Moments more and there loomed far ahead and beneath the colossal tower of the Council of Suns, toward which we were heading. By then I felt all consciousness and volition beginning to leave me, as an utter drowsy weariness overcame me, and I realized but dimly that Korus Kan was slanting the ship down toward the great tower, until abruptly there came from him a sharp cry. With an effort I raised my gaze and saw that from below, as we sped downward, three long, shining shapes were arrowing up to meet us. They were cruisers of our own Interstellar Patrol, and as they flashed upward there suddenly leapt from them a half-dozen brilliant shafts of the crimson rays of death, stabbing straight toward us.
5: For the Federated Suns!
Half conscious as I was, it seemed to me in that dread instant that the whole scene about us was but a strange, set tableau, racing ships and flashing rays frozen motionless in mid-air. Then another cry from Korus Kan jarred me back to realization.
"The signal!" he cried. "Flash the signal of the Interstellar Patrol before they annihilate us!"
At his cry a flash of realization crossed my darkened brain, and I understood that the Patrol cruisers beneath had recognized our craft as an enemy ship, that Korus Kan himself dared not leave the controls even for an instant to flash from the signal our identity. With a last summons of my waning strength I rose, staggered blindly across the room toward the switch, and then, as from beneath the crimson rays flashed blindingly toward us, grasped the switch and swept it around the dial, flashing from our ship's nose the succession of colored lights that proclaimed us of the Patrol. I felt myself sinking to the floor, then, seemed to see the three uprushing ships swerving by us at the last moment as they glimpsed the signal, and then as Korus Kan sent the ship slanting down and over the ground to land I felt a bumping shock, seemed to sink still deeper into the drowsy darkness, then knew no more.
How long it was that I had lain in that darkness, in a stupor of sleep from the weariness of our hours of rushing action, I could not guess when next I opened my eyes. I was lying upon a thick mat on a low metal couch, in a small room lit by a flood of white sunlight that poured through a tall opening in its side. On a similar couch beside me lay Jhul Din, just waking like myself; and for a moment we stared about in bewilderment. Then the sunlight, the brilliant pure white glare of light that could never be mistaken for the light of any star but Canopus, gave me my clue, and I remembered all-our discovery of the approaching swarm while patrolling the galaxy's outer edge, our flight inward and the great battle, our capture of the enemy ship and our escape. I jumped to my feet, and as I did so Korus Kan came into the room.
"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.