It was nothing of feeling or hearing or sight, and I knew that it was guided by another mind. Gradually it spread, an expanding sphere of awareness. It went beyond the rocket. I perceived Venus, and knew that indeed I had missed it. The _Astronaut_ was plunging toward the Sun! Filled with an oddly vague alarm, I made a dim effort to move my body, long enough at least to correct the course of the rocket. But that proved altogether hopeless. And I soon forgot all danger, in the wonder of this new perception. For I _had_ missed Venus! Crosno, I knew, had allowed eighty-nine days for me to reach intersection with its orbit. But already the cloud-shrouded globe of it had flashed back beside me, fleet as a silver shadow. Three months gone! The next instant, I thought, the rocket would strike the Sun! No, its original momentum carried it by. Yet the star of day filled an enormous fiery circle. The rocket flung about it like a stone on a string. Then, like the stone when the string breaks, it hurtled outward again into space. The incredible truth came slowly to me-- The _Astronaut_ was now a comet! Some freak of celestial mechanics, while my numb hands slept on the firing levers, had flung it into an elliptic orbit. A sealed vault flying in the void, like the fabulous coffin of Mohammed, it was destined to flash again around the Sun, recede, drop again ... forever! All that cycle happened, with the thought. Years, I knew, had passed. Time was rushing by me like a river. I could sense the swift rotation of the planets, their deliberate orbital swing, even the northward drift of the whole solar system. And yet again I was amazed by the range and vividness of this new intuition. For, thinking of Crosno back upon the Earth, I suddenly could see his place beside the Hudson, as clearly as if I had been floating above the trees. The old house was shabbier than ever, sagging. Behind it stood a tall white monument, upon which I read: _Hilaire Crosno, 1889-1961._ Sixty-one! Already it was twenty years and more since I had left the Earth. And it seemed the merest instant! For a moment I was stunned. Then I wanted desperately to know what the decades had done to my son. And that uncanny perception showed him to me. He was an old man, already, walking slowly in a garden. Lingering beside his halting steps were a youth and a bright-haired girl--his children, I knew. The girl caught her brother's arm, and begged him anxiously: "Barry, you--you mustn't! The danger's too ghastly. You'll only be lost in space--like grandfather!" "But, Sis!" protested this slim new Barry Horn. "You don't understand." He looked up to the old man. * * * * * My son smiled, and patted his daughter's golden head. "Let him go, Dona," he said softly. "Danger was always food and drink to the Horns--we would die without it. Anyhow, Barry has a better rocket than my father's."