The comet-drivers

By EDMOND HAMILTON
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 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 Canopan pilot beside me were gazing, 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.