"Ready for flying orders, Doctor," the new pilot told Herr Kreiss. "I'll put her where you say--within reason." Behind him he heard the choked voice of Mademoiselle Diane: "_Regardez! Ah, mon Dieu_, the beauty of it! This loveliness--it hurts!" * * * * * One hand was pressed to her throat; her face was turned as the pilot's had been that she might stare and stare at a quite impossible moon--a great half-disk of light in the velvet dark. "This loveliness--it hurts!" Chet looked, too, and knew what Diane was feeling. There was a catch of emotion in his own throat--a feeling that was almost fear. A giant half-moon!--and he knew it was the Earth. Golden Earth-light came to them in a flooding glory; the blazing sun struck on it from above to bring out half the globe in brilliant gold that melted to softest, iridescent, rainbow tints about its edge. Below, hung motionless in the night, was another sphere. Like a reflection of Earth in the depths of some Stygian lake, the old moon shone, too, in a half-circle of light. Small wonder that these celestial glories brought a gasp of delight from Diane, or drew into lines of fear the face of that other pilot who saw only his own world slipping away. But Chet Bullard, Master Pilot of the World, swung back to scan a star-chart that the scientist was holding, then to search out a similar grouping in the black depths into which they were plunging, and to bring the cross-hairs of a rigidly mounted telescope upon that distant target. "How far?" he asked himself in a half-spoken thought, "--how far have we come?" * * * * * There was an instrument that ticked off the seconds in this seemingly timeless void. He pressed a small lever beside it, and, beneath a glass that magnified the readings, there passed the time-tape. Each hour and minute was there; each movement of the controls was indicated; each trifling variation in the power of the generator's blast. Chet made some careful computations and passed the paper to Harkness, who tilted the time-tape recorder that he might see the record. "Check this, will you, Walt?" Chet was asking. "It is based on the time of our other trip, acceleration assumed as one thousand miles per hour per hour out of air--" The scientist interrupted; he spoke in English that was carefully precise. "It should lie directly ahead--the Dark Moon. I have calculated with exactness." Walter Harkness had snatched up a pair of binoculars. He swung sharply from lookout to lookout while he searched the heavens. "It's damned lucky for us that you made a slight error," Chet was telling the other. "Error?" Kreiss challenged. "Impossible!"