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 snake-like, 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!"