Outside the Universe by Edmond Hamilton

Standing at the controls, his tireless metal figure erect as he gazed out into the vast blackness of cosmic space that lay before us, Korus Kan turned from that gaze toward me as I stepped inside the pilot room. Silently I stepped over beside him, and silently, as was our wont, we contemplated the great panorama before us. A stupendous vault of sheer utter darkness it stretched about us, darkness broken only by the misty light of the great universes of thronging suns that floated here and there in this vast void through which we were racing. Behind us our own galaxy lay, just another of those dim glows; for hours had passed since we had launched out into outer space from its edge, and in those hours our awful speed had carried us on through the void through thousands of light-years of space.

But though in those hours of flight our own universe had dwindled to a mere mist of light, those other misty patches that were the universes ahead had hardly grown at all in size or intensity of light, making us realize that even the vast expanse of space through which our ship had already flashed was but a fraction of the gulf that lay between us and the great Andromeda universe. Before us the soft glow that was that universe seemed a little brighter, a little larger, but even so I knew that more than a score of days must elapse before even our ship's tremendous velocity would bring us to it. And even were we able to secure the help we needed, it would still be many days before we could flash back to our own galaxy, and in those days, I well knew, the serpent-invaders would be completing their last plans, tightening their grip on all the suns and worlds of the Cancer cluster, and preparing the way for the vast hordes that soon would cross the void to pour down on that cluster, spreading resistlessly from it across all our galaxy.