"You're awake!" he exclaimed, as his eyes fell on Jhul Din and me, standing. "I thought you would be, by now; the Council of Suns is waiting for us."
"The Council!" I repeated, and he nodded quickly as we strode with him to the door.
"Yes. We've been here for many hours, Dur Nal—you and Jhul Din sleeping—and in those hours the Council has been in almost constant session, deliberating this invasion of our universe."
While he spoke we had been traversing a narrow, gleaming-walled corridor, and now turned at right-angles into another, strode down it and through a mighty, arched doorway, and were in the tremendous amphitheater of the Council Hall, a room familiar to all in the galaxy, the vast circle of its floor covered now by the thousands of seated members. It was toward the central platform that we strode, where Serk Haj, the present Council Chief, a great, black-winged bat-figure from Deneb, stood before the vast assembly, behind him on the platform the score of seated figures who were the heads of the different departments of the galaxy's government. It was toward seats among these that he motioned us, as we reached the platform, and as we took our place in them I glanced about the great hall, interested in spite of the cosmic gravity of the moment. It was with something of a leap in my heart that I saw, among all those dissimilar thousands of strange shapes from the galaxy's farthest stars, the single human figure of the representative of my own little solar system. Then, as Serk Haj went on with the address to the assembly which our entrance had interrupted, I turned my attention to his words.
"And so," he was saying, "it is clear to you how these strange invaders from outer space, these serpent-creatures from outside our universe, have been able to annihilate all but a few ships of our great fleet, to settle upon the worlds of the great Cancer cluster as a base, to set up clear around the edge of our galaxy the watchful patrol of their ships that our scouts report. All this they have done with a fleet of a few thousand ships, have shattered our galaxy's defenses and sent wild panic flaming across that galaxy; yet these few thousand ships, as we have now learned, are but the vanguard of the countless thousands that are soon to follow, to pour down upon us in colossal, irresistible hordes!
"It was through the feat of Dur Nal, here, and his companions, that we have learned this. You have heard how, after the great battle, he and his party were able to do what never before was done in all the annals of interstellar warfare, to board and capture an enemy ship in mid-space and bring it back, intact, to Canopus. That ship has been thoroughly examined by the best of the galaxy's scientists, and in its pilot room was found a collection of metallic sheets or rolls covered with strange characters, the written records of these serpent-invaders. Upon those records for hours our greatest lexicologists have worked, and finally they have been able to decipher them, and have found in them the facts of the history and purposes of these strange invaders from outer space.
"These invaders, as the records show, are inhabitants of one of the distant universes of stars like our own, lying millions of light-years from our own in the depths of infinite outer space. So far are these mighty galaxies like our own that they appear to us but faint patches of light in the blackness of space, yet we recognize them as universes like ours, and have given them names of our own, calling one the Andromeda universe, and another the Triangulum universe, and so on. The universe of these serpent-creatures, though, although one of the nearest to our own, has never been seen or suspected by us because it is invisible from our distance, being not a living universe of flaming stars like our own and the ones we see, but a darkened, dying universe.
"It is a universe in which the thronging stars have followed nature's inexorable laws and have darkened and died, one by one, a great universe passing into death and darkness and decay as our own and all others, some time in the far future, will pass. For eons upon it had dwelt the great masses of the serpent-people, thronging its countless worlds, and as their suns began to fail them, one by one, as their universe swept toward its final darkness and death, they saw that it was necessary for them to migrate to another universe unless they wished to pass also into death. So they constructed great space-ships which were able to travel at millions of light-speeds, by causing an ether-shift about the ship; space-ships in which it would be possible to do what never had another done, to cross the vast gulf between universes. Five thousand of these, when finished, they sent out with serpent-crews and death-beam armament as an advance party which was to locate a universe satisfactory for their races and then attack it, gaining a foothold upon it while the rest of the countless serpent-hordes would build a still mightier fleet of tens of thousands of ships, which would transport all their great hordes to the universe they meant to conquer.
"So the five thousand ships drove out from the dying universe into the void, toward the Andromeda universe, the nearest to their own. Down they poured upon it in swift attack, but up to meet them rose the people of the Andromeda universe, a single race ruling all of it, whose science and power were so great that with mighty weapons they drove back and defeated the five thousand attacking ships, forcing them back into outer space again. It was clear that for the present the Andromeda universe could not be conquered, so they turned at a right angle, and after flashing a message by some means of etheric communication to the masses of their peoples in the dying universe, struck out through the infinite void in a new direction, toward our own universe.