I asked him bluntly, and he looked up from his chart with a smile. “Leonard, in five minutes I could tell you every remaining fundamental of the laws which are governing us. I will tell you, but I want Jim to hear it too. And I’m absorbed now in getting out past the asteroids. A little later, I’ll make it clear.” We dropped past the moon at a distance of perhaps a hundred thousand miles. We were then some two hundred and forty thousand miles from earth. It was nearly noon, with the earth standard time of Dr. Weatherby’s home. We had been traveling eight hours; constantly accelerating, our velocity at noon had reached a thousand miles a minute. The moon, as we passed it, floated upward with a quite visible movement. It was a magnificent sight, though the smallest of telescopes on earth brought it visually nearer than it was now. We ate our first meal, slept, settled down to the routine of life on the vehicle. Another twelve hours passed. Our velocity had reached then a thousand miles a second. But that was only the one hundred and eighty-sixth part of the velocity of light! We were now—with an average rate of five hundred miles a second from the time we left—some twenty-one million and six hundred thousand miles from earth. Half way to Mars! But in four hours more the red planet floated upward past us. Dr. Weatherby kept well away—a million miles his instrument showed as he measured the planet’s visible diameter. We had now reached a velocity of some twenty thousand miles a second. “I shall hold it at that,” Dr. Weatherby said. “It’s too crowded in here, too dangerous.” We traversed the asteroid region at about that rate. It was a tedious, tense voyage, so dangerous that for nearly five hours one of us was always at the tower window, to avoid a possible collision. The belt in here between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was thick-strewn with asteroids. But none came near enough to endanger us. We crossed Jupiter’s orbit. Again Dr. Weatherby accelerated to one hundred thousand miles a second, but it was over an hour before we crossed Saturn’s orbit, four hundred million miles further on. We went no faster for a time. At this velocity it was tedious. Uranus’s orbit at seventeen hundred million miles from our sun; Neptune at twenty-seven hundred million. And then that last outpost of the solar system, Xavion, discovered in 1964. The planet was at the opposite point of its orbit. We could not see it. Our own sun had long since dwindled into invisibility. At last we were away! Launched into the realms of outer stellar space, plunging onward at a hundred thousand miles a second. But ahead of us the giant stars showed no change. As imperturbably distant in their aspect as when we started.