Outside the Universe

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The floor beneath me, slanting swiftly downward, flung me across the room and against its metal wall as our whole ship suddenly spun crazily in mid-space. For the moment following I had only a swift vision of walls and floor and ceiling gyrating insanely about me while I clutched in vain for some hold upon them, and at the same moment I glimpsed through the window the other ships of my little squadron plunging helplessly about behind us. Then as our craft's wild whirling slackened I stumbled to my feet, out of the room and up the narrow stair outside it, bursting into the transparent-walled little pilot room where my two strange lieutenants stood at the ship's controls.

"Korus Kan! Jhul Din!" I exclaimed. "Are you trying to wreck us all?"

The two turned toward me, saluting. Korus Kan, of Antares, was of the metal-bodied races of that star's countless worlds, his brain and heart and nervous system and vital organs encased in an upright body of gleaming metal whose powerful triple arms and triple legs were immune from all fatigue, and from whose ball-like upper brain-chamber or head his triangle of three keen eyes looked forth. Jhul Din, too, was as patently of Spica, of the crustacean peoples of that sun's planets, with his big, erect body armored in hard black shell, his two mighty upper arms and two lower legs short and thick and stiff, while from his shiny black conical head protruded his twin round eyes. Drawn as the members of our crews were, from every peopled star in the galaxy, there were yet no stranger or more dissimilar shapes among them than these two, who confronted me for a moment now in silence before Korus Kan made answer.

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