color
of a moonstone, looked at them like a dead thing that could not even
remember life--and asked them what they were--and wearily bade them
goodbye.

When the planets were no more than seed-pearls floating in the vast behind
them, Ato gave the signal for all to make ready. There was a scurrying
aboard ship for couches and over-stuffed chairs. And after the warning bell
had ceased clanging, Ato muttered to Odin and Gunnar: "This has been tested
enough. It ought to work."

With one last shrug of his lean shoulders, Ato pulled the lever that threw
them into the Fourth Drive.

The stars and the planets became streamers of light. They burst like
sky-rockets and a million sparks fell into the void. The sparks winked out
and the ship hurtled on through a darkness that seemed to take form before
them. It was as though they burrowed through swathes of black cotton.

Once before, Jack Odin had experienced a feeling akin to this. It was
the time when he had used Ato's belt, and Gunnar had flung him into space
as though he had been a minnow at the end of a snapping line. But that
experience had been momentary. This built itself up--until Odin felt
himself expanding and contracting at each pulse beat. His heart seemed
to beat slower and slower. Waves of smothering pain struck him when they
passed the speed of light. Then the pain diminished. He gasped for air,
and it seemed to take years to reach his chest. The pain and the feeling
of speed went slowly away. They were merely drifting now, as though in a
dream, with a feeling of high exhilaration flooding over him. He remembered
feeling that way once as a boy when a heavy storm had passed, taking its
wracks of clouds with it, and the sinking sun had come out to turn all the
trees to emeralds.

And now, beyond life, and beyond death, with eternity curving like a
rainbow of light around them, they dashed on and on into the unknown.

Time did not exist. Space had a new concept. Speed was something that
advanced them. It was little more than a sensation until Alpha Centauri
began to loom larger upon their screens. From their vantage point in
Trans-Einsteinian space, it did not look like a star at all. It was two
intertwined circular spirals of light, and at the intervals where the
two coils met were little nodules of gold.

The crew was given instructions on the anticipated sensations that were
to follow.

"It will be like plunging back from immortality to mortality," Ato to