I think now that it was only that last jerking aside of the controls by Korus Kan that saved us from utter annihilation in that moment. For as he moved them our ship swerved sidewise, not enough to avoid the collision but enough to cause the onrushing ship to strike our own obliquely along the side instead of head on, and it was that alone that saved us. The crash shook our great craft like a leaf in a gale, trembling and reeling there in the black gulf of space and flinging us all to the pilot room's floor, and for a moment it seemed to us that our ship had been riven apart. Then, as it steadied, we scrambled to our feet, just in time to see the ship that had crashed into us reeling away to the side, a shattered mass of metal, while down upon us from above and all about the other serpent-ships were swooping. As Korus Kan sprang back to the controls I leapt to the order-tube, was on the point of shouting a command to our crew beneath, when down from the hovering ships above us there dropped around us a dozen or more of great flexible ropes or loops of gleaming metal, that encircled our ship like great snares. Within another instant our craft had been drawn upward by them until it lay securely lashed between two of the enemy ships, our ray-tubes useless now; since to loose them was but to perish with the ships that held us. Then another ship was slanting down above us, and as it hung over us there projected downward from its lower space-door toward our own upper space-door a hollow tube of metal of the same diameter as the two space-doors, that attached itself with a click to our own upper door, forming a hermetically sealed gangway there between our two ships in space. Until that moment we had stood motionless in amazement, somewhat stunned by the suddenness of our ship's capture; then as the space-door of our ship clanged open above I uttered a cry, sprang out into the corridor that ran the ship's length, and saw the members of our crew bursting into that corridor in answer to my cry, even as from the space-door chamber beside it there writhed out a horde of scores of the serpent-creatures! Jhul Din and Korus Kan were beside me, now, and with shouts of fierce anger we rushed upon the masses of serpent-creatures who still were pouring down from the ship above through the hollow gangway.