All about us in that moment I glimpsed ships smashing squarely into down-rushing serpent-ships, while our own craft spun and whirled as racing ships grazed along its sides. Then, hanging in the air there a scant mile above the ground, we whirled and grappled with the serpent-craft in a fierce, wild struggle. Their whole aim, we knew, was to keep us occupied long enough to permit the escape of their attraction-ships with our own sun-swinging craft in their grasp, while our object, in turn, was to brush aside these serpent-ships before us and race in pursuit of the attraction-ships. Charge and struggle as we might, though, in the moments following we could not break loose from the fury of the serpent-creatures' attack, who drove toward us with death-beams whirling in all the mad recklessness of despair. I saw Andromedan ships all about us driving aimlessly away as those pale beams struck them, saw others destroyed by serpent-ships that crashed deliberately into them, and then pouring up from beneath came the masses of the great fleet beneath, thousands of ships that raced up and around the struggling serpent-ships, crumpling and destroying them with countless invisible shafts of force from their cylinders. Within another moment the last of the enemy craft had vanished, but by that time our own ship and a half-thousand others were flashing up in pursuit of the attraction-ships. Up, up we raced--up until the giant world was but a tiny ball beneath, hanging at the center of the great ring of suns--but then we stopped, and hung motionless. For we were, we saw, too late. About us there stretched only the far-reaching circles of flaming suns that made up the Andromeda universe, with no sign of the attraction-ships or their prey. In those moments that the struggling serpent-craft had held us back, the attraction-ships had flashed out from this universe into the boundless gulf of space, with the hundred sun-swinging craft in their grasp, with Korus Kan himself in one of those ships. On none of our space-charts were they visible, safe from our pursuit out in the void, and we knew that somewhere in that void our sun-swinging craft and all in them were meeting their end, held in the relentless grasp of the attraction-ships and destroyed by them, since the sun-swinging craft could project their own terrific forces only downward. We were too late. Silently, slowly, we slanted back down toward the great central world. As we came to rest there, among the tens of thousands of other gathered ships, I saw Jhul Din and our followers, aroused from beneath by the battle, running forward to meet me. I saw him glance about as he came toward me, inquiry in his glance, and then I shook my head. "We've lost the most powerful weapon of the whole Andromedan fleet," I told him, slowly. "And we've lost, too, Korus Kan."