Behind us now the hundred long oval ships were drawing into plain sight, their white-lit pilot rooms giving us brief glimpses inside of massed machinery and slender beings we could but half-glimpse that moved inside. From the foremost of those ships, now, there stabbed out toward us the broad, pale, ghostly beam of death, but as yet the gap between us was too wide for the beam to bridge, and we flashed onward still, the gleaming shapes of our pursuers leaping still closer. Before us now the whole firmament seemed a wild chaos of gigantic suns, as we raced straight in toward the mighty cluster, with ahead the narrow gap that separated the two giant white suns toward which we were heading. Jhul Din gripped my shoulder, pointed ahead, shouted to me over the roar of our generators. "Unless we slacken speed we'll never make it through that gap without driving into one of the suns," he cried. I shook my head. "It's death either way!" I yelled to him. "Our only chance is to drive between them at full speed!" Now before us the whole heavens seemed a single vast sheet of boiling white flame as we drove in toward the two mighty thundering suns, the gap between them seeming no more than a narrow black cleft at the terrific velocity at which we were moving. At our topmost speed we rushed toward that narrow gap, the ships behind still leaping full upon our track, closing swiftly down upon us now. And now, as Korus Kan braced himself and held our controls still steady, we were flashing squarely in between the two gigantic suns. On either side of us they towered, thundering, boiling upright oceans of devouring, brilliant white flame, whose awful glare all but blinded us, seeming to fill all the universe about us with one great mass of raging fires. Out toward our onward-flashing ship there licked from the great suns on either side titanic tongues of flame bursting out toward us for millions of miles, huge prominences that could have licked up worlds like midges, but straight on between the walling fires our throbbing ship still flashed.