Ursae Minoris from the sun, distance about two point two light
years. It will take six bands of tubes on your tightest beam, LSV3, to
reach us. Barring a touch of an unusually severe type of space-sickness,
everything worked beautifully; even better than either of us dared to
believe. There's something we want to know right away--have we been gone
four hours and some odd minutes, or better than two years?"

He turned to Rodebush and went on:

"Nobody knows how fast this ultra-wave travels, but if it goes as fast
as we did coming out it's no creeper. I'll give him about thirty
minutes, then shoot in another...."

But, interrupting Cleveland's remark, the care-ravaged face of Virgil
Samms appeared sharp and clear upon the plate and his voice snapped
curtly from the speaker.

"Thank God you're alive, and twice that 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 one
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,
equipment, and armament are _ready_!"

"Two minutes to atmosphere? Think you can do it?" Cleveland asked, as
Rodebush flipped off the power and leaped to the control panel. "You
might, though, at that."

"We could do it in less than that if we had to. We used scarcely any
power at all coming out, and I'm going to use quite a lot 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 leape