To his outburst we made no answer, gazing in silence up at the big space-chart, watching doom creep upon us. The serpent-swarm had crept still farther upon us until its foremost dots seemed touching our own ship-dot, its foremost racing craft in reach of our own. Then, gazing through the rear distance-windows that projected from the pilot room's sides, the big Spican uttered a low exclamation, pointing mutely backward as we turned toward him. And as we gazed we saw, far behind us there in the lightless void, a swarm of close-massed light-points that steadily was largening, was drawing nearer toward us, toward our doom. For it was the end, I knew. We had escaped death in a hundred forms in the last days, but this we could not escape, for with the Andromeda universe still hours away our chance of escape was gone. Dodge and turn as we might, they would corner us, would hem us in; and though we might destroy one or two of their half-thousand ships, by no miracle could we hope to escape the rest. For a moment a deathly silence held us as we stared back toward those nearing light-points, and then I whirled around to the order-tube. "Battle-positions--all of the crew to the ray-tubes!" I shouted, and as I turned back to the other two I cried to them, "We'll let some of them feel our rays before they end us!" I heard Jhul Din shout his approval, saw Korus Kan's eyes burning as he glanced back toward our pursuers, heard from beneath the cries of our crew as they took up their positions at the ray-tubes, ready to smite a last blow at our enemies before they overwhelmed us. Behind us in the blackness the onrushing serpent-ships had grown from light-points to great dark oval shapes with white-lit pilot rooms at their noses, the score of great disk attraction-ships racing on among them. Ever closer they were leaping, and I knew that in a moment more those disk-ships would be near enough to grasp us, would glow with attractive force and hold us helpless while the death-beams of the fighting-ships swept us. But as we tensely waited for the end, still flashing on at our own full speed, there was a sharp cry from Korus Kan, and we wheeled toward him to find him regarding the pilot room's walls with eyes suddenly alight with new hope. "It's another radio-active vibration region!" he cried, pointing toward the walls and controls that were beginning to flicker out with the strange, fluorescent light we had always dreaded. "If we plunge straight into it there's a chance we can shake off the pursuit!" I caught my breath at the suggestion but in an instant saw that he was right, that though we might meet death amid the disintegrating vibrations, we might perhaps escape and throw off our pursuers, from whom death was certain as things were. "It's a chance!" I exclaimed. "Head straight into the radio-active region, Korus Kan!"