black and green, flamed inside his
bursting eyeballs. The Universe spun and whirled in mad gyrations about
him as he reeled drunkenly to his feet, staggering and sprawling. He
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 force of will he compelled his grasping 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 depressed a red button; 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 energy and time was taken up in getting out of
the atmosphere. Even at that, though, it's a good thing that space isn't
a perfect vacuum, or we would have been clear out of the Universe by
this time."

"Huh? What are you talking about? Impossible! Where are we, anyway? Then
we must be making mil.... Oh, I see!" Cleveland exclaimed, somewhat
incoherently, 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 that hop without
inertia.