prominences that could have licked up worlds like midges, but straight on between the walling fires our throbbing ship still flashed.
Now the hundred ships behind, still after us through that hell of light and flame, were racing down upon us even as we sped between the giant flaming suns, and now from behind shot shaft upon shaft of the pale death- beams, hardly to be seen in the awful blinding glare. As the beams sprang toward us, though, Korus Kan swerved to the left, and for a moment it seemed that we had swerved from death in one form only to meet it in another, since at our terrific speed we veered millions of miles in that moment toward the left gigantic sun. Its boiling fires were all about us, seemed to encompass us, and then just as it seemed that we were racing into the mighty glowing corona to our deaths Korus Kan had swerved our ship backward into the center of the narrow gap. And now we were reaching that gap's end, were passing from between the giant suns, and out into more open space inside the great cluster, with the pursuing ships again leaping forward to loose their deadly beams.
Out from between the two great suns we flashed, before us now the interior of the mighty cluster, a great swarm of flaming suns that thronged space all about us, and about many of which swung great families of planets, dozens of whirling worlds. Even as we shot into the interior of the great cluster, though, from between the two giant suns, the hundred pursuing craft had leaped forward upon us with one great burst of sudden speed, were behind us, on each side, all about us. It was the end, we knew, and there was an instant of sheer silence as we waited for that end, waited for the pale beams of death from the ships about us. But before they could loose those beams there flashed suddenly upon them from each side other ships, two mighty masses of ships like our own, that burst suddenly out upon our pursuers from behind the two great suns between which we had just come. Ships like our own! Ships long and slender and gleaming! Ships of the Interstellar Patrol, striking at the vanguard of the invaders in defense of our universe.
3: Death-Beam and Crimson Ray
Even as the great masses of ships on each side leapt out upon our pursuers, Korus Kan had glimpsed them, and had swung our own ship instantly around in a great curve. On each side of us, now, were the thousands of cruisers of the great patrol, and before us were the hundred ships that had chased us in toward the galaxy through space. Before those ships could recover from their surprise, before their occupants could realize the trap into which they had ventured, our whole vast fleet was leaping upon them from both sides, flashing down upon the hundred invading craft before they could turn from their onward flight.
Down with them swooped our own ship now, and we shouted aloud as we saw from all the swooping ships about us, as from our own, myriad brilliant shafts of the brilliant red ray flashing down and striking the enemy ships ahead and below. Within an instant, it seemed, half those racing ships had flared and vanished in brilliant bursts of crimson light, while the rest had dipped and turned in a wild effort to escape. Back toward the two great white suns they raced, seeking to escape between them into outer space again, to rejoin the oncoming main swarm of their great fleet, but down before and ahead of them leapt our Patrol cruisers, the red rays again whirling and cutting in great circles of death. And now as they vanished one by one beneath those rays, struggling still through space toward the two great suns, the death beams of the remaining ships sprang savagely up toward us, and I saw cruisers here and there in our own fleet driving aimlessly off, smashing into one another and whirling blindly away as the beams wiped out all life in them.
But now we were leaping after the fleeing ships between the great suns again, and as we shot after them through those terrific walls of flame our rays again took toll of them; so that as we flashed out from between the two mighty suns and into outer space once more but a scant half-dozen of them remained, and these leapt instantly forward and out into the blackness of outer space to rejoin the main body of their approaching fleet, while we in turn sprang after them in hot pursuit, though our ships were not capable of the tremendous speeds of those invading ones.
'Score for us!' cried Jhul Din as our ships flashed on. 'We've all but wiped out those hundred.'
'Wait,' I told him. 'The main body of their fleet's coming on toward us-'
Even as I spoke I saw the ship of Lacq Larus, Chief of the Patrol, the flag-ship of our fleet, slackening its speed ahead of us, and a moment later there came from a speech-instrument beside me his clear, unruffled voice:
'All ships halt and mass in battle formation!' he ordered; and at once, in answer to that command, our flashing ships slowed and stopped, forming instantly into three thick, short columns and hanging motionless in space.
On the space-chart above, now, we could see the mass of thousands of dots that was our fleet hanging motionless a little out from the galaxy's edge, and could see, too, a little outward from that mass of dots, another and equally large mass, that moved slowly in toward us, the great swarm that was the invading fleet. Already the few fleeing survivors of our hundred pursuers had raced back into that main swarm, and now, moving ever more slowly but coming steadily forward, it was driving through space toward us. The great swarm was moving still in a triangular formation, the triangle's apex toward us, and now at last, as we stared forward into the blackness, we made out light-points ahead, a vast swarm of them in that steady triangular formation, moving deliberately toward us.
Slowly now those light-points were largening, were changing into great, gleaming ships as their fleet came on toward us. Ever more slowly it moved, now at but a fraction of a light-speed, for it was evident that they, like us, sought no fight-and-run skirmish but a battle to the finish. At last they had stopped, had halted just out of ray-reach ahead and were hanging motionless in space like ourselves, facing us. And then, for a moment, it seemed as though about us was an unbroken stillness and silence, as the two mighty fleets, numbering each fully five thousand ships, faced each other there in space.
I think that never in all space and time could there have been a moment as strange as that one, when the mighty fleet of our galaxy lay prow to prow with this other mighty fleet from the dark, unguessed mysteries of outer space. All about us lay the cold, lightless blackness of the eternal void, with the great galaxy's colossal rampart of flaming suns stretched across the heavens behind us alone blazing in that blackness, the great Cancer cluster at its edge, just behind us, flaming with all the glory of its mass of gathered suns. A single instant that silence and stillness reigned in the stupendous scene about us, an instant that to our strained nerves seemed endless, and then a sharp order rang from the speech-instrument beside me, and as one our great fleet leapt forward while the opposing fleet sprang to meet us. The battle was on.
I saw the enemy fleet flashing straight toward us, the apex of its triangle pointed full at our center, and knew instinctively that it meant to cut us into halves with the great wedge that was itself. But as it flashed straight toward us and upon us there rang another order from the instrument at my side, and instantly our three short columns of ships veered to the right, changing in a moment into one long column, which instead of meeting the onrushing triangle flashed along its side. As we shot past thus I had a lightning glimpse of the masses of countless oval ships racing by, glimpsed too a score or more of ships at the center of their fleet that seemed not oval but round and disk-like in shape, and then forgot all else as from all our ships there burst the brilliant red rays, raking the side of their fleet with a deadly fire as we flashed past it. Then scores upon scores of their ships were vanishing in crimson flares of light as those rays found them, and though their death-beams found our own ships here and there as we flashed by, the great mass of their ships dared not loose their beams upon us lest they destroy their own ships, so skillful had been our maneuver.
Only a moment did it last, that passing of the two fleets with red ray and death-beam crossing, and then we were past them, were turning and circling and racing back upon them to deliver another blow. Ahead we could see the enemy fleet turning and racing back to meet us, with beyond them the great suns of the galaxy flaming in the blackness of space, and again we leapt straight toward them there in the abysmal void; but this time they had anticipated our maneuver and as we swerved to the right of them their whole great fleet swerved right also, so that in order to avoid a head-on collision with their fleet we were forced to swerve still farther to the right, our long column racing along through space now parallel to the galaxy's edge, with the enemy ships strung in a similar column between us and the galaxy, racing along with us through space at the same speed as ourselves, their pale ghostly beams whirling toward us even as our crimson shafts cut through the void toward them.
Ships on each side were vanishing, now, some flaring in wild explosions of red light and disappearing as the
