last as those two huge fleets caught and struck at each other!
Cubes and cruisers swirled and ran about us as our own cruiser struggled through the wild ruck of the battle, our own black beams stabbing to smash back cubes before and beside us, while through the speech-instruments before me I cried orders to my mighty fleet, directing the masses of cruisers that leapt and struck and soared at the great square cubes about us. All space outside seemed a single giant mass of struggling cubes and cruisers, cut across by blasting crimson bolt and ebon beam, yet ever we were forcing the cubeships back, back over their ring of revolving disk-worlds, back over their mighty central world, and then down toward it as they fought fiercely against our black beams which drove great paths of destruction through them! The surface of that world was looming clearer beneath us, bathed in white revealing light, as the giant battle swung lower down toward it. I glimpsed the great circular clearing, the pyramid with the mechanism and comet-guards on its summit, knew by the dial before me that but minutes still remained to turn aside with it the colossal on-thundering comet. Lower we swung toward the clearing, and as we did so the cubes beneath stiffened against us, their uprushing hail of deadly red bolts stabbing like an upward-falling rain of crimson death! But still more deadly were the black beams that drove down through them from our ships, and they were giving a little before us, sinking lower still, when suddenly from the surface of the world below there rose up among them another cube, one vastly greater than any of the others, one that moved ponderously up to the center of the cube-ship fleet and then glowed suddenly with a brilliant light. And as it did so the thousands of cube-ships beneath us suddenly vanished! Disappeared from sight as though they had never been, leaving below us only the spot of brilliant light that marked the greater cube!
'That great cube!' Jurt Tul was crying. 'It's a vibration-projector of some kind, one whose vibrations make invisible all the cube-ships around it and leave our ships and all else visible! And they're attacking now!'
For even at that moment, as we stared dumfounded toward the place where the cube-ship fleet had vanished, there had come from beneath and beside us hundreds upon hundreds of crimson bolts, bolts that flashed seemingly out of empty space annihilating scores, hundreds, of our bewildered ships, bolts from the cube-ships which we could not see, but which were circling about us now loosing their terrific shafts of death upon us! A battle to the death between two mighty fleets, one invisible, the other a plain target! Out in all directions our black beams were wildly whirling, but we could loose them only by chance, while our own ships, a perfect target to the invisible cubes about us, were flaring in annihilation in ever-increasing numbers!
'That great projector-cube!' I shouted to Gor Han. 'Our only chance is to get to it-destroy it!'
I pointed down toward the spot of brilliant light beneath, which marked the position of the great cube that was projecting the vibrations that made our enemies invisible. But even as I did so a half hundred cruisers of our fleet had massed together, shooting downward in a great wedge, through a withering hail of crimson bolts, down through invisible cubes through which they crashed, down until an instant later the score remaining of them had crashed squarely into the spot of brilliant light below, meeting annihilation with it in that collision. But the light vanished as they crashed, leaving but wreckage of cube and cruisers, and at the same moment the mass of cube- ships beneath us had suddenly flashed into full view once more!
Our great fleet was gathering itself now for a last final rush downward through those opposing cubeships toward the comet-control. I could hear the wild victorious shouts of Gor Han and Jurt Tul and the crew beneath loud in my ears, could see the pyramid's summit, the great control, close beneath, as I turned to the speech-instrument to shout the word that would send our fleet thundering down. But before ever my lips opened I had stiffened, stood motionless. For from the time-dial before me had come the low, metallic note of the passing hour, marking the end of the last moment in which the comet could have been turned aside! Marking the end for our universe, sounding in my stunned ears like a titanic knell of doom across the infinite for our galaxy! Nothing now in all the universe could turn the giant comet aside from that galaxy enough to save it! Motionless there, Gor Han and Jurt Tul and I heard echoing away that muted note that had struck for the galaxy's doom!
'Lost!' Gor Han was saying it, strangely, slowly, uncomprehendingly. 'We've lost!'
Lost! The galaxy-our suns-our myriad peopled worlds-all lost, all doomed to annihilation by the gigantic comet about us that was thundering on now irrevocably! It seemed, in that instant, that all things in existence, the cruisers about us, the cube-ships beneath us, the comet-creature hordes on the surface of the white-lit world below, had paused for one moment breathless, a moment that marked a galaxy's doom. Then suddenly Gor Han was pointing downward, eyes staring, pointing to the comet-creature hordes on that world below, which were suddenly rushing crazily toward the pyramid beneath us, the cube-ships also racing wildly down toward the pyramid's summit! For on that summit from the stair on the pyramid's side a dark, erect figure had suddenly rushed, and before the comet-guards had glimpsed him had rushed to the great disk-dial and pointer of the comet-control! An erect, many limbed dark figure who had seized the pointer in his grasp!
'Najus Nar!' Gor Han's great scream held within it all our renewed faith, our sudden comprehension.
For the insect-man had grasped the pointer, the pointer that controlled the position of the giant comet's tail, and had swung it half around the disk from the dial's rear to its front! As he did so he straightened, arms upflung toward us in a last great gesture toward the distant opening through the coma, and then the comet-guards were upon him, the blasting crimson bolts from the darting cubes above had reached him, annihilating the pyramid's summit, while in all the city beneath us liquid comet-creatures and great cubes were rushing crazily toward that pyramid, rushing too late toward the control which they had themselves built for their comet and which now had destroyed them!
For Najus Nar had reversed the comet-control!
Even as the bolts had blasted the pyramid's top our cruisers had shot with the velocity of thousands of light- speeds out from the central world and those about it, out across the comet's heart toward the circular opening through the coma, through that passage of crimson death at awful speed and out into space behind the comet as the passage closed behind us, as the tail behind the comet waned swiftly! And as our cruisers shot up above the mighty comet, we saw that it had halted in space, the awful momentum with which the old tail at the rear had driven it on balanced, opposed, by the new tail shot from its front, toward the galaxy, when Najus Nar had reversed the control! Caught between the two cosmic pressures, between the momentum and terrific speed with which the old tail drove it forward and the power with which the new tail drove it backward, the mighty coma beneath us was bulging, was spreading! Bulging outward above and below, to right and to left, its giant crimson-glowing coma dilating and breaking up between the terrific pressures from front and rear! Changing from a great sphere to a gigantic shapeless crimson mass of electrical energy, bulging out in all directions, great flashes of leaping light inside it marking the end of the great comet-worlds caught and annihilated inside its tortured mass! Out-out-it swelled, our cruisers hanging far above it, watching it grow swiftly greater, thinner, until in moments more where the colossal crimson comet had been was nothing but a vast, far-flung cloud of faint electrical radiance, the concentrated electrical energy that had been the giant comet and its worlds dispersed out into that huge, faint- shining cloud!
The cosmic vampire that had threatened the life of our universe was gone forever! The comet-drivers had driven their comet and its worlds, at last, to death!
V
Sweeping in toward the galaxy's gathered suns, days later, our great cruiser fleet slowed, halted, hung motionless outside the galaxy's edge once more. Before us flamed great white Rigel, as it had flamed-how long it seemed before! — when Gor Han and Jurt Tul and Najus Nar had gathered in the control room of my cruiser, at the start of our mad journey toward the comet. Now that comet was but a vast, faint cloud of radiance far in the void behind us. And now, too, it was Gor Han and Jurt Tul that stood before me, in the cruiser's silent control room.
The cruisers about us had massed into two great divisions, since here at the galaxy's edge Gor Han and Jurt Tul were to leave me, taking up once more their duties in the ceaseless watch of the Interstellar Patrol, with for me my work as Chief in the headquarters at Canopus. The frantic joy that would be shaking the galaxy's people to see the shadow of doom thus lifted from them, the frantic gratitude that we might claim-in these we had no interest now, wanting only to take up once more the great Patrol's endless work. So now the cruisers of my two friends hung waiting beneath my own, as we paused in silence at the moment of parting.
Gor Han's deep voice broke the silence at last. 'The end of the journey, for us,' he said. 'And for Najus
