of the gaseous nebulae, it was decaying when
your molten planets were flung from the central sun, it was dying before
the boiling seas had given birth to land upon your sphere. And while we
had enough of our own particular electrical food to last us for a
million of your years, and enough power to guide Xlarbti to other
universes, we had exhausted all the remaining energy of our entire
universe. And when we finally left it to dwindle behind us in the black
abysses of space, we left it, a dead cinder, devoid of life, vitiated of
activity, and utterly lacking in cosmic forces, a universe finally run
down.

"The universes, as you may know, are set off from each other by totally
black and empty abysms, expanses so vast that light-rays have not yet
crossed many of them. How did we accomplish the feat of traversing such
a gulf? By the simplest of means: acceleration. Why? Because to remain
in our universe meant inevitable death. We gambled on the greatest
adventure in all the cosmos.

* * * * *

"To begin with, we circled our universe to the remotest point opposite
where we wanted to leave it. We then turned our attraction powers on
part way so that the millions of stars before us drew us ahead, then we
gradually stepped up the power to its full strength, thus ever
increasing our speed. At the same time, as stars passed to our rear in
our flight, we turned our repulsion-rays against them, stepping that
power up also.

"Our initial speed was twenty-four miles per second. Midway in our
universe we had reached the speed of your light--186,000 miles per
second. By the time we left our universe, we were hurtling at a speed
which we estimated to be 1,600,000,000 miles per second. Yet even at
that tremendous speed, it took us years to cross from our universe to
yours. If we had encountered even a planetoid at that enormous rate, we
would probably have been annihilated in white-hot death. But we had
planned well, and there are no superiors to our stellar mechanics, our
astronomers, our scientists.

"When we finally hurtled from the black void into your universe, we
found what we had only dared hope for: a young universe, with many
planets and cooling worlds rich in radium ores, the only element in your
scale that can help to replenish our vanishing energy. Half your
universe we have already deprived of its ores. Your Earth has more that
we want. Then we shall continue on our way, to loot the rest