Even as our ship swerved from the pale beams leaping up toward us, though, I had shouted an order into the tube beside me, and now from our own craft there stabbed down toward the upward-rushing ships a half-dozen long, narrow rays of brilliant red light. Four of the ships below were struck squarely by those brilliant rays, and from our crew came shouts of triumph as those four vanished in blinding flares of crimson light. It was the deadly ray of the Interstellar Patrol, destroying all matter it touched by raising its frequency of vibration, since matter itself is but a certain frequency vibration of the ether, and when that frequency is raised to that of light-vibrations the matter is changed in that moment from solid matter to light. Even in the moment that the four ships vanished beneath our rays, though, I had glanced backward and had seen the last of the ships of our squadron behind vanishing in a wild chaos of whirling death-beam and crimson ray, since scores of other ships were leaping up to attack us from the mighty swarm far beneath. Toward us now, it seemed, ships were flashing from every direction, and I heard the hissing of the ray-tubes below as our crimson rays burned out to meet them, saw three more of them flare and vanish, glimpsed a dozen shafts of the death-beam graze past us as Korus Kan twisted our ship in an erratic, corkscrew course. Not for moments longer, though, I knew, could we keep up this wild and unequal battle, since the mass of ships behind that had annihilated our squadron were now leaping after us. Our only chance was in flight. I shouted to Korus Kan, and then, as scores of the ghostly beams swept through the void toward us, I saw him swerve the control-levers in his hands sharply sidewise, so that our ship abruptly turned squarely to the right, away from the great swarm and the attacking ships about us. It was a maneuver that caught those ships off their guard, and traveling as we were at the terrific velocity of five hundred light-speeds, it put millions of miles of space between us and the great swarm before the attacking ships could realize what we had done. In a split-second they had vanished from sight about us and we were again rushing on through black and empty space, turning now and again heading toward the galaxy's far-flung suns. But, as I gazed anxiously at the big space-chart, I saw that now the great swarm of black dots upon it had slanted from their former course and was heading straight after the single dot that was our ship. By means of their own space-charts, which I knew they must have, they had discovered our trick and were in pursuit! "Let her out to full speed!" I cried to Korus Kan. "They're after us and our only chance is to get to the galaxy ahead of them!"