But what was that below? Our downward-rushing ships had paused, millions of miles still above the great cluster, and we were gazing down toward it, toward a vast, dark shape that was rising from among its swarming suns! A colossal dark _cone_, that was coming slowly, deliberately, up among those suns and at sight of which our cries had died on our lips, our faces masks of blank horror! _It was the mighty death-beam cone of the serpent-creatures!_ It was the colossal generator of death that they had brought with them unfinished from the dying universe, that their serpent-hordes in the cluster beneath had labored upon while we had fought our mighty battle, and that now, while the last of the serpent-ships had held us back a moment longer, they had completed! Up toward us it was coming, slowly rising among the mighty cluster's suns, ponderously, deliberately, and we knew that in a moment more it would be rising out of that cluster, would be annihilating all life in our ships with a single sweep of its colossal beams of death, would be sailing deliberately on to wipe all the life from the galaxy's worlds, and give those worlds forever to the serpent-hordes massed in the cluster beneath! We had not won, but lost! There was a silence--a silence of death--in that moment, as the stupendous cone rose up through the ball of suns beneath. Still, silent, we hung there--our doom rising up beneath us--a moment in which there whirled through my brain confused, swift visions--our awful battle in vain--our universe and the Andromeda universe the serpent-peoples', our races gone forever--and then suddenly into my whirling brain there penetrated a choking cry. It was from Jhul Din, and he was at the window, strangling, staggering, pointing out into the black void of outer space beside us, out to where a little swarm of great shapes were rushing headlong toward us out of that void! A hundred great shapes that were like mighty hemispheres of metal, domed and flatbottomed and gleaming---- "_It's the sun-swinging ships!_" Jhul Din's great cry stabbed into my dazed brain like a sword of sound. "_It's Korus Kan and the sun-swinging ships. They escaped from the attraction-ships that captured them--have come across the void after us----!_"