em,
as Arcot had suggested, but it was difficult to relax. They were
physically tired; they had gone through such great strains, even in the
short time that they had been maneuvering, that they were very tired.

Under a pull five times greater than normal gravity, they had tired in
one-fifth the time they would have at one gravity, but their brains were
still wide awake, trying to think of some way--_any way_--to get away
from the dark sun.

But at last sleep came.

XI

Morey thought he was the first to waken when, seven hours later, he
dressed and dove lightly, noiselessly, out into the library. Suddenly,
he noticed that the telectroscope was in operation--he heard the low hum
of its smoothly working director motors.

He turned and headed back toward the observatory. Arcot was busy with
the telectroscope.

"What's up, Arcot?" he demanded.

Arcot looked up at him and dusted off his hands. "I've just been
gimmicking up the telectroscope. We're going around this dead dwarf once
every three milliseconds, which makes it awfully hard to see the stars
around us. So I put in a cutoff which will shut the telectroscope off
most of the time; it only looks at the sky once every three
milliseconds. As a result, we can get a picture of what's going on
around us very easily. It won't be a steady picture, but since we're
getting a still picture three hundred times a second, it will be better
than any moving picture film ever projected as far as accuracy is
concerned.

"I did it because I want to take a look at that bright streak in the
sky. I think it'll be the means to our salvation--if there is any."

Morey nodded. "I see what you mean; if that's another white dwarf--which
it most likely is--we can use it to escape. I think I see what you're
driving at."

"If it doesn't work," Arcot said coolly, "we can profit by the example
of the people we left back there. Suicide is preferable to dying of
cold."

Morey nodded. "The question is: How helpless are we?"

"Depends entirely on that star; let's see if we can get a focus on it."

At the orbital velocity of the ship, focussing on the star was indeed a
difficult thing to do. It took them well over an hour to get the image
centered in the screen without its drifting off toward one edge; it took
even longer to get the focus close enough to a sphere to give them a
definite reading on the instruments. The image had started out as a
streak, but by taking smaller and sm