travels, but if it goes as fast
as we did coming out it's certainly moving. I'll give him about thirty
minutes, then shoot in another call."

But in less than two minutes the care-ravaged face of their chief
appeared sharp and clear upon their plates and his voice snapped curtly
from the speaker.

"Thank God you're alive, and twice that the ship works!" he exclaimed.
"You've been gone four hours, eleven minutes, and forty-one seconds, but
never mind about abstract theorizing. Get back here, to Pittsburgh, as
fast as you can drive. That Nevian vessel or another like her is mopping
up the city, and has destroyed half the Fleet already!"

"We'll be back there in nine minutes!" Rodebush snapped into the
transmitter. "Two to get from here to atmosphere, four from atmosphere
down to the Hill, and three to cool off. Notify the full four-shift
crew--everybody we've picked out. Don't need anybody else. Ship,
batteries, and armament are _ready_!"

"Two minutes to atmosphere, and it took ten coming out? Think you can do
it?" Cleveland asked, as Rodebush flipped off the power and leaped to
the control panel.

"We could do it in a few seconds if we had to. We used scarcely any
power at all coming out, and I'm not using very much going back," the
physicist explained rapidly, as he set the dials which would determine
their flashing course.

The master switches were thrown and the pangs of inertialessness again
assailed them--but weaker far this time than ever before--and upon their
lookout plates they beheld a spectacle never before seen by eye of man.
For the ultra-beam, with its heterodyned vision, is not distorted by any
velocity yet attained, as are the ether-borne rays of light. Converted
into light only at the plate, it showed their progress as truly as
though they had been traveling at a pace to be expressed in the ordinary
terms of miles per hour. The yellow star that was the sun detached
itself from the firmament and leaped toward them, swelling visibly,
momentarily, into a blinding monster of incandescence. And toward them
also flung the earth, enlarging with such indescribable rapidity that
Cleveland protested involuntarily, in spite of his knowledge of the
peculiar mechanism of the vessel in which they were.

"Hold it, Fred, hold it! Way 'nuff!" he exclaimed.

"I'm using only ten thousand dynes, so she'll stop herself as soon as we
touch atmosphere, long before she can even begin to heat," Rodebush
explained. "L