Even as I ran toward those thousands of ships, though, their Andromedan crews still unaware of their peril, I saw the massed serpent-ships above slanting straight down toward the hundred domed craft behind me, their attraction-ships hanging motionless above those craft for a moment. I had reached the Andromedan fighting-ships, now, and as the crews of the nearest glided forth to meet me I cried out, pointing upward. They saw the serpent-ships swooping down from above, and then were throwing themselves into their own ships. I raced into one with them, up to the pilot room set near the stem on its long flat upper surface. The Andromedans beside me flung back the controls, then, and our ship and the ships about us were leaping up like light toward the down-rushing serpent-ships. At the same moment I saw Korus Kan racing into one of the domed sun-swinging ships above which hovered the score of attraction-ships, saw the doors of those domed ships clanging shut as they prepared to escape from the menace above, since they could project their mighty purple force downward only, and would thus be helpless if caught in the attraction-grip of the disk-ships above. A moment more and those hundred domed craft, the most powerful weapon of the great Andromedan fleet, would be safe, I knew. But in that moment, as the three hundred serpent fighting-ships dashed down toward us, I saw the score of hovering attraction-ships glow suddenly with flickering light; the hundred sun-swinging ships beneath were pulled smoothly upward by that tremendous attractive force; and then the attraction-ships, grasping the hundred domed craft that were the heart of our fleet, were racing straight up and outward into space! _13. The Sailing of the Fleet_ As that score of glowing disk-ships, with our own hundred sun-swinging craft in their grip, flashed up and out of sight, our fighting-ships were flashing upward with the three hundred fighting-ships of the serpent-creatures racing down to meet us. Then, before we could swerve aside from their mad downward charge to pursue the attraction-ships, they had met us, and in all the world about us there was nothing for the moment but crashing and striking ships. Even as they had flashed down upon us, and we up to meet them, the invisible shafts of force from our cylinders had stabbed up and crossed their downward-reaching death-beams, so that scores of their own ships had crumpled and collapsed in the instant before we met them, scores of ours in turn driving crazily forward and sidewise as the pale beams wiped all life from them in that same moment. As we met them, though, it seemed that our ships and theirs were all to perish alike in crashes in mid-air, without further need of weapons, so terrific was the impact.