oothed into kindly lines. He grasped tight
at Jerry's hand.

"I was dreading that part of it," he confessed slowly: "going alone.
It would have been lonely--out there...."

* * * * *

The shining cylinder of aluminum alloy was hurtling through space. No
longer was it a ship of the air; it had thrown itself far beyond that
thin gaseous envelope surrounding the earth; out into the black and
empty depths that lay beyond. And in it were two men, each reacting in
his own way to an adventure incredible. One was deep in the
computation of astronomical data; the other athrill with a quivering,
nerve-shaking joy that was almost breath-taking.

A metal grating that had formed the rear wall of their cabin was now
the floor. Winslow had thrown the ship into a vertical climb that made
of their machine a projectile shooting straight out from the earth.
Gravitation held them now to the grating floor. And, stronger even
than the earth-pull, was the constant acceleration of motion that made
their weight doubled again and again.

The inventor moved ponderously, with leaden limbs, to take sights from
the windows above, to consult his maps of the sky, check and re-check
his figures. But Jerry had eyes only for the earth they had left.

* * * * *

Flat on the grating he lay, his eyes over a thick glass in a
proturbance of the shell that allowed him to stare and stare at what
lay directly below. He watched the familiar things of earth vanish in
fleecy clouds; through them there formed the great ball, where oceans
and continents drew slowly into focus.

And now he was filled with a sense of great solitude. The world, in
its old, familiar companionship, was gone--probably forever. The
earth--_his_ earth--_his_ world--that place of vast distances on land
and on sea, of lofty mountain ranges and heaving oceans, of cities,
countries, continents--was become but a toy. A plaything from the
nursery of some baby god, hanging so quiet in space he could almost
reach and take it in his hands.

Beyond it the sun was blaring, a hard outlined disc in the black sky.
Its rays made shining brilliance of a polar ice-cap.

Jerry Foster closed his eyes and drew back from the glass. Again he
was aware of the generator, whose endless roar reverberated in their
compartment. A smaller but similar apparatus was operating on one of
the liquids from the inventor's laboratory to generate oxygen an