Now, though, we turned our attention from them to the tens of thousands of ships that lay about us. In and out of those ships, too, were moving countless masses of Andromedans, swift-gliding gaseous figures who were inspecting and testing the mechanisms of their craft and the cylinders in their sides that shot forth the crumpling shafts of force. They were making all ready for our start, we knew, for the battle that must ensue when we poured down on the serpent-universe, and we strode over toward them. Already we had learned that the controls and mechanisms of the Andromedan ships were much like those of the serpent-ships, their speed being fully as great, but some features of them were still strange to me. A dozen steps only we took toward them, though, and then stopped short. For down out of the sunlight above was slanting toward us a close-massed swarm of ships that seemed different from the masses of ships that were landing ceaselessly about us, that moved more slowly, more deliberately. Down it came while we watched it, standing there, seeing it change from a far swarm of black dots in the sunlight above to a mass of long dark shapes, that were becoming clearer to our eyes each moment--shapes that, I saw with a sudden great leap of my heart, were not long and flat, but oval! "_They're serpent-ships!_" Korus Kan's great cry stabbed like a sword-blade of sound toward me. "They're the serpent-ships that pursued us to this universe--the three hundred that escaped when we were rescued--they've seen this great fleet gathering and have come to strike a blow at it!" Serpent-ships! My mind was racing with superhuman speed in that instant as they drove down toward us, and I saw that the Antarian was right, that these were the three hundred that had escaped when we were rescued by the Andromedans, and that we thought had fled back to their own universe. Instead they had turned and followed us, knowing that we meant to gather forces to attack their universe, had flashed into the Andromeda universe toward this central world, unseen among the swarms of other ships that were gathering here, and now were swooping down with their score of great disk attraction-ships lowermost, driving down toward us in a fierce, reckless attack! In a single instant it all flashed plain in my mind, and then Korus Kan and I had whirled around, and he was racing back toward the hundred domed sun-swinging ships behind us. "I'll warn these hundred ships!" he yelled, as I turned too and raced toward the nearest of the thousands of fighting-ships about us.