A moment more and we all stood attired in the hermetically sealed, clumsy-looking suits of thick, flexible metal, with head-pieces of metal in which were transparent vision-plates. As we donned them each pressed the button which set the little air-generators inside each suit pouring forth their supply of fresh air and purifying the breathed air; and then, with a swift glance around that showed each in his suit, I motioned to Jhul Din and at once the big Spican pressed the stud in the wall that sent the round space-door in the floor sliding open.
We could not feel through our insulating suits the tremendous cold that instantly invaded the ship, but we heard plainly the swift, terrific swish of air about us as it rushed out of the ship into the mighty void outside. Now, looking down through the open door, we could see a score of feet beneath the broad metal back of the great oval ship, still racing on unsuspectingly beneath us. I turned back to the crew about me, saw that each had gripped one of the metal bars that were to be our only weapons in this attempt, since the use of rays would destroy the ship beneath, which was our only hope of life. Then, reaching forth again to the switchcase on the wall, Jhul Din at my motion threw off the cruiser's gravity-control, so that the attraction-plates built into the floor beneath us, which pulled us always downward and enabled us to walk upright and normally inside the cruiser, no longer pulled us. Instead, though, we were being pulled down now by the gravitational force of the racing ship beneath and a step through the open door would send any of us hurtling down toward that ship.
Now I gave one last glance around, even while the cruiser's walls cracked terribly again, and then swung myself over the edge of the opening in the floor, hanging by my hands from it and swinging there in the infinite void of interstellar space a score of feet above the oval ship's broad metal back. It seemed, that moment that I swung there, a time of endless length, and surely never before had any hung thus between two ships racing on through the void. Then, as another cracking roar came from the walls about me, I loosed my hold upon the edge and hurtled down through empty space toward the back of the ship below.
Down, down-that fall seemed endless as I rushed down through space, but unimpeded as I was by air-resistance it was but an instant before I had slammed down on the ship's broad back, lying motionless for an instant and then rising carefully to a sitting position. Just above me hung our racing cruiser, the opening in its bottom directly overhead, and in another moment Korus Kan had followed me, striking the ship's back beside me while I gripped him and held him tightly. Then came one of the crew, and another, and another, until in a moment the last of them was dropping down among us, Jhul Din alone remaining above. He stepped toward the opening, to lower himself and drop down to us likewise, but even as he did so I saw the great walls of the cruiser above collapsing and buckling inward as they gave at last. I motioned frantically to Jhul Din as the walls collapsed about him, saw him give one startled glance around, and then as the cruiser's sides crumpled up about him he ran forward and leapt cleanly through the opening in the floor, hurtling down toward us and striking full in our midst, just as the crumpled cruiser above, the power of its generators gone with its collapse, jerked sharply out of sight toward the crimson sun behind, hurtling away from us a twisted wreck of metal.
It was with something of a tightness in my throat that I saw the wreck of our familiar, faithful ship drive away from us, but I turned toward our own desperate situation. We were clinging to the back of the great oval ship as it drove on toward the Cancer cluster, with above and all about us the blackness of the void, and the galaxy's flaming suns. Ahead shone the gathered suns of the great cluster, and I knew that we must capture the ship soon if at all; so now, half creeping and half walking, we made our way along the great ship's back toward the round space-door set midway along that back. In a moment we were clustered about it, and found it closed tightly from within, as I had expected. Instantly, though, we set to work on it with the metal bars and tools we had brought with us, drilling down through the thick metal of the door while we clung, like a hundred odd tiny mites, upon the mighty ship's back as it flashed on and on.
What might lie in the ship beneath, what manner of beings might these terrible invaders be, we could not even guess, but it was our one chance to penetrate inside, and frantically we worked. Within moments more we had drilled through in a dozen places, were swinging aside the great bolts that held the door closed inside, and then were sliding it open and dropping swiftly down inside. We heard a little rush of air outward as the door opened, and knew that this ship was inhabited by air-breathing beings, at least, and then we found ourselves in the room beneath the space-door, a bare little vestibule chamber in whose side was a single square door.
Before opening this, however, we closed the round space-door above us, plugging the holes we had drilled in it by driving in sections of metal bar, and then I turned toward the door in the wall, felt carefully around it, and finally pressed a small white plate inset beside it, at which it slid silently aside. We stepped through it, bars raised ready for action. We were in a corridor, a long corridor apparently running the length of the great oval ship, but quite empty for the moment. The throbbing of great generators was loud in our ears, a throbbing much like that in our own ships but with another unfamiliar beating sound mingled with it. Silently we gazed about, then began to make our way down the corridor toward the ship's front end, toward the pilot room at its nose, stopping first to divest ourselves silently of the heavy space-suits, and then starting on.
Now we had come to an open door in the corridor's side, and peering cautiously through it we saw inside a long room holding a score or more of great, cylindrical mechanisms from which arose the throbbing and beating of the oval ship's operation. About these mechanisms were moving some two dozen of the ship's occupants, and as our eyes fell upon them we all but gasped aloud, so utterly strange and alien in shape were they even to us, who held strange shapes enough in our own gathering. Many and many a strange race had we of the Patrol seen in our long journeys through the galaxy, but all these were familiar and commonplace beside the shapes that moved in the room before us. For they were serpent-people.
Serpent people. Long, slender shapes of wriggling pale flesh, each perhaps ten feet in length and a foot in diameter, without arms or legs of any kind, writhing swiftly from place to place snakelike, and coiling an end of their strange bodies about any object which they wished to grip. Each end of the long, cylindrical bodies was cut squarely off, as it were, and in one such flat end of each were the only features-a pair of bulging, many-lensed eyes like those of an insect, big and glassy and unwinking, and a small black opening below that was the only orifice for their breathing. These were the beings who had come out of outer space to attack our universe! These were the beings who had annihilated the galaxy's fleet and were preparing now to seize the galaxy itself.
I turned from my horror-stricken contemplation of them to Jhul Din and Korus Kan, close behind me. "The pilot room," I whispered. "We'll make for it-get the ship's controls."
They nodded silently, and silently we stole past the open door and down the long corridor, toward the door at its end that we knew must lead into the pilot room at the ship's nose. Past other doors we crept, all of them fortunately closed, and as we stole on toward the door at the corridor's end I began to hope that at last our luck had turned. But ironically, even as I hoped, the door at the corridor's end, not a score of feet ahead, slid suddenly aside, and out of it, out of the pilot room beyond it, came one of the writhing serpent-creatures. It stopped short on seeing us, then gave vent to a strange, hissing cry, a high, sibilant call utterly strange to my ears, but at the sound of which the doors all along the corridor behind us slid swiftly open, while through them scores of the serpent-beings writhed out, and upon us.