And then we were outside, in the starlit night. A dark hillside was dropping away. A silver ribbon of river was slipping beneath us, dropping downward, like a plummet falling. The red ray had vanished. Dr. Weatherby’s voice, calm now, with a touch of triumph to it that all had gone so well, said, “Mascar has extinguished the red ray. We used it only for starting. We must start slowly, Leonard.” The river had vanished. A huge Polar liner—I recognized its group of colored lights as Ellison’s, flying in the forty thousand-foot lane—showed overhead. But it, too, seemed falling like a plummet. It flashed straight down past our window and disappeared. Dr. Weatherby went to the instrument table. Time passed. It seemed only a moment or two though. Dolores murmured, “Are we still moving, Jim? You must tell me. Tell me everything you see.” The room was stiflingly hot. We were all gasping. “I’ve turned on the refrigeration,” said Dr. Weatherby, “to counteract the heat of the friction of our passage through the atmosphere. It will be cool enough presently. Come over here. Don’t you want to look down?” We gathered over the instrument room’s floor window. Stars were down there, white, red, and yellow stars in a field of dead black: a narrow crescent edge of stars, and all the rest was a gigantic dull red surface. Visibly convex! Patches of dark, formless areas of clouds. An ocean, the vaguely etched outlines of continents, the coastline of the Americas. We were launched into space! IV EXPANSION! Then the vehicle cooled rapidly. Soon we had the heaters going. The coldness of space enveloped us penetrating the vehicle’s walls. But with the heaters we managed to be comfortable. Dr. Weatherby sat at the instrument table. His chronometer there showed 5 A.M. We had started at 4 A.M. On one of the distant dials the miles were registering in units of a thousand. The dial-pointer was nearing XX6. Six thousand miles: Dr. Weatherby glanced up as I appeared. Alice and Dolores, and Jim with them, had gone astern to prepare a broth. We were all of us still feeling a bit shaky, though the sense of lightness had worn off. Dr. Weatherby had a chart on the table. It showed our solar system. The sun was at its center, and the planetary orbits in concentric circles around it. The planets and our own moon and a few of the larger comets and asteroids were all shown, their positions given progressively for each hour beginning at our starting time. “I’m heading this way, Leonard. Holding the general plane in which the planets lie.” His finger traced a line from the earth, past the moon, past Mars. Jupiter and Saturn lay over to one side, and Neptune to the other. Uranus was far on the opposite side, beyond the sun.