were swinging down after him, and we were dropping steadily down the line of pegs into the rayless darkness.

I think now that of all the journeys in the universe that journey of ours down the shaft was the strangest. Plant-man and human and Arcturian, three different beings from three far-distant stars, we swung down that dizzy ladder into the dark depths of this ' strange world at the fiery nebula's heart, guarded above and below by formless beings of weirdness unutterable. Down we clambered, feeling blindly in the darkness for our hand and foot-holds, down until at last, far below, there appeared a faint little spot of white light in the darkness.

The spot of light grew stronger, larger, as we climbed down toward it, until finally we saw that we were nearing the shaft's bottom, at which it gleamed. A few minutes more and we had clambered down the last peg and stood at the bottom of the shaft, a dark, circular well of metal pierced in one side by a doorway through which came the dim white light. Then we were bunched together once more between our guards, and were marched through the door into a long corridor dimly lit by a few globes of lambent white light suspended from its ceiling. As we marched along this long, metal-walled corridor I wondered how far beneath the great pit's floor we were, estimating by the length of our

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light. In a moment we were beside it, and found it to be one of the great turtle-machines that swarmed across the floors of the vast caverns beyond us, though this one was unoccupied, its round door open to expose the hollow interior of the dome.

"There's our way out!" I cried. "There's room in it for the three of us!"

Within another moment we were inside it, crouching together in the cramped space of the interior and swinging shut the little door. I found that a narrow slit running around the dome allowed us to look forth, and that a little circle of switches grouped around a single large lever were evidently its controls. Swiftly I pressed these switches in a series of combinations, and then there came a welcome hum of power from beneath and we were gliding smoothly out of the shadowy corridor into the full glare of the thronging, white-lit cavern, my hand on the central lever guiding our progress.

Tensely we crouched in our humming vehicle as it moved smoothly across the cavern, between the rows of great machines, toward the corridor opening in the opposite wall. The thronging nebula-creatures about us paid us no attention whatever, taking us for but one of the scores of turtle-machines that were busy about us. Hearts beating high with our success we glided on toward the dark wall-opening that was our goal. A score of feet from it we suddenly held our breath as another of the turtle-machines collided suddenly with our own, but in a moment it had glided away and in another moment we were again in the shadows of a dim-lit corridor, gliding down its length toward the shaft that led upward.

We reached the corridor's end, sprang out of our machine and through the door into the well-like bottom of the shaft. At once the plant-man was clambering up the peg-ladder, followed by the Arcturian with myself last. Up, up we climbed, putting all our strength into the effort, for we knew that not many minutes remained for action. Then suddenly as I looked down I stopped and breathed an exclamation; for standing at the bottom of the shaft were two of the nebula-creatures, not more than a hundred feet below us— two white masses of flesh that were staring up toward us.

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A moment we hung motionless on the pegs, while the two weird beings gazed up, and then we saw one of them glide back into the corridor, racing back to the great caverns to sound the alarm, we knew. The other gazed up at us once more and then, to our horror, began to climb swiftly up after us.

I think now that of all that befell us there in the nebula world the moments that followed were the most agonizing. Swinging ourselves up by sheer muscular power, from peg to peg, we clambered up that giddy ladder, through a darkness impossible of description. Somewhere in that darkness below me, I knew, the nebula-creature that pursued us was swinging up after me, and I knew that to such a creature the negotiation of this dizzy ladder was child's play. Yet, spurred on by deadly fear, I struggled upward with superhuman speed, a hundred feet, another hundred, until a hope flashed across my brain that the thing that pursued us might have given up that pursuit. Then above us I glimpsed a little dot of glowing light, knew it for the shaft's mouth far above. And at the same moment that I glimpsed it, I felt a tug on my ankles, a powerful arm fasten round my body, and knew that the pursuing creature had reached me.

I cried out involuntarily as I felt my feet twitched off the pegs on which they had rested, and dangled for a moment there by my hands while the creature below me tightened his grip on my feet and began to pull me steadily downward. All his force he must have put into that effort, and I felt my hands slipping on the peg which they held, knew that once I lost my hand-grip the creature below would release my feet also and send me hurtling down to death on the shaft's floor far below. In a deathly silence I hung there, striving against that deadly pull, and then felt one of my hands torn from its grip, felt the fingers of the other slipping on the peg they held, felt my will relaxing-Then someone had suddenly swung down past me from above, and I glanced down to glimpse in the dim light from above Sar Than, swinging swiftly down past me and hanging by one of his powerful limbs while with the other three he grasped the creature below me. Instantly the latter's grip

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on my feet relaxed, there was an instant of swift scuffling below me, and then I glimpsed the shapeless body of the nebula-creature forced from its hold on the pegs, hurtling down into the darkness to strike the floor far below with a smacking thud. The next instant Sar Than was up to me and was pulling me up until I again clung safely to the pegs. Only the Arcturian, with his four strange limbs, could ever have successfully battled the nebula-creature thus on that giddy ladder of pegs.

But now we were again clambering up, calling on all our strength to bear us on, watching the little circle of dim light above broadening as we climbed up toward it. Below us, we knew, the alarm had been given, and within a few minutes now a horde of the nebula-creatures would be rushing up the shaft. And but minutes were left for us to act in, so that we put every effort into a mad burst of speed that within a few more minutes had brought us up to the shaft's mouth.

Jor Dahat, above us, was the first to reach its level, and I saw the plant-man raise his head and peer cautiously forth, then beckon us upward. Silently, stealthily, we climbed up, crept over the shaft's edge until we crouched on the smooth metal floor. The scene about us was the same as before, the vast, metal-walled pit, the massed machines around us, the great cylinder at the clearing's center from which arose the livid ray, the long shape of our battered cruiser lying beyond it. A half-dozen of the nebula-creatures were gathered near the great cylinder, and we saw their bodies twisting in their silent speech, but their strange eyes were not turned in our direction.

In a moment Jor Dahat crept silently to one side, where lay a mass of tools, and came back with three heavy, axlike implements of metal in his grasp, long-handled and broad-bladed. Silendy he handed one of these to each of us, and then without words we crawled silently toward the gathered nebula-creatures, on hands and knees. Inch by inch, foot by foot, we crept toward them. I looked up, once, saw the glowing fires of the nebula far above us, knew that within minutes those fires would be flying out through our universe in flaming destruction unless we could act. My

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grip tightened on my weapon as we crawled on through the shadowy dusk, and then suddenly one of the creatures before us had turned and was gazing straight toward us.

Before he could turn to his companions in warning, before j he could do more than merely glimpse us, we had sprung to our feet and were leaping toward the creatures with up- j raised axes. The next moment we were upon them, our heavy J weapons flashing right and left in swift destruction, and when we lowered them only masses of dead flesh lay at our feet. Wildly we looked about, but there seemed no other of the nebula-creatures on all the great pit's floor, nothing j but the silent, automatic machines, and the great cylinder of the ray. Now we leapt toward that cylinder, then halted. A j half-dozen pseudopod arms were reaching up from the shaft up which we had come, a half-dozen of the creatures pulling themselves up there. It was the pursuit from beneath!

Jor Dahat cried out, raced toward the shaft's mouth with the Arcturian. "Cut the cable, Ker Kal!" he shouted. "The cable that runs into the cylinder—Sar Than and I will hold them in the shaft!"

I saw the two of them reach the shaft's mouth just as a mass of the nebula-creatures were emerging from it, saw ¹their two great axes flash down and send the shapeless beings hurtling down to death. Then I had leapt myself to ' the great, foot-thick cable of black metal that ran into the cylinder's side, carrying into it the power from all the machines about us which generated the mighty ray. I raised my ax, brought it down with all my force on the cable, but on the hard metal it made only a shallow cut. Again I swung it, and again, with all my force, while at the shaft's mouth I glimpsed the axes of my two friends flashing in the dim light like brands of lightning, falling in swift death upon the shapeless nebula-creatures as they sought to emerge from the shaft. I heard the puff of jets of the deadly blue smoke leaping upward, but knew that so long as they were held inside the shaft they could not reach the Arcturian and the plant-man with their annihilating jets.

Fiercely I swung my own ax down upon the black metal of the thick cable, in one swift blow after another, severing its twisted strands one after the other. The last minutes

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were speeding, I knew, and like some soulless automaton I wielded the great ax in blow after blow, scarcely conscious in that mad moment of anything but the thick length of metal below me. I was half through it, now, had cut through half its strands, and knew that another dozen of blows would sever it. And even as hope flamed up in my brain there was a cry from Jor Dahat, I saw a sudden resistless wave of the nebula-creatures pour up from the shaft and force my two companions back toward me, and then they were raising their deadly weapons to send annihilation upon us.

For a single moment the whole scene seemed as motionless as a set tableau. Then with a wild shout I whirled the great ax high above my head, swung it for an instant in a flashing circle, and then brought it down with the last mad remnant of my force upon the half-severed cable below, a powerful blow that clove through its twisted strands as a knife might cut through cords. There was a flash of light as the cable parted, and then the brilliance of the great cylinder's upper surface had snapped out, and the mighty ray that sprang from it had vanished I

The next instant there was utter silence, a thick, terrific silence in which we, and all the nebula-creatures that had crowded up onto the pit's floor, gazed up toward the mighty nebula's fires, far above us. Seconds, minutes, that awful silence reigned, and then I saw the weapons of the nebular-creatures before us dropping from their grasp, saw them rushing wildly about as though in mad, frenzied terror, heard a great cry from Jor Dahat, beside me.

"The nebula!" he cried hoarsely, pointing up toward the glowing fires above. "The nebula—collapsing!"

I looked up, dazedly, saw the vast fires moving now, slowly, majestically, gigantically, moving down toward us, toward the nebular world, the whole vast turning nebula collapsing into the great space at its center with the removal of the ray that had whirled it on, its mighty, crowding fires rushing down upon us. Then I had sunk to the floor, felt the arms of my two friends about me, dimly felt myself dragged across the floor through the crazily rushing hordes of nebula-creatures into our cruiser, felt it lifting up out of the great

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pit with the plant-man at the controls, as the fires above • rushed down upon us.

Then there was a thunderous roaring of titanic fires about us, a vast, interminable rushing of colossal currents of flaming gas all around us as we plunged upward through the collapsing nebula. More and more dimly to my ears came that mighty roar of flame as consciousness began to leave me, but at last, through my darkening senses, I felt that it had ceased, that we were humming through space once more. With a last effort I staggered to the window with my two companions, gazed down dazedly toward the terrific ocean of boiling flame that stretched gigantically beneath us, saw that still its fires were drawing together, collapsing, contracting, condensing. Then suddenly up from the collapsing nebula there leapt a single mighty tongue of fire, as from , some titanic conflagration, a vast rush of flame that towered up toward the stars, and dien dwindled and sank and died.

It was the end forever of the world within the nebula.

It was more than two weeks later that with all the thousands of the great Council of Suns we passed out of the mighty tower into the starlit night. They were still shouting, those thousands, for it was but hours before that our battered cruiser had swung down toward the tower out of the void of space, to meet such a reception as never yet had been equaled in this universe. And now that the Council's tumultuous meeting had closed at last, and each of its members made ready to depart for his own sun, the shouting applause about us was redoubled.

At last from out of the darkness a great star-cruiser swept toward us, paused, and then the member from Antares had entered it and it was speeding up into the darkness. Another drew up before us, entered by the strange representative from Rigel, and then it too had vanished and still others were sweeping toward us. Out of the darkness they came, star-cruiser after star-cruiser, and into each went one of the members, flashing out to his own star once more. One by one, we watched them go, watched the great ships lift

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into the darkness, starting out to Polaris and Fomalhaut and Algol, starting out on long journeys to suns far out at the Galaxy's edge. One by one they went, until at last there remained only we three of all the members, with the three cruisers waiting before us that would carry us back to our own stars.

We paused, then, with a common impulse gazing upward. Across the heavens gleamed the hosts of suns, points of brilliant light in a field of deepest black. Moments we gazed up toward them, and toward three among them that were far distant from each other across the heavens—the magnificent golden splendor of great Capella, to the left, the fiery red brilliance of Arcturus, to the right and above us and between them a* smaller star of deep yellow, that little spark of light toward which the eyes and hearts of men shall turn until the end of time, though they roam the limits of the universe. A moment we gazed up, up toward the three orbs, and then Jor Dahat raised his hand, pointing to another star low above the horizon, a great soft-glowing one that was like a little ball of misty light.

"Look," he said softly. "The nebula!"

Silendy we gazed out toward it for a long moment, a moment in which our thoughts leapt out across the gulf toward the glowing thing at which we gazed, toward that mighty realm of fire where we had struggled for our universe, in the strange world inside it which we three had plunged to its doom. Then, silent still, we gripped hands, and turned toward our waiting cruisers.

Then they, too, were driving up into the darkness, out from Canopus once more into the gulf of space, into the eternal silence of the changeless void, each toward its star.

THE COMET DRIVERS I

"Passing Rigel on our left, sir," reported the Canopan pilot standing in the control room beside me.

I nodded. "We'll sight the Patrol's cruisers soon, then," I 129 told him. "I ordered them to mass beyond Rigel, just outside the galaxy's edge."

Together we strained our eyes into the impenetrable blackness of space that lay before us. To the left, in that blackness, there burned the great white sun of Rigel, like a brilliant ball of diamond fire, while to our right and behind us there flamed at a greater distance red Betelgeuse, and blue-white Vega, and Castor's twin golden suns, all the galaxy's gathered suns stretching in a great mass there at our backs. Even then, though, our cruiser was flashing out over the edge of the galaxy's great disk-like swarm of stars, and as white Rigel dropped behind us to the left there lay before us only the vast, uncharted deeps of outer space.

Gazing forward into those black depths our eyes could make out, faint and inconceivably far, the few little patches of misty light that we knew were remote galaxies of suns like the one behind us, unthinkably distant universes like our own. In the blackness before us, too, there shone a single great point of crimson light, burning through the blackness of the outer void like a great red eye. It was toward this crimson point that I and the great-headed, bodiless Cano-pan pilot beside me were grazing, somberly and silently, as our cruiser hummed on. Then as he shifted his gaze there came from him a low exclamation, and I turned to see that a great swarm of gleaming points had appeared in the blackness close before us, resolving as we flashed on toward them into a far-flung, motionless swarm of long, gleaming cruisers like our own.

Swiftly our cruiser rushed into that hanging swarm of ships, which made way quickly before us as there flashed from our bows the signal that marked my cruiser as that of the Chief of the Interstellar Patrol. Then as we too slowed and hung motionless at the head of the swarm I saw three cruisers among them flashing toward us, slanting up and hovering just beneath our craft. There came the sharp rattle of metal as their space-gangways rose up and connected with our cruiser, and then the clang of our space-doors opening. A moment more and the door of the control room was snapped suddenly aside and three strange and dissimilar figures stepped inside, coming swiftly to attention and saluting me.

"Gor Han! Jurt Tul! Najus Nar!" I greeted them. "You've massed a thousand of the Patrol's cruisers here as I ordered ?°

Gor Han bowed in the affirmative. A great Betelgeusan, his big fur-covered shape was typical of the races of that big sun's cold world: a huge barrel-like torso supported by four thick stocky limbs, with four similar upper arms; his dark eyes and other features being set directly into the upper part of that furry torso, which was headless. Jurt Tul, beside him, was as strange a figure, patently of the amphibious peoples of Aldebaran's watery worlds, his great green bulk of shapeless body and powerful flipper-limbs almost hiding the bulbous head with its round- and lidless eyes. And Najus Nar, who completed the strange trio, was as dissimilar from them as from myself. One of the powerful insect-men of Procyon, his flat, upright body, as tall almost as my own, was dark and hard and shiny in back and of soft white flesh in front, with a half-dozen pairs of short limbs branching from it from bottom to top, and with a blank, faceless head from the sides of which projected the short, flexible stalks that held in their ends his four keen eyes. Strange enough were these three Sub-Chiefs of the great Patrol, yet to me these three lieutenants of mine were so familiar, in appearance, that as they faced me now their strange and dissimilar forms made no impression on my mind.

"Your order was urgent, sir," Gor Han was saying, "that we mass a thousand of the Patrol's cruisers here outside the galaxy's edge, and await your coming."

"Urgent, yes," I repeated somberly, my eyes turning from them to the great point of crimson light that shone in the black depths beyond; "urgent because it is out from the galaxy's edge that we are going with these cruisers, toward that point of red light there in the void that has puzzled all the galaxy since its appearance days ago—out toward that point of crimson light which our astronomers now have discovered to be a gigantic comet that is racing at speed incredible straight toward our galaxy from the depths of outer space!"

The three gazed at me, stunned, silent, and in that moment the only sound- in the control room was the low humming of the generators beneath, which sustained our ship

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in space. Then, gazing out again into the black depths ahead toward that blood-like point, I was speaking on.

"Comets there are in our galaxy, as you know, comets that revolve in irregular orbits about various of our stars, and which have been familiar to us always. A comet, as you know, consists of the coma or head, the nucleus, and the tail. The coma is simply a great globe of electrical energy, with a hollow space at its center. The nucleus is all the comet's solid matter, a mass of meteoric and other material hanging in the hollow at the coma's center. The great coma blows from its own electrical energy, and is driven through space by the release of some of that energy backward, through the vast tail, which is simply released energy from the coma. It is the great coma that makes a comet deadly to approach, since any matter that enters its terrific sea of electrical energy is converted instantly into electrical energy likewise, changed from matter-vibrations to electrical vibrations, annihilated. Our interstellar navigators have for that reason avoided the comets of our galaxy, while never has it been dreamed that a comet might exist in empty space outside our galaxy.

"Now, however, our astronomers have found that this crimson spot of light that has appeared in the outer void and has puzzled us for days is in reality a giant crimson comet of size and speed unthinkable, which is racing straight toward our galaxy and will reach it within a few more weeks. And when it does reach it, it means the galaxy's doom! For this gigantic comet, greater by far than any of the galaxy's greatest suns, will crash through the galaxy's swarm of stars like a meteor through a swarm of fireflies, annihilating those in its path by absorbing them and their worlds into the terrific electrical energy of its mighty coma; disrupting all the finely balanced celestial mechanism of our universe and sucking its whirling stars into its deadly self as it smashes on; engulfing our suns and worlds in elecjrical annihilation, and then racing on into the void, leaving behind it but the drifting fragments of our wrecked and riven universe!

"Onward toward our universe this mighty comet is thundering, and but one chance remains for us to turn it aside. The center of this comet, of any cornet, is the nucleus at

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the heart of its coma, which is the only solid matter in it. If we could penetrate through the coma to the great hollow inside it, could turn upon that nucleus the powerful force-beams used by our Patrol cruisers to sweep up meteor-swarms, we could possibly push it aside enough to change its course, to send it past our galaxy's edge instead of through it. But that must be done soon! Our astronomers have calculated that within twelve more days the comet will have reached a point so near the galaxy that it will be too late for anything ever to turn it aside. When the Council of Suns informed me of this I flashed word immediately for you three Sub-Chiefs to mass swiftly a thousand of the Patrol's cruisers here outside the galaxy's edge. And with these thousand ships we are starting at once toward the cometl

"Behind us the Patrol will be massing another five thousand cruisers to send out after us, but these can hardly reach the comet before it is too late. It is on us, and on our thousand cruisers, that the galaxy's fate now hangs. If we can reach the great oncoming comet, can penetrate through its deadly coma to the solid nucleus at its center, can deflect that nucleus with our force-beams before the twelfth day ends, we will have turned the great comet aside, will have saved the galaxy itself from death. If we can not, the galaxy perishes and we perish with it. For we of the Interstellar Patrol, who have defended and guarded the ways of that galaxy for thousands upon tens of thousands of years, go out to the oncoming comet now not to return unless we can turn that comet aside and save our universe from doom!"

Again in the control room was silence when I had finished, a silence that seemed intensified, as the three strange Sub-Chiefs before me held my eyes. Then, without speaking, they calmly saluted once more, eyes alight. Impulsively I reached hands out toward them, grasped their own. Then they had turned, were striding swiftly out of the control room and through the closed space-gangways to their own three cruisers. As our space-doors clanged shut once more, the gangways of those cruisers folded down upon them, and then the diree craft had smoothly moved back to take up a position just behind my own.

I turned to the round opening of the speech-instrument beside me, spoke a brief order into it, and in answer to

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that order the thousand cruisers behind us smoothly and quickly massed into space-squadron formation, a long slender wedge with my own cruiser at the apex and those of the three Sub-Chiefs just behind me. Another brief order and the Canopan pilot beside me was opening the controls, our cruiser and the great triangle of massed cruisers behind us moving smoothly forward toward the crimson-gleaming point in the blackness ahead, our generators throbbing louder and louder as we slipped forward at swiftly mounting speed. We were on our way toward the great comet, and our struggle for the life of our universe had begunl

The voice of Gor Han came clearly from the speech-instrument as I stepped into the control room, days later. "Comet dead ahead, sir," he announced.

But my own eyes were already on the scene ahead. "Yes," I told him, "another hour will bring us to the coma's edge."

For before us now, bulking crimson and mighty and monstrous in the heavens ahead, glowed the giant comet toward which for the last nine days our thousand ships had been flashing. On and on we had rushed toward it at unnumbered light-speeds, through the vast ether-currents that raged here in space outside the galaxy, past regions of strange and deadly force which we but glimpsed and which we gave a wide berth, on into the endless outer void until our galaxy had shrunk to a small swarm of blinking light-points in the darkness behind us. Almost, in those days, we had forgotten the existence of that galaxy, so centered was our attention upon the sinister crimson glory of the comet ahead. Through these days it had largened swiftly to our eyes, from a light-point to a small red disk, and then to a larger disk, and finally to the gigantic circle of crimson-glowing light that loomed before us now, and toward which I and the three Sub-Chiefs in the cruisers just behind my own now gazed.

Tremendous as it was, the great comet's light was not dazzling to our eyes, being a deep crimson, a dusky, lurid red, and gazing foiward I could make out its general features. The spherical coma was what lay fuU before us, a gigantic ball of crimson-glowing electrical energy that I knew, as in all comets, was hollow, holding in the space

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inside it the solid matter of the nucleus. Behind it, too, I could glimpse the vast faint-glowing tail streaming outward behind the onrushing coma. The light of that tail, I knew, was but faint electrical energy shot back from the terrific coma and propelling that coma forward through space like a great rocket streaming fire behind it. The small comets of our own galaxy, I knew, moved in fixed though irregular orbits about our stars, and thus would often move about a star or sun in the opposite direction to that in which their tail was pushing them, simply because even the impetus of the tail could not make them leave their fixed orbits. This giant comet of outer space, though, I knew, moved in no orbit whatever through the empty immensities of the outer void, and so would always race through space in a direction opposite to that of its tail, the energy of the mighty coma shot forth in the tail like the powder of a great rocket, propelling it irresistibly forward with terrific momentum and force.

The glowing coma seemed countless millions of miles across, the still vaster tail behind appearing to extend limit-lessly backward into the void. Gazing toward it, with something of awe, I was silent for a time, then turned to the speech-instrument. "We'll slant our ships up over the coma," I ordered, "and reconnoiter it for an opening."

Our massed cruisers shot steeply upward at the order, but as they did so the voice of Jurt Tul came doubtfully from the opening before me. "You think we can find an opening through which we can penetrate inside the coma?" he asked.

"We'll have to," I told him. "We've only a few score hours left to get inside and bring our force-beams to bear on the nucleus."

The Aldebaranian's voice came slowly in answer. "That coma," he said; "it seems impossible that we can ever get inside it—"

There was silence as I gazed ahead toward the great comet, whose coma was now indeed a terrific spectacle. An immense lurid sea of crimson light, it seemed to fill all the universe, shifting slowly downward and beneath us as our thousand cruisers hummed up at a steep slant over it. We were racing toward it at a full million miles above its level, the rim of the huge sphere of crimson light creeping across

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the black void beneath us as comet and cruisers rushed closer to each other. Gazing down toward the great coma, its lurid crimson light drenching all in the control room, I heard startled exclamations beneath as even the imperturbable members of my cruiser's cosmopolitan crew were awed by the comet's magnitude and terror. Then, when the titanic crimson sphere of the coma seemed squarely beneath our rushing ships, I uttered a word into the instrument before me, and immediately our cruiser and the thousand behind it had halted, had turned squarely about, and then at reduced speed were racing along at the same speed as the comet, hanging above it and accompanying it on its mad rush through the void toward our galaxy.

Below us now lay the giant red-glowing globe of the coma, racing on toward the far swarm of light-points that was our galaxy. And now, gazing intently down into its far-flung glowing mass, I strained my eyes for sight of some opening, some crevice in that mighty body of glowing electrical energy that would permit us to penetrate to the space inside it. Yet no such opening could be seen, no tiniest break in the coma's lurid sphere. A single, unbroken and gigantic globe of crimson luminescence, it hung beneath us, as we rushed through the void, the vast fan-tail of faintest crimson light streaming out behind. Through all our days of tense flight outward toward the comet I had hoped against hope that in its coma would be some break or opening, however small, that would permit us to penetrate inside, but now my last hope, and the galaxy's last hope, was shattered by the glowing, unbroken mass of this gigantic comet's coma. With sinking heart I gazed down toward it as our triangle of ships sped on above it.

Gor Han's deep voice sounded from the instrument before me. "There seems no opening in the coma at all, Khel Ken," he said. "And it is instant annihilation for anything to venture into that coma's electrical energy!"

"We'll have to drop lower and cruise about the coma's surface," I told the Betelgeusan. "We must get inside.

With the words our cruiser began to sink smoothly downward, still holding its forward flight above the comet, the massed ships behind following steadily in our course. Down —down—by thousands of miles a moment we sank, down

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until the giant coma beneath seemed the only thing in all the universe, glowing from horizon to horizon like an awful aurora of crimson death. An inconceivably colossal sea of lurid electrical energy, a giant deadly sphere of glowing force which it were annihilation for anything to touch, it stretched beneath us, broadening still as we came closer toward it. Down—down—

A cry from Najus Nar sounded beside me. "Those cubes!" the insectman was shouting. "Racing ahead of the comet there!"

Swiftly I gazed down toward the foremost rim of the great, onrushing coma, and saw what he had seen. Racing along a few thousand miles in front of the comet, separated from each other by spaces, there sped score upon score of mighty metal cubes, glinting in the coma's lurid light! Distant as they were, I could glimpse them clearly through our telescopic windows, extending in a great chain or line around the comet's head, and rushing before it through the deeps of space. And there were openings in the sides of these speeding cubes, transparent openings from which gushed pure white light! For they were ships! Colossal cube-ships flashing on with the great comet on its thundering rush toward our universe!

"Cube-ships!" It was Gor Han's shout that echoed my thought.

"Cube-ships!" Najus Nar too was crying. "Scouting before the comet!"

"And that means that these cubeships are from the comet's heart!" I cried excitedly; "from its—"

My exclamation had been cut short by simultaneous sharp cries from Gor Han and Jurt Tul.

"The cubes have seen us!" they shouted. "They're coming up toward us!"

For there, far below us, the great chain of mighty cube-ships had suddenly condensed, shortened, and they had all, a hundred or more in number, massed swiftly together as though in answer to some sudden alarm and were driving up toward us! At velocity incredible they shot up toward us, while we gazed stunned; then as they flashed nearer there flashed up from the foremost of them a long, slender shaft of crimson light like that of the comet below, a terrific

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bolt of electrical energy like that of the coma beneath, which struck one of our cruisers squarely and instantly annihilated it. And as we gazed stupefied toward it in that dazing moment, from the upleaping cubes beneath score upon score of other crimson deadly bolts were stabbing up toward us I

"Battle formation!"

Even as the deadly crimson bolts had shot up from the cubes toward us I had yelled the order into the instrument before me, and it was all that saved us from disaster in that moment, since in the split-second before the glowing bolts could reach us our cruisers had shifted their formation suddenly, only a score of them being struck by those glowing shafts. In that moment our cruisers had shifted into three long parallel lines, and then, as the massed cubes beneath flashed ever upward toward us, their glowing bolts blasting our cruisers, I had shouted another order into the speech-instrument above the great din beneath.

"The force-beams!" I cried. "Turn them on these cube-ships—push them down into the coma!"

There came a deep shout from Gor Han at the order, and from Jurt Tul's ship there issued through my instrument the amphibian's cool laugh. The next instant there were shooting downward from all our cruisers the great force-beams, broad beams, not of light but of darkness, of utter blackness and absence of light, of great force that was invisible itself but whose terrific power drove even the light-vibrations .from its path and so made the force-beams seem beams of utter blackness. Down toward the uprushing cube-ships the black force-beams stabbed, and as they smote among those cubes those that were struck by them were driven suddenly downward with inconceivable power. Down, down, struggling vainly against the irresistible force-beams that pushed them, down, down until in a moment more those struck had been driven into the crimson sphere of the mighty coma beneath, vanishing in its immense lurid sea and there meeting annihilation instantly in spurts of leaping light!

Thus a full score of the hundred cube-ships below had 138

been forced down to death in the comet in a single moment, but the rest were still leaping toward us and before we could loose more of the deadly force-beams they were just beneath us, among us, their crimson bolts blasting lightninglike about them, leaping from cube to cruiser. High above the titanic thundering comet, like flies above a sun, cubes and cruisers whirled and struck and ran, with crimson bolts and black force-beams stabbing thick through the void about us. I heard the shouts of Gor Han and Jurt Tul and Najus Nar from the instrument before me, screamed my orders into its opening as my own cruiser soared through the wild mêlée with black beams whirling. I glimpsed one of the cubes rocketing toward us, looming in an instant to immense size, a colossal metal cube thousands of feet square, through the transparent sections of which I could glimpse for a split-second the white-lit interior, a mass of intricate mechanisms among which clung the beings who manned it, black, shapeless masses that I but half glimpsed in that mad moment. Then from the cube's great side a glowing red bolt shot toward us, but a moment too late, since by then our cruiser had shot upward and our black forcebeam had smote down upon the cubeship to drive it into the glowing sea of death below!

About us, too, all our cruisers were speeding upward, in answer to my orders, and before the cubes could check our maneuver we were over them, all our dark force-beams smiting from above. Struck by those beams, all but a scant half-dozen of the remaining cubes drove down to doom in the coma's fiery sea, before they could rise to our level to resume the battle. The half-dozen left seemed to hover motionless a moment, then turned and sped away from us, back over the coma's crimson-glowing sphere toward the great tail of the comet, streaming out behind!

"We've beaten them!" Gor Han was bellowing. "They're trying to get away—"

"After them!" I yelled into the speech-instrument. "They're trying to get back inside the coma—they must have some way of getting inside!"

But my order had been unnecessary, for even as the half-dozen great cubes flashed away, our cruisers, still some eight hundred in number, had turned and were racing

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after them like unleashed hounds after their prey. Downward and backward we raced after them, low across the glowing surface of the great comet, over the deadly coma to where the faint, vast tail issued from it. Ahead we could see the six cubes fleeing onward, at a speed equal to our own, and the sight of them caused us to open to the last notch the power of our throbbing generators for that wild pursuit. Within moments, at that tremendous speed, there came into view ahead the rear rim of the coma's colossal glowing sphere, with the fainter glow that marked the currents of the great tail streaming back from the rim into the void of space.

Swift as were the great cubes ahead, though, our great cruisers of the Interstellar Patrol, speediest of all the galaxy's ships, were proving now to be swifter, since slowly, steadily, we had begun to overhaul those fleeing shapes. I heard Gor Han's deep voice, excited as always in battle, from the speech-instruments, heard Jurt Tul's calm comments as we drove nearer the flying cubes, heard Najus Nar's eager cries. The cubes were passing out now from over the great coma, on over the vast tail, to my puzzlement. I had thought they were striving to gain the interior of the comet, but instead they were racing away from it, while with every moment we were drawing nearer to them. Then, just when it seemed that another moment's flight would bring us upon them, they halted abruptly in space, hovering above the faint, vast-streaming tail, and then plunged straight down into the mighty currents of the tail, and were moving back, inside that tail, toward the great coma behind us!

"The tail!" cried Najus Nar. "They're going up the tail itself and into the coma's heart!"

But I too had seen and had understood all in that moment, had understood what I had not dreamed before, that the only opening through the great coma to the hollow at its heart lay at the coma's rear, and could be reached only by struggling up to it through the awful currents of the tail! These mighty cubes, I saw, had been constructed in that shape especially to resist and endure those terrible, back-sweeping ether-currents set up by the comet's rush through the void, terrific currents glowing with the electrical energy shot backward and dissipated in driving the

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comet on. The cubes thus specially constructed could brave those colossal currents where weaker craft would be battered to fragments. All this I understood and weighed, in that tense moment, and then had made decision and was shouting back into the instrument before me.

"Down with our ships, too, then!" I cried. "We're going up the tail after them!"

I heard an exclamation from Gor Han, an answering shout from Najus Nar, and then my cruiser and all the cruisers behind us were dipping steeply downward, plunging into the vast and faint-glowing tail! The next moment was one of blind, utter confusion, for as we plunged into the terrific currents our cruisers were whirled up and backward as though by gigantic hands, thrown helplessly like leaves in a terrific wind, cruiser smashing against cruiser and destroying each other there by dozens in that wild moment. Then as the pilot beside me clung to the controls, bringing its bows around to face those mighty currents, heading toward the coma, our ship steadied, while those about it steadied likewise. We had lost half a hundred ships in that first terrific plunge, but neither my own nor those of the three Sub-Chiefs had been injured, and now we were moving slowly up the great currents of the tail toward the coma. The tail about us was to the eyes but a great region of faint light, but far ahead of us there glowed like a crimson wall of light across the heavens the mighty coma, and against it we could make out the dark square shapes of the cube-ships we pursued, likewise fighting their way toward the coma through those terrific currents.

I think now that the moments which followed, as we struggled in pursuit of those cubes, were almost the most terrible I ever experienced, moments in which it seemed impossible that our ships could breast such awful currents and live. About us the currents roared deafeningiy, thrilling through every portion of our ships, sweeping against us with titanic power. On and on we struggled, veering to take advantage of weaker currents, blundering into great maelstroms, swaying, plunging, fighting on, with the coma's glowing wall looming ever closer ahead. I heard Gor Han's anxious comments from the instrument before me, glimpsed

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cruisers here and there behind my own collapsing and sweeping backward, knew that not for long could we fight against those currents and live.

The coma was very near, now, a giant wall of crimson light across the heavens, and now I made out a dark circle within that glowing wall, a circular opening rapidly largen-ing to our eyes and toward which the flying cubes ahead were struggling.

"The opening!" Gor Han was shouting, his voice coming to me even above the awful din of the currents about us.

"Straight toward it after those cubes!" I cried. "Our ships can't stand this much longer!"

Now ahead I could see the cubeships we pursued struggl-ing toward that opening slower and slower, fighting the currents which were most powerful here where they issued from the mighty coma ahead. A moment more, though, and they had reached it, and vanished inside, while we in turn were fighting through the titanic sweep of those currents toward it. On—on—the currents that raged against us had become awful in strength, seeming to clutch at us with supreme power at this last moment. The opening loomed larger ahead, now, a dark circular passageway remaining miraculously open and unchanged through that electrical sea whose deadly crimson mass formed its walls. On—on—it seemed that never could we reach it, so terribly did the currents sweep about us. Yard by yard, foot by foot, we crept forward toward it, were on its brink, seemed to hesitate there for an instant before being swept backward and away, and then with a supreme last effort of our throbbing generators we crept forward out of the grip of those gigantic currents and into the open passageway!

Now all about us there raged the glowing electrical sea of the colossal coma, into the deadly mass of which the passage led, a straight passage which I knew could only be artificially made and maintained. Far ahead in that light-walled passage we could glimpse the dark shapes of the cubes, fleeing still before us, and now with humming generators our cruisers leapt forward, through that tunnel of the deadly coma! Above, below, on each side, there raged the coma's electrical sea, which it were annihilation to touch, and the circular passage down which we fled was hardly

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wide enough to admit three of our ships abreast, yet down it at reckless speed we sped, all thought leaving us now save the wild excitement of the pursuit.

Crimson light from the hell of glowing death that raged all about us beat blood-like upon us as we drove on, yet the cries of Gor Han and Najus Nar and even the cool Jurt Tul mingled with my own from the speech-instrument, as we shot forward in pursuit of the fleeing cubes. Never, surely, was pursuit stranger than that one, the galaxy's hundreds of cruisers, manned by every dissimilar shape to be found upon its myriad worlds, leaping forward in the narrow opening that led through a comet's deadly mass into its unglimpsed heart, after the strange cube-craft that fled on before us. A single slip of the controls for a fraction of an inch was enough to send any cruiser into the incandescent walls to death, and indeed I glimpsed cruisers among those that followed me blundering into those walls in our wild flight onward and vanishing in wild spurts of light!

Yet on and on we leapt, and shouted now as we saw the cubes ahead shooting out from the passageway into open space beyond. A moment more and we were on their tracks, were flashing out too from the encircling crimson walls of glowing death, that vanished suddenly from about us as we entered into a vast region of open space, the immense open space that lay at the giant comet's heart! Far, far away from us there stretched the walls of the gigantic coma that encompassed this open space, above and below, enclosing all that space within their deadly electrical sea. This, though, we had expected and it was not this that held our attention in that stunning moment. It was the comet's nucleus, hanging at the center of that space. For that nucleus was a mass of smoothly revolving worlds!

Worlds! Worlds there at the comet's heart, worlds that were disk-shaped instead of spherical, a dozen or more of which revolved in a great ring about a single world that was larger than any of the others, and that hung motionless! Over those revolving worlds, down toward that central disk-world the cube-ships ahead of us were fleeing, and as we shot down after them I saw that it and the rim of other disks, though not illuminated by the dusky crimson glow of the encompassing comet, were bathed in light, pure white

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light that seemed to emanate from themselves! And as we rushed down toward the surface of that central world I glimpsed upon it smooth dark ways and streets, on each side of which were what seemed great, smooth-sided shallow pits; glimpsed multitudes of dark, shapeless figures that moved to and fro along those streets and ways, tending great mechanisms set up in masses here and there along them; glimpsed a single great circular plaza or smooth-floored clearing set amid those streets and pits and massed mechanisms, at the center of which loomed a great, truncated dark pyramid upon whose flat summit rested some big disk-shaped mechanism. Then in that same flashing glimpse I saw that which drove all else from my mind, saw from the surface of all this mighty world a tremendous swarm of great cube-ships that was driving up toward the ships we pursued, and toward ourselves!

"Cube-ships!" Gor Han was crying. "Cube-ships in thousands, and they're attacking us!"

"Back!" I cried. "Back up and outward! we have no chance against these thousands!"

But before our cruisers could turn, before we could halt and slant back upward, the thousands of leaping cubes from beneath were upon us! Then about us for a wild moment was conflict indescribable, colossal cubes rushing by thousands upon our hundreds of gleaming cruisers, crimson electrical bolts and black force-beams whirling and stabbing in wild destruction. Cubes thronged thick about us as our cruisers leapt upward, and then the thrumming of the force-beams of our ship sounded as they drove paths of instant devastation through the ruck of battle about us. From the speech-instrument there came above the din of battle a wild cry. from Gor Han, and I saw that a crimson bolt had grazed past his cruiser's stern, warping its whole side with its terrific power and sending his craft swirling helplessly down to the world below! I cried out at that sight, then saw Najus Nar's craft slant downward even as my own struggled wildly with the cubes about it, saw the insect-man's cruiser drive right and left with force-beams, as other cubes from beneath rushed up toward it. Then as it shot downward among them to reach Gor Han's falling ship it had crashed glancingly along the side of one of the uprushing cubes, and

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with its prow a twisted wreck of metal was whirling down also!

"Gor Han! Najus Nar!" I shouted, as I saw them fall; then a deadly bolt of blinding crimson fire flashed past our cruiser's walls, missing us only by inches; I yelled crazily as the cube above that had loosed it was driven smashing-ly into the battle whirl about us by our swift-leaping force-beam. But about us now our cruisers were swiftly vanishing, as the hordes of cube-ships rushed upon them! They were stabbing out with black beams to the bitter end, driving cubes down to death with those beams, yet they were fast disappearing beneath the withering hail of deadly crimson electrical bolts. But a score of cruisers remained beside me, now but a dozen, as the crimson bolts still flashed thick, Jurt Tills ship fighting side by side with my own. Then, as but a scant five or six cruisers remained, the target of all the blasting bolts from the massed cubes about us, there penetrated through the deafening roar of battle from the speech-instrument Jurt Tul's great voice.

"Back out of the comet!" he yelled. "It's our only chance, Khel Ken—to get outside until the rest of the Patrol's cruisers arrive!"

I saw, even through my mad bloodlust at that moment, that he was right and that our only chance of further action lay in winning clear of the comet. "Back, then!" I cried.

With the words our half-dozen cruisers zoomed upward and outward at such tremendous velocity that the deadly bolts from the thousands of cubes beneath fell short of us in our wild upward rush. Up—up—upward from that central world we shot, and outward. The cube-ships beneath were taken by surprize for the moment, then massed also and leapt up after us. And now, a scant six cruisers remaining of all the thousand that had been our force a few minutes before, we raced out from that central world, toward the darker circle in the distant coma's wall that was the one passage to outside space. Out over the ring of revolving disk-worlds we shot, out toward that opening, out—

But what was that? That swarm of tiny, square shapes, of gleaming little cube-shapes, which even at that distance we could see had darted suddenly from one side across the dark circle of the single opening? Close-massed in a compact

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swarm, they had shot out from the side to halt across that opening, hanging motionless there. Cube-ships, hundreds in number, that had flashed toward that opening from one side, to hang motionless there across it, while behind us there raced after us in deadly pursuit the other cube-ship thousands! Cube-ships that hung motionless, ready, across that round opening through the great coma, and at sight of which I cried aloud once more.

"They've cut us off—they're ahead of us!" I cried. "They've barred the one way to outside space and we're trapped here at the comet's heart!"

Ill

The moment that followed, as our ships slowed and hung motionless, with doom ahead and doom behind, was one in which the death that we had dared a score of times since reaching the comet loomed full before us. The cube-ships that barred the way ahead, the thousands racing toward us from behind—these were like death's great jaws closing upon us, and for an instant I felt myself surrendering to utter despair. But then, as my eyes dropped downward, toward the ring of outer smaller disk-worlds over which we had been flashing and above which we now hung, a flicker of hope shot through me and I turned swiftly to the speech-instrument.

"Down to those worlds below!" I cried. "There's a chance that we can hide on one of them until we can get out of the comet!" •

Instantly, spurred to greater swiftness by our desperate situation, our half-dozen cruisers were slanting sharply down toward one of those revolving disk-worlds. The surface of that world leapt up with terrific speed toward us as we shot recklessly downward, and I sighted cities of pits and streets and mechanisms like that of the central world upon it, cities though that did not cover all its surface as in the central world, but were scattered about it, the rest of the disk-world's surface being a tumbled mass of mighty mountains and chasmed valleys, all of barren dark rock. It was down toward one of these tremendous chasms, near the

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disk-world's outer edge, that we were heading, every feature of that world's surface lying plain beneath us in the strange white light that bathed all these revolving worlds. Downward into that awful chasm our cruisers shot, and as they did so I glimpsed, high above, a swarm of tiny dark cube-shapes that had halted their pursuit of us, were circling about and dropping lower as though to discover our whereabouts!

Our lives depended on finding some place of hiding in this tremendous-walled chasm, I knew, and as we arrowed down into its depths, white-lit by the same strange illumination, I gazed swiftly about for some place of concealment. A moment the search seemed hopeless, there being nothing but the chasm's narrow floor of barren rock, its towering jagged rock sides, and then as we shot along its length I sighted a great crack or crevice in one of them, a long, crack-like opening that was large enough to admit our cruisers, and behind which could be glimpsed the dark depths of some great cavernous hollow in the rock.

"Through that crack!" I ordered swiftly, saw Jurt Tul's cruiser move quickly toward it, scraping against the crack's jagged edges as it pushed through into the. dark cavern behind. Another of our cruisers followed, and then the rest, one by one, until my own was scraping inside, just as I saw the cube-ships high above dropping toward us, splitting into divisions of a dozen ships each which were slanting down over all the surface of this world in search of us, one of them heading straight toward the great chasm!

As it slanted down toward us I gazed about me, saw that our six cruisers were hanging in a dark, cavernous abyss that seemed to extend far down into the depths of this disk-world. A rocky shelf just inside the crack-opening, though, seemed large enough for us to rest our ships upon; so instantly we brought them to rest there, cutting off the generators whose humming might betray us. Then, as our space-doors opened with a slight inward hiss from the higher-pressure air of the disk's atmosphere, I stepped quickly out, found Jurt Tul and the other cruiser captains beside me, and then we had all suddenly crouched down inside the great crack's edge as a score of the great cube-ships shot down into the white-lit chasm outside.

Peering out from the cavern's dark depths we saw those cubes hanging there, then moving slowly along the chasm's length as though in search of us. Down its length they disappeared and we breathed easier for a moment; then they reappeared, coming to rest on the chasm's floor directly beneath the opening in which we crouched, scarce a half-hundred feet below us. Tensely we watched, saw the doors were opening in those cubes' sides, creatures emerging, the comet-creatures of these strange worlds. And at sight of those creatures even our tense situation could not suppress our gasps. For they were—liquid-creatures! Creatures whose bodies were liquid instead of solid, creatures that were each but a pool of thick black liquid, flowing visciously about, in each of which pools floated two round, white blank disks, great white pupilless eyes.

We saw them flowing forth from out their cubes, saw some whose viscous bodies held what seemed tools or weapons, saw the floating eyes turned this way and that about the chasm, as though in search of us. Then a score of the strange creatures did an incomprehensible thing; they flowed together into a single liquid mass, a great black pool in which floated all their eyes, their liquid bodies mingling together! A moment they remained thus, then had separated, each from the others, and were returning to their cubes.

"Conversing!" whispered Jurt Tul beside me. "It's their method of conversing, of exchanging thoughts—to mingle their liquid bodies one with another!"

I knew the amphibian was right, and shuddered involuntarily at the thing we had seen. The cubes' doors had closed now, and the cubes were lifting upward from the chasm's floor. One, more suspicious apparently than the rest, hovered a moment outside the crack within which we crouched, and we shrank back, suddenly tense, but after a moment's inspection it too had driven up after the others, which passed from sight high above, searching slowly across the disk-world's surface in a strange formation as though following some discussed plan. We breathed easier, then, standing erect, and I turned quickly to Jurt Tul.

"Our only chance is to get out of the comet and wait for the five thousand Patrol cruisers that were to come after

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us," I told him. "But we can't leave the comet with Gor Han and Najus Nar prisoned in it!"

The great amphibian shook his head. "We could venture back to the comet-city on the central world to attempt to find them," he said, "but in this brilliant white light we'd be seen and destroyed at once."

I was silent, for I knew that it was so, and broodingly I considered that light, whose white illumination filled all the great chasm outside, beating faintly even into the cavern, yet seeming to have no visible source whatever. And then, even as I gazed upon it, that light died! It seemed to gray, to darken, and then had vanished altogether, within a moment, while at the same moment there beat faintly through the air from far away a great clanging note like that of a giant gong. The chasm outside, the world and worlds about us, lay now in dusk, their only illumination the lurid, dark crimson light of the comet's glowing coma, a red dusk that gave to the barren rocky world about us an inconceivably weird appearance.

"That gong!" Jurt Tul was saying. "You heard it? It sounded when the light died—it means that these comet-creatures maintain and regulate their own day and night!"

"That white light," I said; "you mean that it's made by them, turned off for their night?"

He nodded quickly. "It must be. They can use the coma's great electrical energy to produce that light at will, just as they use that energy for their crimson bolts. They must turn if off and on at regular intervals, to produce their day and night, their activity-periods and rest-periods."

"But then we can venture back to the comet-city—back to the central world for Gor Han and Najus Nar!" I exclaimed^ and he nodded.

"Yes, but we'd best wait longer, since now the cube-ships' search will be going on, even in this dusk, and we'd have small chance of escaping them."

For all my impatience I saw the wisdom of Jurt Tul's suggestion and so composed myself to a longer period of waiting. So hour followed hour while we crouched there in the great crack in the chasm's wall. Far above we could see the crimson coma, against which there came and went

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now and then divisions of cube-ships, still searching for the fugitives who had escaped them. My thoughts turned to Gor Han and to Najus Nar, prisoned in the comet-city, and then to our own predicament. But hours remained now in which the comet might be turned aside, and unless we could escape from it, could meet the five thousand cruisers that were racing toward it from the galaxy and lead them inside, no power in all space and time could turn the comet aside from the galaxy. And I could not, would not, attempt to escape from the comet without having first learned the fate, at least, of Gor Han and Najur Nar.

At last I stood upright, turned to Jurt Tul. "The cube-ships above seem to have slackened their search," I told him, "and now's the time for our venture. We've had hours now of this dusk, and the light of their day may be turned on at any time."

He nodded, then pointed out that his cruiser had been damaged somewhat in the battle over the central world. So that it might not delay us we transferred his crew from it to the others, Jurt Tul entering my own cruiser with me, while the damaged one we left there on the cavern's shelf. Then, after we had closed our space-doors, our cruisers moved gently out of the narrow opening, rising swiftly up over the disk-world from the chasm's depths. That disk-world's surface lay beneath us, now, illumined by the coma's far crimson glow alone, a lurid luminescence that picked out streaks and veins of metal here and there in the jagged rock. It was plain, indeed, that these worlds were meteoric in nature, and had been formed and set spinning in this orderly fashion by the comet-creatures themselves.

For the time, though, we heeded not these things, intent on the scene ahead as our five cruisers shot silently through the lurid dusk toward the central world. Far away, now and then, against the coma's baleful glow, we caught sight of cube-ships moving still restlessly about in search of us, and once a party of these seemed to take up our course, to follow us. These, though, veered away in the dusk behind us, and then in a moment more we had passed above that ring of outer disk-worlds, and Jurt Tul and I, gazing forward from the control room, could make out the great, motionless mass of the central world beneath us, the world

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that was our goal. No light gleamed upon its darkened surface, lying in a weird picture there in the coma's crimson dusk. As we shot down toward it I saw vaguely in that dusk the great, massed machines here and there, the smooth streets, the enigmatic pits about them, and then the great clearing at the flat world's center.

"That clearing!" I whispered to Jurt Tul. "It was near it that Gor Han's and Najus Nar's ships fell—we'll land near it."

Our cruisers now were arrowing smoothly down toward one of the broader streets some distance from the clearing, since we could see now that on all the world below there moved only an occasional dark liquid-creature, the throngs we had seen before having unaccountably disappeared. Here and there above it moved a cube-ship, but none of these glimpsed us through the dusk, and in a moment more our cruisers had landed gently upon one of the smooth streets. There Jurt Tul and I swiftly stepped forth, for we had decided that we two alone could explore the comet-city more silently than a larger party. At once the cruisers swept back to wait for us in the dusk above, ready to make an attempt to escape from the comet should we be discovered. Then the amphibian and I moved swiftly along that silent street toward the great central plaza.

On each side of us loomed great massed machines at which we merely glanced as we hurried on. As we passed one of the pits that had puzzled me, though, I stepped to its edge, gazed down, then shrank back in horror! For in that shallow, smooth-walled pit there lay what seemed a great pool of thick black liquid unguessably deep, a pool formed by the liquid bodies of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the liquid comet-creatures that had poured into it! I could glimpse the white eyes floating in it, here and there, but there was no other sign of life or movement in the mass, and as I saw that and thought of the rows upon rows of other similar pits that extended across the comet-city, I understood, and turned swiftly to Jurt Tul.

"Sleeping!" I exclaimed. "In their night, their rest-period, they must all pour into these pits together—mingling their liquid bodies!"

Swiftly we shrank back from the great pit, moved on toward the clearing. Massed machines, grim and gleaming

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and towering, loomed all about us, half seen in the crimson 1 dusk, and we passed scores of the great, liquid-filled pits in ' which slept the comet-creatures, but there was no sign of our two friends. Had they been destroyed? Dread filled me, dread intensified because I realized that soon the comet-creatures would be ending their night, and turning on their white light of day, discovering us there on their world. Then, abruptly, Jurt Tul jerked me back from my forward stride, crouching silently with me upon the street, behind a mass of great mechanisms. For out of the darkness to our right had come the sound of something moving, something approaching us! Silently, tensely, we crouched there, and saw a dark shape moving stealthily down one of the branching streets toward us. It had turned from us, toward the great clearing ahead, when unexpectedly, as we crouched, my arm had brushed against the great machine beside us and touched something that moved beneath the touch, with a loud metallic clicking. Instantly that dark shape ahead had turned, and then was leaping straight toward us!

Before we could rise to meet it the rush of it had borne us downward, and as it did so I realized with a wild thrill that it was not a liquid-creature but a great and warm and fur-covered being, many-limbed, that had attacked us! Even as that fact penetrated into my brain our struggle had abruptly ceased, and we were staggering erect, Jurt Tul and I grasping the other.

"Gor Han!" I exclaimed. "It's you!"

The great Betelgeusan's fur-covered body and strange features were clearly visible to us now as he grasped our own hands, his eyes wide.

"Khel Ken! Jurt Tul!" he whispered. "I thought you destroyed in the battle!"

"We hid—escaped," I explained to him swiftly. "But you, Gor Han—how have you escaped?—and where's Najus Nar?"

He was silent a moment, then suddenly dragged us down into the deeper shadow of the great machines beside us. There, with the lurid light of the coma on his strange features, he spoke swiftly.

"Najus Nar is-living," he said, "but I will tell you what came upon us. You saw our ships fall in the battle over

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the city here, crashing down into it. At once these liquid comet-creatures were upon us, most of our crews having been killed in the crash, and but a few were left; but these being injured, too, they annihilated them with crimson bolts before we realized it, leaving but Najus Nar and myself, whom they wished, apparently, to question. Us they secured by metal bonds to one of the great machines, then came to us with little metal models, made of what seemed plastic gleaming metal, which could change instantaneously through a myriad different forms at their operation, and which they used for a rough communication with us. And through these and the things they explained to us, we learned, Najus Nar and I, something of the purpose and the past of these comet-creatures.

"Eons they had dwelt upon the central worlds of this giant comet that roamed the outer void, shaping those worlds to their will as it flashed on. They had used the coma's electrical energy for their own weapons, and had used it to produce light-vibrations, a white light which diey turned on and off for their day and night. The coma's energy, indeed, was the source of all their world's activities, but as their giant comet plunged on through space, that energy, ever shot backward in the tail that drove the comet on, was dissipated faster and faster, the coma waning and dying as all comets wane and die in time. But one thing could save them: to absorb into the coma vast quantities of matter, which would be converted instantly into electrical energy to replenish the coma. Not far from the great comet at that time loomed a vast universe of suns, and if the comet were to crash through the universe its suns and worlds would replenish their waning coma and save their comet from death. They needed but to change the comet's course, to send it toward the universe instead of passing it, and to do this they set up a great comet-control.

"This comet-control was set on the top of a truncated pyramid in a clearing at the central world's center. It was a great horizontal disk, set parallel to their disk world, with a pointer that could be moved at will around the disk-dial. The position of the pointer, by means of great projectors to which it was connected, controlled the position of the comet's tail. If the pointer was at the dial's rear the

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tail would be shot forth from the great coma's rear also, driving it forward through space. If they turned the pointer to the left the tail would shoot from the coma's left, driving the comet to the right. They could thus, by means of the comet-control and the great projectors which controlled the tail's position, drive the comet in any direction,, at will. The only thing they could not do with it was to reverse the comet-control, to shoot out a new tail opposite to the old one, since the momentum or pressure of the new one would crush and annihilate the coma and its worlds between their great pressures. They could drive the comet to right or left at will, though, which was all that they needed, since now they drove it toward the universe of suns near them.

"Onward the giant comet drove to that universe, and soon crashed through it, its suns and worlds being sucked into the gigantic coma and annihilated there, converted instantly into electrical energy which restored the waning coma's glory. So onward through space with renewed power it flashed, through the great void between the galaxies, until ages later when its coma was again waning they drove it toward another universe, crashed through it likewise. And so through the eons, as ever the comet's glory, the coma's power, has waned, they have driven it through another universe, destroying that universe to restore it. On though the limitless void of outer space they have driven it, a cosmic vampire looting the life of universes to restore its own! And now, when the comet's glory has again waned, they have turned it toward our own galaxy, to destroy it as they have done countless others. And within less than a scant half-dozen hours now the comet will have thundered so close to our galaxy that no power in existence can turn it aside!

"All this we heard from the comet-creatures' communication with us, and then they proposed that we cast in our lot with them, forgetting our doomed universe, and help them build great cruisers and force-beam apparatus like those with which we had fought them. I refused, of course, not wishing to live under any conditions after our galaxy's death, but to my honor Najus Nar accepted the proposal! He joined them, not listening to my frantic words,

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and went away with them, leaving me in despair. Then when the gong sounded across their worlds that marked the end of the white light and the beginning of this night, I began to work frantically with the metal bonds that held me to the great machine, twisting and untwisting them until at last, but minutes ago, I managed to break them. They had counted on the bonds holding me, and had left no guard over me, so at once I started off toward the central clearing, toward the great comet-control, for a desperate last attempt at turning the comet aside with it. I heard you crouching there, thought you comet-creatures and sprang at you, and the rest you know."

When Gor Han's deep whisper had ceased we were silent a moment, and surely never did stranger trio crouch in stranger place than we three, earth-man and amphibian Al-debaranian and great fur-clad Betelgeusan, there in the crimson dusk of the comet-city, all about us the pits that held its countless liquid-creatures and above us the glowing red coma which encompassed this world and was driving on toward our galaxy's doom. At last I broke the silence.

"Najus Nar with the comet-creatures!" I whispered. "It's impossible! In all its record there have been no traitors in the Interstellar Patrol!"

Gor Han looked steadily, compassionately, at me. "It is so, Khel Ken," he said. "I would not believe it had I not seen it myself."

"Najus Nar!" I repeated, again, then gathered myself. "There's but one thing to do," I said swiftly, "and that's for us three to make the attempt you planned, Gor Han, to get to the comet-control in the clearing and turn it, then destroy it before they can turn it back!"

We rose, paused. "There are comet-guards at the pyramid's base and summit, I know," said Gor Han, "but if we can overcome them before this night-period ends we'll succeed!"

Swiftly we moved forward, now, down the street through the dusk toward the great clearing. Mighty machines looming in the red dusk on each side of us, dark pits yawning between them in which the comet-hordes lay silent, glowing crimson coma that swung above—these made an incon-

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ceivably weird scene about us through which we three, 1 a weird and dissimilar enough trio in that lurid dusk, moved •] rapidly on. Once we saw a few of the liquid-creatures J flowing across one of the streets ahead, shrank back until j they had disappeared, then moved swiftly on. One or two ! cube-ships slid by above, too, but these did not spy us, and in a few minutes more we had emerged from the mass of machines and pits into the great flat-floored circular plaza at the city's center, the truncated pyramid rising vaguely from it in the crimson dusk.

"The guards!" whispered Gor Han. "There at the pyramid's base!"

I gazed, saw that a great notched stair or flight of narrow steps ran up the pyramid's side, and that at its foot were some four dark liquid-shapes, lying motionless, but with weapons of some sort, bolt-containers I did not doubt, held in the grasp of their viscous fluid bodies. A moment we hesitated, then crept out across the clearing toward them. They seemed not aware of our approach, and still nearer we crept stealthily, approaching them from a side, until just when we were within feet of them, one seemed to flow swiftly toward us for an instant, then back, at the same time training his deadly weapon upon us! Before he could loose the crashing bolts from it, though, we had sprung upon them!

The combat that followed at the pyramid's base was the most horrible, I think, that ever I engaged in. I had grasped at the body of one of the things but instantly felt the viscous liquid body withdraw from my grasp, flow away from me, while I struggled in vain for some hold upon it. Then I glimpsed Gor Han with his four great arms gripping one of the viscous things and hurling it against the pyramid's side before it could evade his grasp, shattering it into liquid black splashes there. The thing I strugged with had gripped me in turn, now, and was like fluid steel in the strength with which it held me. I felt a powerful viscous arm tightening about my neck, while others pinioned my arms, felt that grasp tightening, strangling me, and then it was abruptly torn from me as Gor Han lifted and flung it likewise! I rose, staggering, to see that of the four comet-creatures only black splashes here and there about us remained, Gor Han and Jurt Tul having annihilated them with their mighty limbs.

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"Up to the pyramid's summit!" I choked, stumbling toward the stair's base. "We've a chance to win yet!"

The others were rushing toward the stair with me, and then suddenly, as we set foot upon it, we stopped short. For in the air about us, sounding out across all the central world and the worlds about it, had clanged the note of a mighty gong! I heard Gor Han and Jurt Tul cry out at that sound, but in the next instant brlliant white light had sprung into being about us, the light of the comet-creatures' day suddenly turned on, bathing all things in their world in its revealing glare! And as we staggered there almost blinded by that brilliance, from the streets about us comet-creatures were flowing into the great clearing, liquid black comet-creatures in countless hordes from the pits of the mighty city. Even as they poured into the clearing they saw us, those on the pyramid's summit had also glimpsed us, and then from above and from all about the comet-creatures in countless thousands were rushing upon us!

There was a wild cry from Gor Han. "They've come out—it's the end of their night! And the end for us!"

The end for us! It seemed so in that instant, the great hordes of comet-creatures flowing in toward us from all the clearing's sides, from the pyramid's summit down toward us, the suddenly aroused cube-ships darting across the city toward us from far away. Then, even in that split-second of terror, I saw rushing toward us among those liquid-hordes a figure at sight of which I forgot even the doom that was upon us, an erect, manylimbed, familiar insect-figure as tall almost as myself, at sight of which I uttered a great cry.

"Najus Nar!" My great shout reached him even across the wild confusion and din of that moment, and I saw him gaze full toward us, his strange face expressionless, then rush on toward us without sign of recognition, one with the hordes of comet-creatures about him! I heard a gasp of unbelief as Jurt Tul beside me saw also, heard the crazy yell of great Gor Han as with eyes crimson he stepped forward to throw himself against those onrushing comet-crea-

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tures, then was conscious that great dark shapes had swooped down from behind us, hovering momentarily beside us. They were our five cruisers!

Their space-doors were already wide, and in the next instant, just before the comet-creatures were upon us, we had tumbled inside, were rocketing upward above the city pursued by scores of brilliant crimson bolts, two of which found their marks and sent two of our ships into flaring death. The cruiser into which we three had rushed, though, and the other two remaining ones, were racing up now above the white-lit central world, with the countless cubes rising swiftly after us, forming in a great crescent-formation behind us as they flashed after us across the ringed worlds toward the coma's wall!

"They're going to drive us straight into the coma itself!" cried Gor Han above the din of our generators as we flung madly on.

I saw in the same moment that it was so, that the great crescent of thousands of cube-ships that had risen to destroy us were not overhauling us, behind, but were driving us onward without chance of escape sidewise or downward, this time. The glowing wall loomed before us, and the single circular opening in that wall was guarded still by hundreds of other cube-ships, hanging in a solid mass across it. We could not escape through that opening, even had we desired escape, nor could we evade the relentless pursuit behind us, and inevitably within seconds more we would be driven into instant annihilation! Driven to our own deaths by the cubes behind us! This I saw, and in that instant of cold despair could have plunged on into that annihilating death, but then wild anger surged up in me and I whirled to Gor Han and Jurt Tul and the pilot beside them.

"Drive straight toward the opening!" I shouted. "Straight into the cube-ships there! If this is the end we'll take some of them, at least, with us!"

A fierce cry from the Betelgeusan, a reckless laugh from the amphibian, answered me as our three ships shot forward in that moment like things of light toward the cube-ships massed across the opening. Nearer we flashed toward them, nearer toward the hundreds of crimson bolts which in another moment would blast us, nearer—but look! look! Those hun-

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dreds of waiting ships had turned suddenly from us, had turned about and disregarding us were loosing their crimson bolts into the great passage-opening through the coma behind them, were falling back toward us from that opening, with red bolts blasting toward it! And then out of that opening after them came the things at which they fired, mass upon mass of long, shining shapes, of great, long cruisers, that burst forth from the opening in hundreds, in thousands, loosing upon the battling cubes a myriad of black shafts of the force-beams which in a moment more had driven them down and back in shattered masses of wreckage!

"Cruisers! Cruisers of the Interstellar Patrol!"

We were all shouting madly, then. Cruisers, the five thousand cruisers that had been sent out after our own thousand and that now, at the last, had found their way inside the comet in time to save us! They were shooting toward our own, massing about us, and then as from our bows flashed the signal that was mine as Chief of the Patrol, they were massing swiftly behind us, battle-formation again in long parallel lines, with our own ship at their head!

"Back to the central world!" I cried, my eyes upon the time dial set before me. "We've minutes left yet to get to that comet-control!"

Cruisers massed together, we were leaping back, now, back toward the spinning worlds, and toward the great crescent-formation of cube-ships that faced us now. Before those thousands of cube-ships had grasped what had happened, before they could turn, could change their formation, our compact mass had driven into them. Then cruiser thousands and cube-ship thousands were spinning and striking and mingling together, smiting with black force-beams and crimson bolts in titanic battle inside the tremendous electrical coma, whirling and stabbing in awful combat, the comet-creatures for their comet and we for our universe! Comet and galaxy had come to grips at last as those two huge fleets caught and struck at each other!

Cubes and cruisers swirled and ran about us as our own cruiser struggled through the wild ruck of the battle, our own black beams stabbing to smash back cubes before and beside us, while through the speech-instruments before me

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I cried orders to my mighty fleet, directing the masses of cruisers that leapt and struck and soared at the great square cubes about us. All space outside seemed a single giant mass of struggling cubes and cruisers, cut across by blasting crimson bolt and ebon beam, yet ever we were forcing the cubeships back, back over their ring of revolving disk-worlds, back over their mighty central world, and then down toward it as they fought fiercely against our black beams which drove great paths of destruction through them!

The surface of that world was looming clearer beneath us, bathed in white revealing light, as the giant battle swung lower down toward it. I glimpsed the great circular clearing, the pyramid with the mechanism and comet-guards on its summit, knew by the dial before me that but minutes still remained to turn aside with it the colossal on-thundering comet. Lower we swung toward the clearing, and as we did so the cubes beneath stiffened against us, their uprushing hail of deadly red bolts stabbing like an upward-falling rain of crimson death! But still more deadly were the black beams that drove down through them from our ships, and they were giving a little before us, sinking lower still, when suddenly from the surface of the world below there rose up among them another cube, one vastly greater than any of the others, one that moved ponderously up to the center of the cube-ship fleet and then glowed suddenly with a brilliant light. And as it did so the thousands of cube-ships beneath us suddenly vanishedl Disappeared from sight as though they had never been, leaving below us only the spot of brilliant light that marked the greater cube!

"That great cube!" Jurt Tul was crying. "It's a vibration-projector of some kind, one whose vibrations make invisible all the cube-ships around it and leave our ships and all else visible! And they're attacking now!"

For even at that moment, as we stared dumfounded toward the place where the cube-ship fleet had vanished, there had come from beneath and beside us hundreds upon hundreds of crimson bolts, bolts that flashed seemingly out of empty space annihilating scores, hundreds, of our bewildered ships, bolts from the cube-ships which we could not see, but which were circling about us now loosing their terrific

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shafts of death upon us! A battle to the death between two mighty fleets, one invisible, the other a plain target! Out in all directions our black beams were wildly whirling, but we could loose them only by chance, while our own ships, a perfect target to the invisible cubes about us, were flaring in annihilation in ever-increasing numbers!

"That great projector-cube!" I shouted to Gor Han. "Our only chance is to get to it—destroy it!"

I pointed down toward the spot of brilliant light beneath, which marked the position of the great cube that was projecting the vibrations that made our enemies invisible. But even as I did so a half hundred cruisers of our fleet had massed together, shooting downward in a great wedge, through a withering hail of crimson bolts, down through invisible cubes through which they crashed, down until an instant later the score remaining of them had crashed squarely into the spot of brilliant light below, meeting annihilation with it in that collision. But the light vanished as they crashed, leaving but wreckage of cube and cruisers, and at the same moment the mass of cube-ships beneath us had suddenly flashed into full view once more!

Our great fleet was gathering itself now for a last final rush downward through those opposing cubeships toward the comet-control. I could hear the wild victorious shouts of Gor Han and Jurt Tul and the crew beneath loud in my ears, could see the pyramid's summit, the great control, close beneath, as I turned to the speech-instrument to shout the word that would send our fleet thundering down. But before ever my lips opened I had stiffened, stood motionless. For from the time-dial before me had come the low, metallic note of the passing hour, marking the end of the last moment in which the comet could have been turned aside! Marking the end for our universe, sounding in my stunned ears like a titanic knell of doom across the infinite for our galaxy! Nothing now in all the universe could turn the giant comet aside from that galaxy enough to save it! Motionless there, Gor Han and Jurt Tul and I heard echoing away that muted note that had struck for the galaxy's doom!

"Lost!" Gor Han was saying it, strangely, slowly, un-comprehendingly. "We've lost!"

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Lost! The galaxy—our suns—our myriad peopled worlds —all lost, all doomed to annihilation by the gigantic comet about us that was thundering on now irrevocably! It seemed, in that instant, that all things in existence, the cruisers about us, the cube-ships beneath us, the comet-creature hordes on the surface of the white-lit world below, had paused for one moment breathless, a moment that marked a galaxy's doom. Then suddenly Gor Han was pointing downward, eyes staring, pointing to the comet-creature hordes on that world below, which were suddenly rushing crazily toward the pyramid beneath us, the cube-ships also racing wildly down toward the pyramid's summit! For on that summit from the stair on the pyramid's side a dark, erect figure had suddenly rushed, and before the comet-guards had glimpsed him had rushed to the great disk-dial and pointer of the comet-control! An erect, manylimbed dark figure who had seized the pointer in his grasp!

"Najus Nar!" Gor Han's great scream held within it all our renewed faith, our sudden comprehension.

For the insect-man had grasped the pointer, the pointer that controlled the position of the giant comet's tail, and had swung it half around the disk from the dial's rear to its front! As he did so he straightened, arms upflung toward us in a last great gesture toward the distant opening through the coma, and then the comet-guards were upon him, the blasting crimson bolts from the darting cubes above had reached him, annihilating the pyramid's summit, while in all the city beneath us liquid comet-creatures and great cubes were rushing crazily toward that pyramid, rushing too late toward the control which they had themselves built for their comet and which now had destroyed them!

For Najus Nar had reversed the comet-control!

Even as the bolts had blasted the pyramid's top our cruisers had shot with the velocity of thousands of light-speeds out from the central world and those about it, out across the comet's heart toward the circular opening through the coma, through that passage of crimson death at awful speed and out into space behind the comet as the passage closed behind us, as the tail behind the comet waned swiftly! And as our cruisers shot up above the mighty comet, we saw that it had halted in space, the awful momentum with

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which the old tail at the rear had driven it on balanced, opposed, by the new tail shot from its front, toward die galaxy, when Najus Nar had reversed the control! Caught between the two cosmic pressures, between the momentum and terrific speed with which the old tail drove it forward and the power with which the new tail drove it backward, the mighty coma beneath us was bulging, was spreadingl Bulging outward above and below, to right and to left, its giant crimson-glowing coma dilating and breaking up between the terrific pressures from front and rear! Changing from a great sphere to a gigantic shapeless crimson mass of electrical energy, bulging out in all directions, great flashes of leaping light inside it marking the end of the great comet-worlds caught and annihilated inside its tortured mass! Out—out—it swelled, our cruisers hanging far above it, watching it grow swiftly greater, thinner, until in moments more where the colossal crimson comet had been was nothing but a vast, far-flung cloud of faint electrical radiance, the concentrated electrical energy that had been the giant comet and its worlds dispersed out into that huge, faint-shining cloud!

The cosmic vampire that had threatened the life of our universe was gone forever! The comet-drivers had driven their comet and its worlds, at last, to death!

Sweeping in toward the galaxy's gathered suns, days later, our great cruiser fleet slowed, halted, hung motionless outside the galaxy's edge once more. Before us flamed great white Rigel, as it had flamed—how long it seemed before!— when Gor Han and Jurt Tul and Najus Nar had gathered in the control room of my cruiser, at the start of our mad journey toward the comet. Now that comet was but a vast, faint cloud of radiance far in the void behind us. And now, too, it was Gor Han and Jurt Tul that stood before me, in the cruiser's silent control room.

The cruisers about us had massed into two great divisions, since here at the galaxy's edge Gor Han and Jurt Tul were to leave me, taking up once more their duties in the

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ceaseless watch of the Interstellar Patrol, with for me my work as Chief in the headquarters at Canopus. The frantic joy that would be shaking the galaxy's people to see the shadow of doom thus lifted from them, the frantic gratitude that we might claim—in these we had no interest now, wanting only to take up once more the great Patrol's endless work. So now the cruisers of my two friends hung waiting beneath my own, as we paused in silence at the moment of parting.

Gor Han's deep voice broke the silence at last. "The end of the journey, for us," he said. "And for Najus Nar—?"

"For Najus Nar, too," I said. "He dared and died, for the galaxy—pretending to join the comet-creatures that he might thwart their plans at the last—and he would have wished no other end."

Jurt Tul nodded slowly. "Najus Nar would have wished it," he said. "Yet strange it seems, that we four of the Patrol are three, at last."

Silent we stood again, at that, and then Gor Han and Jurt Tul reached forth, Betelgeusan and Aldebaranian and Earth-man clasping hands in a moment's grip. They had turned, had saluted sharply, and were striding down through the cruiser toward their own ships, which with a clang of metal moved away from beneath my own. Gor Han's to the right, Jurt Tul's to the left, they moved, heading each the massed cruisers there, and then those cruisers were moving away, to right and left along the galaxy's edge, passing and vanishing. My single cruiser hung alone in the void, the pilot beside me with hand on its controls, but for a moment I paused still, gazing back through the blackness of the great void toward a far, faint-shining cloud that glimmered in the blackness. A long moment I gazed toward it, then turned. And then our cruiser too was moving, in over the galaxy's edge, in toward great Canopus through its gathered, flaming suns.

THE COSMIC CLOUD

We three stared at the Chief across the metal desk for a moment before I broke the silence.

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"But it's incredible!" I exclaimed. "You must be mistaken, sir—nothing in the galaxy could cause a thing like that!"

Jhul Din and Korus Kan nodded in agreement beside me, but the Chief of the Interstellar Patrol shook his head.

"Yet something in the galaxy is causing it, Dur Nal," he said. "I tell you that this thing has taken thousands of interstellar ships in the last few days without giving us any clue to its cause!"

Slowly I shook my head. "I don't doubt what you say, sir," I told him, "but it seems impossible."

The four of us were sitting in a small metal-walled room through whose window came the red light of mighty Betel-geuse, the sun upon one of whose planets we were. The room was part of the Betelgeuse headquarters of the Interstellar Patrol, and to it but hours before from the great central headquarters at Canopus had come Lacq Larus, Chief of the Patrol. His first act had been to summon our cruiser, which had been patrolling off Betelgeuse, and he sat considering us now, a great plant-man of Capella whose strange green fibrous body was tense and whose green-pupiled eyes were unmoving as he faced us.

Jhul Din and Korus Kan and I sat across the desk from him. Jhul Din was of Spica, a big powerful crustacean-man, his strong body armored in black shell, his quick eyes protruding. Korus Kan, of Antares, was typical of that star's races, his upright man-like body being of metal, with lenslike eyes, a tireless body-machine in which his living brain was cased. I, Earth-man, completed the trio, and though the members of the Interstellar Patrol are from every peopled sun no stranger three in appearance could have been found in it.

Lacq Larus had been looking thoughtfully out of the window across the teeming world of Betelgeusans outside, but turned and again faced us. "I will explain to you the whole situation," he said, "for it's imperative that you three understand it.

"As you know, our galaxy is a great swarm of suns floating in the vast gulf of space, each with its own worlds and peoples. All, of course, are ruled by the Federation of Suns, and all are policed by our own Interstellar Patrol. Back and forth between these suns has gone the galaxy's interstellar

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commerce for ages, countless thousands of great space-ships plying from sun to sun without hindrance. But now at last this great commerce of the galaxy is threatened with disaster!

"That threat lies in what we have always known as the cosmic cloud, a vast cloud of utter darkness that lies, as you know, near the galaxy's center. It has always lain there, a tremendous area of utter blackness billions of miles in extent, and of it our scientists have been able to say with certainty only that it is a tremendous region where the light-vibrations are simply non-existent.

"More than that none could say, for no ship can venture into that region without plunging into absolute lightlessness, so that none knows what may lie inside. It is true that some years ago one of the galaxy's scientists, Zat Zanat by name, ventured into the cloud to explore it in a ship with some assistants, having some new theory concerning it which he wished to test. But this scientist, one of the scientists of the sun of Deneb, never emerged from it and without doubt met death in it as many luckless ships in the past have done.

"None other has ever desired to penetrate into the great cloud and the galaxy's interstellar ships have always routed their course far around it, to escape the danger. But suddenly, a few days ago, hundreds of ships passing near the great cloud in space were drawn abruptly into it by some titanic and irresistible force. Their calls for help came to our distance-phones and a score of cruisers of the Patrol were rushed to the cloud's edge to investigate. But they found that the unfortunate swarms of ships had vanished inside it by then, their calls ceasing soon after, and there was no trace of what force had whirled them in!

"Instantly warnings were broadcast to all interstellar ships to avoid the neighborhood of the cloud. The cruisers of the Patrol then reconnoitered completely around it for more than a day, finding nothing unusual. At last we were convinced that it was some great ether-disturbance that had whirled the luckless ships inside, and orders were given that the space-lanes around the cloud were again safe. Yet the interstellar traffic had been streaming around it for no more than a few hours when the thing was repeated, and more than a thou-

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sand other great ships were drawn with terrific power and swiftness into the great blackness.

"Again all traffic around the cloud was suspended and again a squadron of Interstellar Patrol cruisers flashed to the scene. But they found nothing more this time, no sign of what had caused the great disaster. For two days we waited, though, but the cruisers there reported all as usual. So with some misgivings we yielded to the clamor from the galaxy's suns and allowed the ships again to route their course around the great blackness. A day passed without mishap and we began to breathe easier. And then the thing struck again, and again, but hours ago, more than a thousand ships with all inside them were whirled into the great cloud's darkness.

"This third disaster has caused something like a panic across the galaxy. All realize now that interstellar traffic around the cloud must be suspended until the thing is cleared up, and since the cloud lies almost at the galaxy's center that means the crippling of our interstellar commerce. Always, in time of great peril, the galaxy's peoples have turned to the Interstellar Patrol to save them. They are turning to us now to bring an end to this great threat, and we of the Patrol must not fail them."

Lacq Larus halted for a moment and as he did so the three of us were on our feet.

"When do we start for the cloud, sir?" asked Jhul Din quietly.

The Chief smiled. "You have guessed it," he said. "I have summoned you here to Betelgeuse, have come here from Canopus to meet you because it is on you three that I now rely. You, Dur Nal and Korus Kan and Jhul Din, saved all this galaxy once, when you dared outside our universe to other universes to thwart those who would have loosed death on us.

"I am asking you, therefore, to dare again for the galaxy, to endeavor to find what force it is that has whirled those thousands of ships into the blackness of the cosmic cloud. I dare not send a number of cruisers there, for all may be lost like the others. I do not even give you an order to go, for it means certain death if that force manifests itself again and draws you into the cloud. But if you can explore around its

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edges you may be able with your recording-instruments to find out what great ether-disturbance or unknown force it is that has caused these terrible calamities, may save the galaxy from greater ones. I say again though that it is not an order. If you, Dur Nal and your two lieutenants wish to go in your cruiser it is well, but if you do not wish to you need not. What say you?"

He was looking at me fixedly, but my eyes were on the time-dial on my wrist.

"We should reach the cloud's edge within ten hours," was all I said.

Minutes later our cruiser was slanting up at mounting speed from that swarming world of Betelgeusans, our crew rushing about its throbbing generators and Korus Kan and Jhul Din and I in its pilot room. With Korus Kan at the wheel the long ship rose through the glare of the great crimson sun and threaded through the masses of interstellar shipping until it was speeding through the black gloom of space, with all about us the shining hosts of the galaxy's suns.

Far ahead there stood out against the farther stars what seemed a small black spot in the galaxy's star-swarm. It was, we knew, the colossal cosmic cloud of darkness absolute into which thousands of ships had been drawn to some strange fate, and whose secret, if secret there were, we must discover. With the cruiser's hull quivering slightly and with the generators beneath talking louder we hurtled at thousands of light-speeds across the galaxy toward that lightless region.

Hour upon hour our cruiser flew like a thing of thought through the vast spaces toward the cloud. At the highest speed safe to use inside the galaxy we were traveling, and as we drew nearer the cloud's edge our space-chart showed that no other ships were in space about us now, all avoiding the cloud's strange menace. But our own craft hurtled steadily on, and steadily the vast region of blackness grew greater in the firmament before us.

In the cruiser's instrument room Jhul Din and I prepared the intricate recording-instruments on which the success of our venture depended. These were mechanisms connected to various indicators outside the hull, which recorded all

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ether-currents and drifts and disturbances around the ship, all electrical or radioactive or other forces, and all conditions of temperature and pressure.

If it was really some unheard-of and recurring force or some tremendous ether-disturbance that had swept the luckless ships into the cloud, we should be able to determine its nature and source with these aids.

From the instrument room's window Jhul Din and I watched the great cloud largen as we neared it. It seemed soon like a colossal black curtain across the universe, blotting half the galaxy's suns from sight, stretching across billions of miles. What mysteries did that vast and enigmatic region of lightlessness contain?

At last Korus Kan's voice came down through the order-phone from the pilot room. "We're within two million miles of the cloud's edge," he reported. "What orders?"

"Turn right and coast at a hundred light-speeds along its edge," I told him. "Jhul Din and I will start our observations, and I'll let you know when to change course or speed."

He assented briefly, and in the next moment we saw through the window that the gigantic black curtain of the cloud was sliding sidewise as our cruiser toned in space to coast along its edge. At once Jhul Din and I began our work. Bending over the dials of the recording-instruments, the Spican and I made quick readings as the ship moved on.

All ether-conditions outside the cruiser seemed normal, however, with no strong currents or maelstroms anywhere near us. Nor were our other instruments more enlightening, for none registered any unusual force. For more than an hour, while Korus Kan held the cruiser in a steady course along the cloud's edge, we kept to our watch of the dials, but with no greater result.

I turned from the instruments to the window, shaking my head. "I'm afraid it's useless, Jhul Din," I said. "It never was but a slender chance that we might find anything this way, and I'm afraid it has failed."

He looked thoughtfully with me toward the vast black wall of darkness. "Yet it's our one chance to learn anything," he said. "It may be that on the cloud's other side we could discover something."

"Already they had almost completed the refitting of these ships, fitting them with their vibration-guiding devices, and also with the mechanisms they will take with them for their conquest of the galaxy. These are mechanisms each of which can destroy all light for a vast space around it by neutralizing the light-vibrations even as is done by neutral forces here in the cloud.

"And with these they will conquer the galaxy inevitably. For they need but settle upon a world and with their mechanisms or one of them destroy all light in and around it. Plunged in absolute darkness, its blind peoples will be unable to strike back at the eyeless creatures who, used to darkness and at home in it, can wipe out the others at their leisure with the pain-producers.

"Already their last preparations are being finished, already their hordes streaming toward the waiting masses of interstellar ships. It was that knowledge that made me desperate, and in desperation I managed to escape from the building of the rulers that was my prison. I have kept always with me the ultra-violet sight-glasses, and with a pair of them was able to elude the creatures, hoping to steal a cruiser and get out to the galaxy to warn it. But I could not get near any of the ships, and in going through the city in a vain hope of doing so I saw you battling with and killing that creature and came to you."

When Zat Zanat had finished his strange tale, I was silent for a moment, gazing out into the narrow violet-lit street beside which we crouched.

"You think then that the only hope is to steal a cruiser and get out of the cloud to warn the galaxy before the attack comes?" I asked.

He nodded quickly. "What other hope is there? Nothing -can halt this invasion of theirs, for before an hour more is past, it may well be, their hordes will be pouring out of the cloud in their cruisers. You can hear them making ready now."

"But what of my friends? I can't escape and leave Jhul Din and Korus Kan here, or the others either."

He thought for a moment. "For your cruiser's crew there is no hope," he said, "for the rulers would order them slain

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at once. If your two friends seemed of any importance, though, there is a chance that they would have been let live for a while, prisoned there in the ruler's building."

"Then it's for us to get them out," I said, and he laughed shortly.

"That's all," he agreed. "Well, one thing seems hardly more hopeless than another, and we may as well try it. But we must get your friends soon if ever, for these creatures of darkness will surely kill their prisoners to the last one before they leave."

We stood up, then ventured cautiously into the narrow street. Looking along its violet-lit length I could see in the broader street that crossed it innumerable dark shapes hastening this way and that. The buildings on each side of the streets were tall rectangular ones a few hundred feet in height, their walls smooth and black like the paving of the streets. They had doors but no windows whatever, seeming like great boxes. It was with an effort that I remembered that in unending darkness there was small need for windows.

Zat Zanat pointed out over the city to a great block-like building that towered above all others, and on whose top I could make out the shapes of resting space-ships.

"The building of the rulers," he whispered. "It's there your friends are, if they still live."

"Lead on, then," I said, and without further words we started down the narrow way.

As we came toward the broader avenue that crossed it we went more carefully, and it was here that I had my first real glimpse of the creatures of darkness with whom I had struggled and from whom and among whom I had fled. They were much as my touching hands had informed me, great upright bodies of dark flesh moving on two flaplike lower limbs and with two similar arms. In the upper part of the body the only features were the small opening of the mouth and great cup-like ears set on each side of it.

As I watched, with something of a recurrence of my former horror, I saw that the creatures seemed to judge all their movements by hearing, avoiding one another when they heard the sound of steps, and avoiding walls and other obstacles evidently by listening to the echo of their

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own steps. The product of evolution in the unending dark- j ness of the cosmic cloud, hearing meant to them all that j sight could mean to children of light.

Zat Zanat, making a sign of caution to me, stepped for- I
ward and led the way across the border street, at a time _iwhen the stream of eyeless creatures had lessened. As we
approached its other side, though, the approach of two of
the monsters bearing a section of machinery between them
forced us to halt lest our steps be heard. The two passed but
inches from us, and unutterably strange and terrifying it
was to stand silent there in the violet-lit street with those
creatures flopping past. It took an effort to remember that
when we made no sound they could not perceive us. .

As we moved on I glanced ahead and back and saw that / over all the city as far as the eye could reach, in the violet \ light which was in reality not light, streams of the creatures were pouring toward great square open spaces in the city j where rested the thousands of captured interstellar ships. The last pieces of mechanism were being loaded into these, it seemed, and the monsters themselves were pouring into them. They were on the point of making their start out through the cloud to fall upon the galaxy's worlds!

The sight spurred us forward. Halting now and then and freezing motionless as statues to allow some of the darkness creatures to pass around or near us, we made our way through the streets until we were nearing the great building of the rulers. By then the greater part of the city's hordes had poured toward and into the massed interstellar ships, and because of that we went forward more quickly.

Zat Zanat turned now and then to whisper caution, though, and the third time that he did so I saw his eyes widen suddenly in terror behind his glasses, saw him racing back toward me with arms outstretched. With swift sense of panic I made to whirl around but before I could do so two great flap-arms had closed on me from behind, and in grasping my head knocked loose the glasses from my eyes.

Instantly I was plunged into the most profound darkness, and then as there came a rush of feet was released by the creature that had held me and sent staggering off into the darkness. I heard a terrific struggle going on in the darkness

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beside me, knew that Zat Zanat and the monster were locked in death-grips, but was helpless to aid my friend in the blindness that was upon me.

Rushing toward the sound of battle I was knocked back and down by a great blow that caught my face. I pawed frantically along the street in search of the glasses I had lost, heard over the scuffle in the dark the sound of Zat Zanat's gasps for breath and a smothered flute-like cry from his antagonist.

Abruptly the sounds of struggle ceased, and somewhere in the darkness a heavy weight thudded against the paving. Which of the two had won? I waited statue-like for the answer until I was grasped by the shoulders, and whirled around in sudden terror. But as I did so a hand was again pressing the eye-disks against my eyes and as the whole scene sprang from deep darkness into violet light once more I saw that it was Zat Zanat, disheveled and panting for breath, and that the other lay dead upon the paving.

"On to the building!" Zat Zanat gasped. "We've but minutes left, I think!"

We sprang forward, running now along the street, for along its whole length we could see none of the eyeless monsters, and were aware with sinking hearts that all or almost all must be already in the waiting ships. Minutes more would see them pouring out of the cloud to spread darkness and doom over the galaxy!

Down the street we ran, careless now of any that might hear, until there loomed at its end before and above us the vast box-like building of the rulers. None of the creatures of darkness could be seen around it, and we sprang toward the great square open door, then halted for an instant despite ourselves.

Far away across the city was sounding a humming as of a gigantic swarm of bees. It was a sound that I knew well and one that drove the blood from my heart. It was the sound of the generators of great space-ships throbbing, and as it sounded there was lifting over the city a mass of hundreds of the gleaming ships!

Away to our right another mass of equal size was rising, and far behind us in the strange city another, and still odiers at a greater distance from us, thousands of huge

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interstellar ships loaded with all the eyeless hordes! They were starting out from their world and from the cloud on their career of dread conquest!

"They're starting!" I cred to Zat Zanat. "We're too late!" "Not yet!" he cried. "Look, there's still a ship waiting on the roof! They must be slaying their prisoners now!"

For on the roof of the great building before us we glimpsed a waiting cruiser that had not yet risen. The significance of it and of Zat Zanat's cry drove home to my brain at the same instant. It was waiting for those in the building, those who were killing the prisoners they had kept there. And Jhul Din and Korus Kan—!

I uttered a cry of rage, leapt forward and through the door with Zat Zanat close behind me. I vaguely glimpsed great halls through which we raced, queer seats and desks and instruments, and then with my companion beside me was leaping up the broad flight of curving steps ahead.

Up it and up another stair we raced, and then my face blanched and I threw myself on at greater speed as from somewhere in the great building over us came shriek on shriek of the most dreadful agony, ending in each case in quick silence but taken up at once by other voices.

"The pain-producers!" Zat Zanat sobbed. "They're slaying the prisoners with them!"

"Jhul Din! Korus Kan!" I cried, madly, and then cried out again as there came to me from above somewhere a faint answering shout. We rushed up into the next level, along a broad corridor, and halted before a solid door from behind which came the cries of my friends.

I threw myself frantically at the door but the secret of its lock defied me, and it was diamond-hard in material. Other shrieks came now from the floor above us, and then as they ended came the flopping steps of the eyeless creatures coming down the stair to finish these their last prisoners.

Zat Zanat jerked me swiftly aside from the door. "Wait!" he commanded, and as I understood his purpose I froze instantly silent and motionless with him.

Down the stair and into the corridor came a half-dozen great eyeless monsters who carried with them funnel-like instruments of metal that I knew were the pain-producers. Their flute-voices sounded as they hastened along the hall

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toward the door by which we stood. We saw one finger with his flap-hands the mechanism on the door, and then as it swung open two had raised their funnel-like weapons toward the two inside. But it was then that Zat Zanat and I leaped.

A wild chorus of flute-cries went up as we crashed into them, and two sprawled motionless beneath our striking arms before the others could comprehend what was happening. And at the same moment there rushed through the open door Korus Kan and Jhul Din, the Antarian's powerful arms striking right and left and Jhul Din's great voice booming in rage as he laid about him.

Both Korus Kan and Jhul Din, though, were fighting in darkness absolute, not having the ultra-violet light disks that enabled Zat Zanat and me to see, and though five of the eyeless monsters had gone down in the first frenzied moment of the battle the others were turning with incredible speed, perceiving all our movements by hearing, to strike back at us.

In a moment Korus Kan was down, drawing another of the eyeless things with him. Jhul Din had blindly gripped two of them with his immense arms. Before either Zat Zanat or I could throw ourselves upon the remaining creature, though, he had leaped back from the battle and had raised his funnel-like weapon. A buzzing sound came from it and instantly through all of us in every nerve seared a white-hot agony that seemed to rive our brains asunder.

I was staggering against, the wall in that awful torture, and Korus Kan and Jhul Din, though they had killed their opponents, were writhing in agony. I saw the creature holding the weapon coming closer toward us with it, knew that an instant more of that agony meant the death they had dealt their prisoners. But at that moment there took place before my eyes one of the bravest things that ever was looked upon.

Zat Zanat had been nearest the creature when it had turned its weapon on us, and had staggered in that awful agony as we had, but as the thing came closer he straightened as with a terrible effort, summoned by a supreme command of his reeling brain all the power of his tortured mus-

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cles, and bounded forward in a single agonized leap that sent him crashing against the monster.

As he struck the creature its weapon was knocked from its grasp, and as the pain that was killing us abruptly ceased we rushed to where the two struggled and in a moment the creature lay dead with the others. We staggered up unsteadily, Zat Zanat handing from his belt pouch ultra-violet glasses to my two friends.

"To the roof!" he cried.

"The roof—that cruiser on it is our one chance to get out of the cloud and warn the galaxy before the attack comes!"

Even as we cried out that, we were bounding up the curving stairs from floor to floor until in a moment more we were bursting out into the broad flat roof of the great building. In a single glance we took in the whole scene. At the roof's center rose a square block that was the center of innumerable branching electrical connections and that bore upon it a great lever-switch or control now open, the control Zat Zanat had described which made of this world a colossal-powered magnet when closed. To one side of the roof rested a long cruiser with no occupants, the ship that had been awaiting the half-dozen creatures who had tarried to slay the prisoners.

But as we burst out into the roof's violet light it was not at these things we were looking but at what was around and above us. The whole city, the whole world around us, were deserted! High above us we made out a tremendous swarm of black spots, which were rapidly diminishing in size as they moved away. They were the thousands of interstellar ships and they were going forth with all the eyeless hordes inside them to the conquest of the galaxy!

"They've started—started out of the cloud! We're too late!"

"Too late!"

The words seemed like tocsins of doom in our ears as we stood there motionless, Jhul Din and Korus Kan and Zat Zanat and I, gazing at the vast armada going out to spread death and destruction across our universe. Never could the galaxy's peoples of light stand against those dread peoples of darkness who would spread darkness before them. Never could we outdistance them even to warn the galaxy of the

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