t her where you say--within reason."

Behind him he heard the choked voice of Mademoiselle Diane:
"_Regardez! Ah, mon Dieu_, the beauty of it! This loveliness--it
hurts!"

* * * * *

One hand was pressed to her throat; her face was turned as the pilot's
had been that she might stare and stare at a quite impossible moon--a
great half-disk of light in the velvet dark.

"This loveliness--it hurts!" Chet looked, too, and knew what Diane was
feeling. There was a catch of emotion in his own throat--a feeling
that was almost fear.

A giant half-moon!--and he knew it was the Earth. Golden Earth-light
came to them in a flooding glory; the blazing sun struck on it from
above to bring out half the globe in brilliant gold that melted to
softest, iridescent, rainbow tints about its edge. Below, hung
motionless in the night, was another sphere. Like a reflection of
Earth in the depths of some Stygian lake, the old moon shone, too, in
a half-circle of light.

Small wonder that these celestial glories brought a gasp of delight
from Diane, or drew into lines of fear the face of that other pilot
who saw only his own world slipping away. But Chet Bullard, Master
Pilot of the World, swung back to scan a star-chart that the scientist
was holding, then to search out a similar grouping in the black depths
into which they were plunging, and to bring the cross-hairs of a
rigidly mounted telescope upon that distant target.

"How far?" he asked himself in a half-spoken thought, "--how far have
we come?"

* * * * *

There was an instrument that ticked off the seconds in this seemingly
timeless void. He pressed a small lever beside it, and, beneath a
glass that magnified the readings, there passed the time-tape. Each
hour and minute was there; each movement of the controls was
indicated; each trifling variation in the power of the generator's
blast. Chet made some careful computations and passed the paper to
Harkness, who tilted the time-tape recorder that he might see the
record.

"Check this, will you, Walt?" Chet was asking. "It is based on the
time of our other trip, acceleration assumed as one thousand miles per
hour per hour out of air--"

The scientist interrupted; he spoke in English that was carefully
precise.

"It should lie directly ahead--the Dark Moon. I have calculated with
exactness."

Walter Harkness had snatched up a pair of binoculars. He swung sharpl