The sun-swinging ships! The ships that with Korus Kan in them had been captured and that we had thought destroyed, but that somehow, in the void outside the Andromeda universe, had escaped from the attraction-ships that held them, had sped across the void after us and were now racing in among us, hanging above the giant cluster of suns beneath, up through which the great cone of doom was rising! Then from those hundred domed ships hanging there, there sprang downward vast, broad rays of dark, purple-glowing force, the force with which the Andromedans had moved all their suns, vast rays that spread out fanwise as they shot down and that formed a continuous, unbroken wall of purple-glowing force about all the great cluster beneath, screening all in that cluster from the gravitational pull of everything outside, from the pull of the galaxy that alone counterbalanced the attraction of the cluster's suns toward each other! And as that counterbalancing pull was shut off, that alone had held the suns of the giant cluster in their balanced positions, _those suns began slowly to move--to move toward each other_! Slowly at first they moved, and then faster and faster, sweeping majestically in toward each other, the whole giant cluster of swarming suns contracting, condensing! Inward they moved, and now sun was crashing into sun, at the cluster's center, sending up towering bursts of awful flame as they met in titanic shock! Inward the thronging, blazing suns swept still, crashing now through all the cluster into each other, worlds that circled about them vanishing in great bursts of fire as they plunged into or were caught between the suns that crashed about them! Almost to the great cluster's top had the giant death-cone reached, as the suns about and below it hurtled inward to doom, and then we saw two mighty suns on each side of it that were rushing inward and toward it, converging upon it, annihilating themselves and it together in the gigantic shock of their collision! On and on, sun moving into sun, they went, all the worlds about them vanishing into their fires, annihilating forever all the serpent-hordes that had massed upon them, all matter and all life inside that cluster perishing as its thundering suns crashed gigantically into each other! On and on, until but a single colossal core of fire remained below us, formed by all the cluster's crashing suns, and that already, as the domed ships among us turned off their screening force, was beginning to expand outward, to swell out into a vast nebula of flaming gas! A mighty nebula there where the great cluster had been! A giant nebula that held within its fires all that had been the countless invading serpent-hordes who had swept upon us from--and who had been annihilated at the last by others from--outside the universe! _17. Outward Once Again_