Nearer they came, and then from their glowing ships toward our own stabbed the pale death-beams, sweeping about us as we flashed on, a shining mark. As they did so, though, our own red shafts burned out swiftly, two of those attacking ships flaring to nothingness beneath them, while with a swift turn to the left Korus Kan had avoided the pale beams. That turn, though, took us now every moment outward once more from the radio-active region's center, forcing us out once more into clear space where the serpent-ships could annihilate us without danger to themselves. Out and out we flashed, and though our ship and all in it still glowed with the fluorescent light, that glow was waning, and the clang of falling metal from beneath, from the ship's disintegrating sides had ceased. Out--out--the score of ships to our right joining with the greater mass behind us again, and all drawing closer toward us, until the tingling nausea that had filled us had vanished, the glowing light of our ships and theirs vanishing likewise. Then, in one great mass, they were leaping again upon us. Our lives at last within their grasp, they flashed after us and toward us, and I knew that an instant more would see them about us, their death-beams striking at us from all around as they encircled us. I gazed ahead for a moment, to where the giant universe of Andromeda stretched like a great rampart of burning suns across the black, cold heavens, still hours away from us, and then gazed back to where the close-massed hundreds of serpent-ships leapt after and upon us, the death-beam tubes in their sides already swinging toward us. Then in me, at that instant of onrushing doom, there flamed up a strange, wild rage, a fierce, utter fury that had grown in me during all the struggles and flights that had been ours since first we had met these serpent-creatures. I wheeled around to Jhul Din and Korus Kan, my anger breaking from me in a fiery shout. "Turn the ship square around and halt, Korus Kan!" I cried. "We of the Interstellar Patrol are not going to be picked off as we run--we're going to turn and face them head-on!"