In a silence of utter despair I gazed ahead as our ship and those about it hummed on, while Jhul Din and Korus Kan and all the survivors of our crew prisoned with us maintained the same despairing silence. There was no plan for escape, no suggestion of it, even, for well we knew the impossibility of even winning clear of the room that was our prison, not to speak of overcoming the hordes of serpent-creatures who now operated our ship. In a strange apathy of spirit we sat and stood, hour after hour, speaking little. Our eyes and minds turned only to the window through which we could see, in the black abyss of space ahead, the faintly glowing universe of the serpent-people broadening slowly ahead as our ships raced on at full speed toward it.
A day passed, and that dying universe had grown across a full third of the vault of space before us, a great, dim-glowing region of flickering luminescence utterly different from the radiance of the shining Andromeda universe, that lay now far to our left. On and on the serpent-ships raced, unceasingly, hour upon hour, until at last on the third day of our imprisonment their speed began to slacken, the drone of the great generators falling a little in pitch as they drew near at last to their galaxy, that had expanded outward now until it seemed to fill all the heavens before us, so strange a spectacle to our eyes that almost we forgot our own predicament and despair in contemplation of it.
Full in the heavens before us it lay, a mighty galaxy fully as large as our own, as the Andromeda universe, but infinitely different, a galaxy not of life but of death. In all its mighty mass were no flaming white or blue or yellow suns like those of our own galaxy, no brilliant young stars surrounded by circling, sun-warmed worlds. Here was only a vast forest of dead and dying suns, stretched across the heavens, huge throngs of dark, burned-out stars, cold and black and barren, that crowded thick upon one another, with here and there a few dying suns of dark, smoky red, somber crimson stars in the last stages of stellar evolution. It was with the light of these few alone that the great mass faintly glowed, an expiring universe in which all light and life were sinking into darkness and death.
Silent with awe and wonder we watched as our ships drove in toward this darkening galaxy, and then I began to make out, between us and it, a strange, constant flicker of blue light that seemed to extend all about the faint-glowing universe before us. Stronger that flicker was growing as we sped on toward it, though through it there shone clearly as ever the light of the crimson suns beyond it. At last we seemed racing straight into it, and now I saw that it was a colossal globular shell of flickering blue light, almost invisible, that enclosed within itself all the mighty, circular mass of the dying universe before us. Our ships seemed about to flash straight into it, but now turned sharply to the left, speeding along the great light-barrier's edge. A ship beside us, though, had turned a little too late and had struck the light-wall while turning, and as it did so I saw it rebounding back with terrific force as though in collision with a solid wall, its whole prow crumpled by the impact. Then, at last, I comprehended the nature of this vast shell of flickering blue light that enclosed the dying universe.
"It's a vibration-wall." I cried to my companions. "A great wall of etheric vibrations enclosing all this universe."
For I saw now that that was the great barrier's nature. It was a mighty shell of perpetual vibrations in the ether itself, extending all about the universe before us, allowing light and electro-magnetic communication waves to pass through it, unchanged, but excluding and holding out the vibrations of matter, by meeting them, as I knew must be the case, with a vibration of equal frequency which opposed them, reflected them back, forming a barrier more impenetrable than any of solid matter, yet one all but invisible, extending about all this mighty universe, excluding from it for all time all matter from outside. Too, as I was later to learn, the great vibration-wall was impenetrable to the heat-vibrations, reflecting those of its dying suns that struck it back into the universe inside. It was for this purpose that the vast barrier had been erected, as the suns of the serpent-people failed, to prevent the escape of any of the precious heat-radiations of their few living suns, and also to place about all their universe a wall impenetrable to all invaders. Set in the ether about their universe eons before, the vibrations that made up the great barrier were perpetual and undying, a vast wall of defense about the serpent-universe.
We were flashing close along the mighty, flickering barrier's edge, now, and the speed of our ships slackened swiftly as there loomed far ahead in space two great, dark bulks starred here and there with points of white light. Moments more and they had grown to immense size as we neared them, and now we saw that these were mighty, square-walled structures of gleaming metal, each a full five thousand feet in length along each of its four sides, and half again that much in height: two colossal metal forts that floated motionless there in space, set directly in the great wall of flickering blue vibrations, and between which there was a great opening in that wall, a clear space in which I divined was the single opening in all the great wall. And flanking that opening on either side hung the massive metal structures, upheld there in the void, as I guessed, by mighty generators like those of our own ships, castles of metal whose countless deadly death-beam tubes commanded the opening between them and from whose white-lit windows the serpent-garrisons of them gazed out upon us, great space-forts hung there at the vibration-wall's one opening, guarding the gates of a universe.
In toward the narrow opening between the great forts swept our ships, and as they moved slowly inward there flashed a challenging signal of lights from those forts, answered at once by similar signals from our ships. Then we were driving inward, between the towering metal castles on either side, flashing in through the great vibration-wall and into the dying galaxy itself. With generators again humming at a high speed our half-hundred ships swept on, into the thronging thousands of dead and dying suns that swarmed before us, inside the colossal protecting shell of the great vibration-wall.
All about us now were great hordes of swarming dark-stars that we could but dimly glimpse, as our ships flashed between them, vast throngs of black and burned-out suns that outnumbered the few still flaming stars by hundreds to one. Here and there about us, though, as we swept on, we could make out a red sun or two, some comparatively brilliant and others so dark and far gone that they seemed only like giant cooling embers in the black heavens. Clusters there were, too, of which all but one or two suns would be black and dead, and as we flashed on into the depths of this universe we began to realize at last what tremendous necessity it had been that had sent the serpent-peoples driving out through the limitless void in search of a new universe.
Far ahead, though, there loomed before us as we sped on a trio of giant crimson suns more brilliant than any we had yet seen in this dying universe, and which hung at its center, each of them as large as great Canopus itself in our own galaxy. In a great triangle they hung there, two of them much brighter than the other, a mighty triplet of titanic waning suns that seemed like the dying monarchs of the vast and dying realm about them. It was down toward these three great suns that our ships were slanting now, down toward the space at the center of their great triangle, and now we saw that in that space there swung a single mighty world, a dark, immense planet of size inconceivable, almost as large as the three great suns at whose center it turned, and whose light and heat fell perpetually upon it.