But what was that below? Our downward-rushing ships had paused, millions of miles still above the great cluster, and we were gazing down toward it, toward a vast, dark shape that was rising from among its swarming suns! A colossal dark cone, that was coming slowly, deliberately, up among those suns and at sight of which our cries had died on our lips, our faces masks of blank horror! It was the mighty death-beam cone of the serpent-creatures! It was the colossal generator of death that they had brought with them unfinished from the dying universe, that their serpent-hordes in the cluster beneath had labored upon while we had fought our mighty battle, and that now, while the last of the serpent-ships had held us back a moment longer, they had completed. Up toward us it was coming, slowly rising among the mighty cluster's suns, ponderously, deliberately, and we knew that in a moment more it would be rising out of that cluster, would be annihilating all life in our ships with a single sweep of its colossal beams of death, would be sailing deliberately on to wipe all the life from the galaxy's worlds, and give those worlds forever to the serpent-hordes massed in the cluster beneath! We had not won, but lost.
There was a silence-a silence of death-in that moment, as the stupendous cone rose up through the ball of suns beneath. Still, silent, we hung there-our doom rising up beneath us-a moment in which there whirled through my brain confused, swift visions-our awful battle in vain-our universe and the Andromeda universe the serpent-peoples', our races gone forever-and then suddenly into my whirling brain there penetrated a choking cry. It was from Jhul Din, and he was at the window, strangling, staggering, pointing out into the black void of outer space beside us, out to where a little swarm of great shapes were rushing headlong toward us out of that void. A hundred great shapes that were like mighty hemispheres of metal, domed and flat-bottomed and gleaming-
"It's the sun-swinging ships!" Jhul Din's great cry stabbed into my dazed brain like a sword of sound. "It's Korus Kan and the sun-swinging ships. They escaped from the attraction-ships that captured them-have come across the void after us-"
The sun-swinging ships. The ships that with Korus Kan in them had been captured and that we had thought destroyed, but that somehow, in the void outside the Andromeda universe, had escaped from the attraction-ships that held them, had sped across the void after us and were now racing in among us, hanging above the giant cluster of suns beneath, up through which the great cone of doom was rising. Then from those hundred domed ships hanging there, there sprang downward vast, broad rays of dark, purple-glowing force, the force with which the Andromedans had moved all their suns, vast rays that spread out fanwise as they shot down and that formed a continuous, unbroken wall of purple-glowing force about all the great cluster beneath, screening all in that cluster from the gravitational pull of everything outside, from the pull of the galaxy that alone counterbalanced the attraction of the cluster's suns toward each other. And as that counterbalancing pull was shut off that alone had held the suns of the giant cluster in their balanced positions, those suns began slowly to move-to move toward each other.
Slowly at first they moved, and then faster and faster, sweeping majestically in toward each other, the whole giant cluster of swarming suns contracting, condensing. Inward they moved, and now sun was crashing into sun, at the cluster's center, sending up towering bursts of awful flame as they met in titanic shock. Inward the thronging, blazing suns swept still, crashing now through all the cluster into each other, worlds that circled about them vanishing in great bursts of fire as they plunged into or were caught between the suns that crashed about them. Almost to the great cluster's top had the giant death-cone reached, as the suns about and below it hurtled inward to doom, and then we saw two mighty suns on each side of it that were rushing inward and toward it, converging upon it, annihilating themselves and it together in the gigantic shock of their collision. On and on, sun moving into sun, they went, all the worlds about them vanishing into their fires, annihilating forever all the serpent-hordes that had massed upon them, all matter and all life inside that cluster perishing as its thundering suns crashed gigantically into each other. On and on, until but a single colossal core of fire remained below us, formed by all the cluster's crashing suns, and that already, as the domed ships among us turned off their screening force, was beginning to expand outward, to swell out into a vast nebula of flaming gas. A mighty nebula there where the great cluster had been. A giant nebula that held within its fires all that had been the countless invading serpent-hordes who had swept upon us from-and who had been annihilated at the last by others from-outside the universe.
17: Outward Once Again
Standing outside the mighty tower of the Council of Suns, with the light of great Canopus brilliant on all about us, Jhul Din, Korus Kan and I watched, days later, as our Andromedan allies bade us farewell. Behind us were grouped the massed thousands of the Council, with its Chief, Serk Haj, beside us, while in close-ranked rows on the ground before us rested the five thousand Andromedan ships that were all that remained of the mighty fleet of a hundred thousand that had come across the void to our universe. From those ships the dozen of the Andromedan leaders were coming toward us, while in them their crews awaited the start.
In the intervening days those crews, those thousands of gaseous Andromedans, had been the recipients of the galaxy's frantic gratitude at having lifted from it the shadow of doom that had hung upon it, in all that time when the serpent-creatures, in the Cancer cluster, had prepared to spread out in their great conquest. Sun had vied with sun, and world with world, to do the Andromedans honor, for they it was, as all in the galaxy knew, who had gathered the mighty fleet that had rushed across the void to our universe's aid. They it was who, with the galaxy's fleet, had smashed the serpent-armada in such a battle as had never been known before. And they it was, too, whose great sun-swinging ships had saved us at the last, had annihilated all the serpent-hordes and their cone of doom.
And if the galaxy had given to the Andromedans for their aid its highest honors, it had given no less to us and our followers who had dared cross the void to seek that aid; to me, who had led that wild expedition across the gulf and had led the great Andromedan fleet back to our galaxy and into the colossal battle of universes; to Jhul Din, who had saved us all, and with us the galaxy's chance of life, in the serpent universe; and to Korus Kan, who when captured with the sun-swinging craft by the attraction-ships had managed to escape them in the void far out from the Andromeda universe by replacing in an upward position some of the purple-force projectors of the sun-swinging ships, blasting the disk-ships that held them with the force of those projectors and racing back to find our great fleet gone, speeding across the void after us and flashing in to save us at the last moment. So great was the gratitude of our galaxy for what we had done that no reward had been offered, either to us or to the Andromedans. For what save our universe itself could reward those who had saved that universe?
Now, as the dozen Andromedan leaders came toward us there, the great Council behind us and the vast throngs about us silent, they paused. Strange, erect columns of misty green vapor, they poised there, contemplating us, I knew. Then Serk Haj had reached an arm toward them, bat-winged being of Deneb with his grasp returned by the misty arms of the gaseous beings before us, and then they had passed from him to Jhul Din, and from the big crustacean to Korus Kan, and from his gleaming metal figure to me. There was a strange tightness across my throat as I reached a hand out toward them, and they paused as they grasped it, paused as for the third and for the last time I gripped hands with these gaseous beings of an alien universe, whose great fleet I had led through the void from battle to mighty battle. Then they had turned, were gliding toward their ships.
And now we three turned toward our own long, cigar-like ship that waited beside us, for we were to pilot them out through our galaxy into outer space once more. Into our craft we stepped, up into its pilot room with Korus Kan at the controls once more, and then we were driving up from the great world beneath, with the five
thousand Andromedan ships behind us, were slanting up and outward-out from that world, out from great Canopus, until it was dwindling and diminishing behind us, out through the galaxy's swarming suns and past the great nebula that had been the Cancer cluster, until we were driving out from the galaxy's edge into the great void once again.
Our ship and the ships about us slowed, halted. Before us lay the vast darkness of outer space, infinite in extent. Before us and to the right in that darkness, far ahead and hardly to be seen, was visible a dim little flicker of light, the flicker that was the serpent-universe, a dying universe almost as lifeless as the worlds within it were now. And to the left and ahead glowed the misty little patch of light that was the Andromeda universe. Even as our eyes caught it, the ships around us were moving toward that misty patch, outward into the gulf of space, passing from about us, their great shapes dwindling swiftly as they sped out from us, toward their universe. Standing there, shoulder to shoulder, we three watched them go, until at last they were but tiny points ahead, were wavering, were vanishing, were gone.
Yet still, though, we stood there unmoving, gazing out after them, with before us the silence and darkness of the eternal void, and behind us the galaxy's stars.
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Outside the Universe ip-4 Page 18