"Turn the ship square around and halt, Korus Kan!" I cried. "We of the Interstellar Patrol are not going to be picked off as we run—we're going to turn and face them head-on!"
Korus Kan's eyes flamed at my cry, his hands moved swiftly on the controls, and then our ship had curved suddenly about and had slowed and stopped, swinging around and hanging motionless in space, facing our enemies. Even as we had curved and stopped, they too had swiftly halted, as though suspicious for the moment of some trap, and hung before us in the black gulf of space, facing us. Then there was an instant of utter stillness and silence, as there in the void we faced them, our ship motionless in space, we three in the pilot room gazing toward their own great swarm of ships hanging motionless before us; the mighty Andromeda universe flaming in the heavens behind us, now, and the far, dim glow of the dying serpent-universe in the blackness ahead, and the misty little circle of light that was our own galaxy away to the right; all these lay about us in a silence that was the silence of doom. For a single moment the great tableau held, and then, disdaining to use their attraction-ships upon us now, the great swarm of serpent-ships leapt as one toward us, their hundreds of death-beams stabbing toward us!
But as they did so, as they sprang upon us there in space, there leapt from above and behind us a mighty swarm of other ships—long, slender, flat, gleaming ships entirely different from the oval-shaped serpent-craft, or even from the cigar-like ships of our own galaxy—long, flat ships like none we had ever seen before, that flashed down over and past us straight upon the serpent-fleet! From the sides of these strange new ships there projected thick, squat cylinders that were pointed now toward the serpent-ships before us, and though no ray or beam could be seen issuing from those cylinders, the serpent-ships at which they were aimed were crumpling, were contracting and folding up into shapeless masses of crumpled metal, as though crushed in the grasp of a giant hand! And as that mighty swarm of strange, flat ships flashed down upon the serpent-fleet that reeled back and recoiled from its terrific blows, I heard a wild cry from Korus Kan, as he and Jhul Din stared out with me.
"Strange ships attacking our pursuers!" he cried. "They're ships that have come out from the Andromeda universe to save us from the serpent-creatures' pursuit!"
11. Into the Andromeda Universe
As the mighty swarm of Andromeda ships from behind us drove down upon the half-thousand serpent-craft ahead, I could only stare for a moment in stupefied surprize, so stunning had been our sudden transition from death to deliverance. I saw the long, flat craft of the Andromedans, a full thousand in number, flashing down on the serpent-ships in one great swoop, saw the latter, in groups, in dozens, in scores, crumpling and constricting as the deadly cylinders of the Andromedan ships were turned toward them. Within an instant, it seemed, a full two hundred of the half-thousand serpent-ships had crumpled and whirled away beneath the terrible, invisible force of the cylinders, though death-beams were raging out thickly all about the swooping Andromedan ships. Then, with almost half their fleet wiped out, the remaining three hundred serpent-ships, including their score of great disk-attraction-ships, had whirled around and were racing back into space toward their own dying universe, fleeing from the terrific blows of the attacking ships that had come out from the Andromeda universe ahead, just in time to save us.
Now, as the serpent-fleet flashed from sight, into the void toward its own universe, the thousand Andromedan ships massed swiftly and moved toward our own, that hung still motionless there in the gulf of space. In tense silence we watched them come, hoping that they might not set us down, too, as enemies because of our serpent-ship, but they turned none of their deadly cylinders toward us. Those cylinders, as I was later to learn, were in reality projectors that shot forth a shaft of invisible force, one that caused the ether about any ship it struck to compress about that ship instantly with terrific force, compressing thus into small compass the ether-vibrations that were the matter of the ship, and thus crumpling that matter itself, in an instant. It was a weapon fully as terrible as the crimson destruction-rays of our galaxy's ships or the pale death-beams of the serpent-creatures, a shaft of crumpling force that we knew could destroy us instantly. Instead of loosing it upon us, though, they slanted down until one of their foremost ships was hanging just above our own.
We guessed then that they meant to enter our ship, and in a moment our guess was confirmed as the long, flat ship hovering above sank downward until its lower surface was lying along the upper surface of our own oval craft, the two touching. Then we heard a section of the underside of the ship above sliding back, and a moment later, at my order, one of our crew slid open our own upper space-door. The openings in the two ships, in the upper side of ours and the lower side of theirs, were thus together, pressed so closely by the weight of the upper ship as it pressed down upon us that it formed a hermetically sealed opening connecting the two. Then, down through that opening from the ship above, down into the corridor of our ship and toward our pilot room, there came a half-dozen of the Andromedans from the ship above us, a half-dozen of the people of the Andromeda universe.
I do not know what weird and alien shapes we had expected to see in these beings of a different universe, but I do know that never had our imaginations envisaged creatures of so utterly strange a nature as these that came toward us now. For they were gaseous! Tall columns of misty green gas, that held always to the same pillar-like outline, as unchanging of form as though of solid flesh, and that were gliding along the corridor toward us! Upright, unchanging columns of green, opaque vapor, from near the top of whose six feet of height there branched out on each side a smaller arm of the same thick green gas, arms that they moved at will, and in which some of them held instruments and weapons! Tall, erect columns of thick, green vapor, without features of any kind that we could see, that yet were living, intelligent and powerful beings like ourselves! Their bodies, their two arms, their very organs and features and senses formed of gas, just as our bodies are solid, and that of a jellyfish liquid!