Outside the Universe by Edmond Hamilton

Standing once more in the pilot room, with Jhul Din at the controls beside me, I stared out through the room's fore-windows, straining my vision out through the cosmic darkness that lay about our onward-rushing ships. Far ahead, in that darkness, lay a great, glowing mass of light, lay a radiant, disk-like mass that was resolving itself into a great swarm of brilliant stars as we rushed ever on toward it. In silence we two gazed toward it, for it was our own great galaxy that lay before us, toward which for day upon dragging day, hour upon slow hour, our mighty fleet had rushed on and on.

Now, as we gazed toward it, waxing there in splendor before us in the lightless heavens, I could not but reflect upon how infinitely strange and far a journey had been ours since we had left it, across what infinities of trackless space and upon what alien suns and worlds we had gone. Out into the infinite we had gone for the help that might save our universe, and now out of the infinite we were coming with that help, but two returning where three had gone out. Yet would the help we brought be in time to save our galaxy? Already the great serpent-hordes, we knew, would have reached that galaxy, would have settled upon the suns and worlds of the great Cancer cluster where their vanguard had made for them a base, and there they would be laboring to complete the colossal death-beam cone with which they could wipe out all the life on all the galaxy's worlds, and all our own great fleet. Could we reach them and conquer them before they completed that great cone of death?