I turned to the round opening of the speech-instrument beside me, spoke a brief order into it, and in answer to that order the thousand cruisers behind us smoothly and quickly massed into space-squadron formation, a long slender wedge with my own cruiser at the apex and those of the three Sub-Chiefs just behind me. Another brief order and the Canopan pilot beside me was opening the controls, our cruiser and the great triangle of massed cruisers behind us moving smoothly forward toward the crimson-gleaming point in the blackness ahead, our generators throbbing louder and louder as we slipped forward at swiftly mounting speed. We were on our way toward the great comet, and our struggle for the life of our universe had begun! * * * * * The voice of Gor Han came clearly from the speech-instrument as I stepped into the control room, days later. "Comet dead ahead, sir," he announced. But my own eyes were already on the scene ahead. "Yes," I told him, "another hour will bring us to the coma's edge." For before us now, bulking crimson and mighty and monstrous in the heavens ahead, glowed the giant comet toward which for the last nine days our thousand ships had been flashing. On and on we had rushed toward it at unnumbered light-speeds, through the vast ether-currents that raged here in space outside the galaxy, past regions of strange and deadly force which we but glimpsed and which we gave a wide berth, on into the endless outer void until our galaxy had shrunk to a small swarm of blinking light-points in the darkness behind us. Almost, in those days, we had forgotten the existence of that galaxy, so centered was our attention upon the sinister crimson glory of the comet ahead. Through those days it had largened swiftly to our eyes, from a light-point to a small red disk, and then to a larger disk, and finally to the gigantic circle of crimson-glowing light that loomed before us now, and toward which I and the three Sub-Chiefs in the cruisers just behind my own now gazed.