orld, that flooding brilliance was more than
mere light. It was the promise of release, the very essence of hope.
His eyes clung to these little round windows; then the larger glass
beside him blazed forth with the bright sunlight of an open world that
was unbearable to one who had lived so long in darkness.

He held tightly to that slim hand that remained so confidingly within
his own.

"It isn't true," Rawson was telling himself frantically. "It can't be
true. It must be a delusion, another dream."

He gripped the girl's hand in what must have been a painful clasp. He
told himself that she at least was real. Her lovely face was before
him when at last he could bear to open his eyes.

* * * * *

About him were the others. The cylinder rested firmly upon a surface
of pale-rose quartz. Inside the shell he saw the floor where he had
stood, and with that he added one more fact to the few he had gotten
together. There was no dent in the floor. The shell's position was
reversed. What had been up was now down. Rawson knew he was standing
firmly, with what seemed his normal earth weight, upon a smooth
surface of rock; he knew that he was standing head down as compared
with his position at the beginning of their flight--as compared, too,
with the way he had stood in the mole-men's world and in his own world
up above.

"I've passed the center of the world." The words were ringing in his
brain. And then reason shot in a quick denial. "You're as heavy as you
were on earth," he told himself. "You'd have to go through and on to
the other side, the opposite surface of the world, before your weight
would come back like that!"

"What could it mean?" he was demanding as his eyes came back from the
machine and swept around over a gorgeous, glittering panorama of
crystal mountains, rose and white. Fields of strange plants, vividly
green; a whole world that rioted madly in a luxury of color. Before
him the girl stood smiling. Every line of her quivering figure spoke
eloquently of her joy in seeing this world through Rawson's eyes.

* * * * *

A man was approaching, a man like the others, yet whose oval face
strangely resembled that of the girl. She led Rawson toward him, then
Rawson, stopping, jerked backward in uncontrollable amazement, for the
tall man drawing near had spoken. His lips were open, moving, and from
them came sounds which to Rawson were absolutely unbe