For the moment we could not know whether we had been fully understood by the beings before us, but the next instant one of them pointed with a gaseous limb toward the gathered suns of the Andromeda universe, flaring in the blackness ahead, and as we nodded and pointed also, they stepped over beside us. The next moment the opening in the under side of the ship above and the space-door in our own ship had clanged shut, and as the whole great fleet of ships about us began to move toward the Andromeda universe, Korus Kan opened up the power of our own generators, moving smoothly along among them. Within moments more, the strange, gaseous forms of the Andromedans standing there beside us, our ship and all those about it were flashing at full speed toward the great galaxy ahead. From the ship's hull beneath I could hear an odd, grating sound, as of the clash of metal on metal, that continued to come to my ears as we flashed on, but in the moments, the hours that followed, I paid but small attention to it, engrossed as we all were in the magnificent spectacle of the universe ahead. Like a tremendous belt of suns across the black heavens it was, largening in vastness and brilliance with every moment that we flashed nearer, until by the time we had raced toward it for a half-score of hours it seemed to fill all the firmament before us with its hosts of flaming stars. We were flashing on in the same course as the ships about us, heading toward a spot where there shone two great yellow suns that were like twin wardens of this mighty universe. And as we hummed through the void toward them, sweeping in nearer to this great galaxy's edge, the ships about us and our own ship, too, had begun to slacken their tremendous speed, until at last at a reduced velocity we were driving in past the outmost suns of the Andromeda universe. The dull grating sound from beneath was persisting, still, but now interest in all else had left me as there spread before and about me the wonders of this stupendous universe. A universe it was as large as our own, as large as the dying serpent-universe, but different from either. For if ours was a young universe, with the majority of our stars glowing with blue and white-hot youth, and the serpent-universe an aged and dying one, with burned-out and waning crimson suns, this one before us was a universe in its prime--a universe the vast majority of whose suns were flaming yellow with their greatest splendor, a golden galaxy of living stars infinitely different from the dim, dying universe from which we had just escaped, and infinitely different, too, from the giant, white young suns and raw, vast nebulæ of our own youthful universe.