There was silence as I gazed ahead toward the great comet, whose coma was now indeed a terrific spectacle. An immense lurid sea of crimson light, it seemed to fill all the universe, shifting slowly downward and beneath us as our thousand cruisers hummed up at a steep slant over it. We were racing toward it at a full million miles above its level, the rim of the huge sphere of crimson light creeping across the black void beneath us as comet and cruisers rushed closer to each other. Gazing down toward the great coma, its lurid crimson light drenching all in the control room, I heard startled exclamations beneath as even the imperturbable members of my cruiser's cosmopolitan crew were awed by the comet's magnitude and terror. Then, when the titanic crimson sphere of the coma seemed squarely beneath our rushing ships, I uttered a word into the instrument before me, and immediately our cruiser and the thousand behind it had halted, had turned squarely about, and then at reduced speed were racing along at the same speed as the comet, hanging above it and accompanying it on its mad rush through the void toward our galaxy. Below us now lay the giant red-glowing globe of the coma, racing on toward the far swarm of light-points that was our galaxy. And now, gazing intently down into its far-flung glowing mass, I strained my eyes for sight of some opening, some crevice in that mighty body of glowing electrical energy that would permit us to penetrate to the space inside it. Yet no such opening could be seen, no tiniest break in the coma's lurid sphere. A single, unbroken and gigantic globe of crimson luminescence, it hung beneath us, as we rushed through the void, the vast fan-tail of faintest crimson light streaming out behind. Through all our days of tense flight outward toward the comet I had hoped against hope that in its coma would be some break or opening, however small, that would permit us to penetrate inside, but now my last hope, and the galaxy's last hope, was shattered by the glowing, unbroken mass of this gigantic comet's coma. With sinking heart I gazed down toward it as our triangle of ships sped on above it. Gor Han's deep voice sounded from the instrument before me. "There seems no opening in the coma at all, Khel Ken," he said. "And it is instant annihilation for anything to venture into that coma's electrical energy!" "We'll have to drop lower and cruise about the coma's surface," I told the Betelgeusan. "We _must_ get inside, somehow!"