angely, and there was a vast cloud of strange,
violet or pale green stars before them. Directly ahead was one green
star that glowed big and brilliant, then it faded rapidly and shrank to
a tiny dot--a distant star. There was a strange tenseness about the men;
they seemed held in an odd, compelled silence.

Arcot reached forward again. "Cutting off power, Morey!" The red tumbler
snapped back. Again space seemed to be charged with a vast surplus of
energy that rushed in from all around, coursing through their bodies,
producing a tingling feeling. Then space rocked in a gray cloud about
them; the stars leaped out at them in blazing glory again.

"Well, it worked once!" breathed Arcot with a sigh of relief. "Lord, I
made some errors in calculation, though! I hope I didn't make any more!
Morey--how was it? I only used one-sixteenth power."

"Well, don't use any more, then," said Morey. "We sure traveled! The
things worked perfectly. By the way, it's a good thing we had all the
relays magnetically shielded; the magnetic field down here was so strong
that my pocket kit tried to start running circles around it.

"According to your magnetic drag meter, the conductors were carrying
over fifty billion amperes. The small coils worked perfectly. They're
charged again; the power went back into them from the big coil with only
a five percent loss of power--about twenty thousand megawatts."

"Hey, Arcot," Wade said. "I thought you said we wouldn't be able to see
the stars."

Arcot spread his hands. "I did say that, and all my apologies for it.
But we're not seeing them by light. The stars all have
projections--shadows--in this space because of their intense
gravitational fields. There are probably slight fluctuations in the
field, perhaps one every minute or so. Since we were approaching them at
twenty thousand times the speed of light, the Doppler effect gives us
what looks like violet light.

"We saw the stars in front of us as violet points. The green ones were
actually behind us, and the green light was tremendously reduced in
frequency. It certainly can't be anything less than gamma rays and
probably even of greater frequency.

"Did you notice there were no stars off to the side? We weren't
approaching them, so they didn't give either effect."

"How did you know which was which?" asked Fuller skeptically.

"Did you see that green star directly ahead of us?" Arcot asked. "The
one that dwindled so rapidly? That could onl