Outside the Universe

by Hamilton Edmond

* * *

When I awoke I sensed that hours had passed, though Jhul Din and our followers lay still unconscious about me. Leaving them there, I strode out of the room and into the great Council Hall, whose stupendous circle lay empty now and bare, seeming immeasurably more vast in its white-lit emptiness than when filled with the thousands of gaseous Andromedans. I moved across it to the raised section at the center, stepped upon the purple-glowing disk beneath the ascending shaft, and then, thrust upward by the force of that disk, was moving smoothly toward the round opening in that ceiling and on up the shaft until I had burst out into the unceasing light of the belt of suns above, stepping sidewise onto the ground as I did so. And now I saw that Korus Kan, not a dozen feet away, had turned and was coming toward me.

"Their ships are gathering, Dur Nal," he exclaimed, eyes alight. "You've slept for nearly a day, there below, and their ships have been coming in those hours from every sun and world in their universe."

I swept my gaze about, a certain awe filling me as I saw now the tremendous forces that had gathered and were gathering here on the surface of this giant central world. A tremendous circular area of miles in diameter around us, around the shafts that led down to the hall of the council, had been cleared of all else and was now a single vast gathering-point for the thousands of ships that were massing here. Even while we gazed, the air above was being darkened by the swarms of those ships that shot ceaselessly downward, landing in this great circular area, drawing up in regular rows and masses. In tens of thousands they were grouped about us, a tremendous plain of gleaming metal ships that stretched as far as the eye could reach.

At the center of this vast plain of ships, though, there lay a round clearing, in which we ourselves stood, a clearing in which there rested only a hundred other ships, different far from the thousands around them, a hundred domed, gleaming craft like giant hemispheres of metal. Not a thousand feet from us lay these great, strange craft, their space-doors open and their Andromedan crews busy among the masses of strange mechanisms inside, and I recognized them instantly as the great craft I had seen in the thought-pictures in the Council Hall below, the mighty ships whose projected sheaths and walls of dark-purple force could move giant suns at will.

"The sun-swinging ships," I exclaimed, and Korus Kan nodded, his eyes upon them also.

"Yes," he said, "they'll be the most powerful weapons of the whole great fleet-with them we can crash the suns and worlds of the serpent-universe together at will."

Now, though, we turned our attention from them to the tens of thousands of ships that lay about us. In and out of those ships, too, were moving countless masses of Andromedans, swift-gliding gaseous figures who were inspecting and testing the mechanisms of their craft and the cylinders in their sides that shot forth the crumpling shafts of force. They were making all ready for our start, we knew, for the battle that must ensue when we poured down on the serpent-universe, and we strode over toward them. Already we had learned that the controls and mechanisms of the Andromedan ships were much like those of the serpent-ships, their speed being fully as great, but some features of them were still strange to me. A dozen steps only we took toward them, though, and then stopped short.

For down out of the sunlight above was slanting toward us a close-massed swarm of ships that seemed different from the masses of ships that were landing ceaselessly about us, that moved more slowly, more deliberately. Down it came while we watched it, standing there, seeing it change from a far swarm of black dots in the sunlight above to a mass of long dark shapes, that were becoming clearer to our eyes each moment-shapes that, I saw with a sudden great leap of my heart, were not long and flat, but oval.

"They're serpent-ships!" Korus Kan's great cry stabbed like a sword-blade of sound toward me. "They're the serpent-ships that pursued us to this universe-the three hundred that escaped when we were rescued-they've seen this great fleet gathering and have come to strike a blow at it."