Still grasping the controls, though, I held the ship to a course aslant from our previous one, while my two companions tensed with me over them, gazing ahead, while from beneath again came wild cries of alarm as those of our crew, who had already run the gantlet of the enemies' death-beams and of the great heat-region, saw the new peril that encompassed us. There came, too, from somewhere in the ship, a great thump and clang of metal as some one of our mechanisms there broke loose from its crumbling base, but still we flung onward through the void, rocking and twisting, and in a moment the terrible tenseness that gripped us lessened a little as we saw that the glowing of the walls about us, and of our own bodies, was beginning to wane, as we drew out of the zone of deadly force. A few more moments of onward flight and they had vanished altogether, and then I brought the ship back to its course, heading once more toward the misty light-patch of the Andromeda universe, while I drew a long breath of relief. * * * * * There was a silence of moments before Jhul Din, first of us, found his voice. "Heat-regions and radio-active force regions!" he exclaimed. "If more of them lie between us and the Andromeda universe, what's our chance of getting there?" Korus Kan shook his head. "We'll get there," he said, "but we'll have to keep close watch every moment of our flight--there's no way of telling how thickly scattered these great vibration-regions may lie in space about us." A moment more and Jhul Din left us, passing down into the ship's body to ascertain what damage had been wrought by the great zone of radio-active force, though we knew that we had escaped from it before it could seriously damage the ship. And as I now relinquished the controls to Korus Kan, pausing with him a moment to look out again with some fearfulness into the black void through which we were racing, it was with a full realization, at last, of the tremendous perils and unguessed circumstances that might lie in the vast spaces through which we must yet flash. Yet as my eyes fell again on the misty-glowing circle of the Andromeda universe, and the sinister, dimly flickering mass of the dying universe of the serpent-people, to its right, I felt my determination steeling again within me.