fell. He
realized that he was falling, yet he could not fall! Thrashing wildly,
grotesquely in agony, he struggled madly and blindly across the room,
directly toward the thick steel wall. The tip of one hair of his unruly
thatch touched the wall, and the slim length of that single hair did not
even bend as its slight strength brought to an instant halt the
hundred-and-eighty-odd pounds of mass--mass now entirely without
inertia--that was his body.

But finally the sheer brain power of the man began to triumph over his
physical torture. By indomitable force of will he compelled his groping
hands to seize a life-line, almost meaningless to his dazed
intelligence; and through that nightmare incarnate of hellish torture he
fought his way back to the control board. Hooking one leg around a
standard, he made a seemingly enormous effort and drove the two switches
back into their original positions; then fell flat upon the floor,
weakly but in a wave of relief and thankfulness, as his racked body felt
again the wonted phenomena of weight and of inertia. White, trembling,
frankly and openly sick, the two men stared at each other in half-amazed
joy.

"It worked." Cleveland smiled wanly as he recovered sufficiently to
speak, then leaped to his feet. "Snap it up, Fred! We must be falling
fast--we'll be wrecked when we hit!"

"We're not falling anywhere." Rodebush, foreboding in his eyes, walked
over to the main observation plate and scanned the heavens. "However,
it's not as bad as I was afraid it might be. I can still recognize a few
of the constellations, even though they are all pretty badly distorted.
That means that we can't be more than a couple of light-years or so away
from the Solar System. Of course, since we had so little thrust on,
practically all of our time and energy was spent in getting out of the
atmosphere; but, even at that, it's a good thing that space isn't an
absolutely perfect vacuum or we would have been clear out of the
Universe by this time."

"Huh? Impossible--where are we anyway? Then we must be making mil ...
Oh, I see!" Cleveland exclaimed in disjointed sentences as he also
stared into the plate.

"Right. We aren't traveling at all _now_." Rodebush replied. "We are
perfectly stationary relative to Tellus, since we made the hop without
inertia. We must have attained one hundred percent neutralization, which
we didn't quite expect, and therefore we must have stopped
instantaneously when our inert