"And so," he was saying, "it is clear to you how these strange invaders from outer space, these serpent-creatures from outside our universe, have been able to annihilate all but a few ships of our great fleet, to settle upon the worlds of the great Cancer cluster as a base, to set up clear around the edge of our galaxy the watchful patrol of their ships that our scouts report. All this they have done with a fleet of a few thousand ships, have shattered our galaxy's defenses and sent wild panic flaming across that galaxy; yet these few thousand ships, as we have now learned, are but the vanguard of the countless thousands that are soon to follow, to pour down upon us in colossal, irresistible hordes! "It was through the feat of Dur Nal, here, and his companions, that we have learned this. You have heard how, after the great battle, he and his party were able to do what never before was done in all the annals of interstellar warfare, to board and capture an enemy ship in mid-space and bring it back, intact, to Canopus. That ship has been thoroughly examined by the best of the galaxy's scientists, and in its pilot room was found a collection of metallic sheets or rolls covered with strange characters, the written records of these serpent-invaders. Upon those records for hours our greatest lexicologists have worked, and finally they have been able to decipher them, and have found in them the facts of the history and purposes of these strange invaders from outer space. "These invaders, as the records show, are inhabitants of one of the distant universes of stars like our own, lying millions of light-years from our own in the depths of infinite outer space. So far are these mighty galaxies like our own that they appear to us but faint patches of light in the blackness of space, yet we recognize them as universes like ours, and have given them names of our own, calling one the Andromeda universe, and another the Triangulum universe, and so on. The universe of these serpent-creatures, though, although one of the nearest to our own, has never been seen or suspected by us because it is invisible from our distance, being not a living universe of flaming stars like our own and the ones we see, but a darkened, dying universe.