I was fumbling for sextant and slide rule and tables, to try to discover and correct the direction of my flight, when I first perceived the prickling of my flesh. A queerly painful feeling, burning through every tissue. It must be the Cosmic Rays, I knew; those intense, space-pervading radiations from which the Earth is shielded only by miles of atmosphere. Perhaps I hadn't taken enough of Crosno's drug. With numbed hands I found the little hypodermic clipped to the wall, shot another heavy dose into my arm. "No sleep now," I muttered wearily. "Not for a million miles!" And I reached again for the sextant. For the white point of Venus was incredibly tiny, and thirty million miles away. The slightest deviation, I knew, would carry me thousands of miles wide of the target--perhaps to fall into the merciless furnace of the Sun. But a queer, deadly numbness had followed the prickling. I felt a terrible sudden pressure of sleep. All the accumulated fatigue of those sleepless nights and days poured over me resistlessly. I knew it wouldn't do to sleep--not until the course of the _Astronaut_ had been calculated and corrected. A delay of minutes, even, might be fatal. With dead hands I struggled to adjust the sextant, fighting for life itself. But the instrument slipped from my fingers. _The drug_, I thought. _Some reaction with the Cosmic Rays; an effect that Crosno had not anticipated. Missing ... Venus ..._ I slept. II THE CONQUEST OF THE STARS Uranium is a strange element, slightly understood. Its atom is the heaviest known. It is the mother of a dozen others, even of magic radium. For its radioactive atom breaks down to form a chain of other elements, but so slowly that only half the mass is consumed in six billion years. The uranium salts in that drug must have been responsible for my sleep. At first there was only blank darkness. Then out of it spoke a low, clear voice, terribly familiar--the voice of Dona Carridan and of the woman in the crystal box--calling urgently: "Barry! Wake up, Barry Horn." Then, out of trembling awe, I came back to a queer sort of subliminal awareness. Something I had never experienced before, it was the sort of perception that might be possessed by a truly disembodied mind--yet I had an odd feeling that it came to me through the voice that had called. I remember reading of Rhine's famous experiments in "parapsychology." It must have been some phenomenon of what he calls extra-sensory perception, independent of nerves and sense-organs, even of distance and time, that came to my sleeping brain. It was a thing of thought alone. I was aware of my stiff body, slumped awkwardly over the controls of the silent, hurtling rocket. But the rigid flesh seemed no more real, no more a part of me, than the run-down chronometer or the cold rocket muzzles.