"Well, currents or no currents, we'll have to hold our course," I told them. "The Patrol has to be kept up, even out here." And as Korus Kan's hands on the controls brought our long, slender ship back into its proper path I stepped over beside him. Standing between the Antarian and the Spican and glancing back through our rear telescopic distance-windows I could make out in a moment the other ships of our squadron, falling again into formation far behind us. Then I had turned, and with my two friends was gazing forth into the great vista of light and darkness that lay before us. It was toward our left that the light lay, for to the right and in front and behind us the eye met only blackness, the utter, unimaginable blackness of outer space. Left of us, though, there stretched along the ebon heavens a colossal belt of countless brilliant stars, the gathered suns of our galaxy. A stupendous, disk-like mass of stars, it floated there in the black void of space like a little island of light, and hundreds of billions of miles outward from the outermost suns of this island-universe our little squadron flashed through space, parallel to its edge. Looking toward the great galaxy from that distance, its countless thousands of glittering suns seemed merged almost in one mighty flaming mass; yet even among those thousands there burned out distinctly the clearer glory of the greater suns, the blue radiance of Vega, or the yellow splendor of Altair, or the white fire of great Canopus itself. Here and there among the fiery thousands, too, there glowed the strange, misty luminescence of the galaxy's mighty comets, while at the galaxy's edge directly to our left there flamed among the more loosely scattered stars the great Cancer cluster, a close-packed, ball-like mass of hundreds of shining suns, gathered together there like a great hive of swarming stars. On our right, though, sharply contrasted with the galaxy's far-flung splendor, there stretched only blackness, the deep, utter blackness of that titanic void that lies outside our universe. Black, deep black, it stretched away in unthinkable reaches of eternal emptiness and night. Far away in that blackness the eye could in time make out, hardly to be seen, a few faint little patches of misty light, glowing feebly to our eyes across the mighty gloom of space; faint patches of light that were, I knew, galaxies of stars, island-universes like our own, separated from our own by a titanic void of millions of light-years of space, an immensity of emptiness into which even the swiftest of our ships could not venture, and beside which the distances between our own stars seemed tiny and insignificant.