Below them Hastur was already a sphere, and, as Timbie’s fingers pressed buttons releasing full fire on the rockets, it became again the incredible globe they had seen when approaching it. They were free. Dorothy raised her hand to her face to wipe away a tear that was streaming down her cheek, smiled despite herself when her mailed finger touched the glassite of her helmet. “Goodbye, Harry,” she whispered. * * * * * “We have here,” declared Edgar, picking his nose, “a small list of the mysteries of Hastur. So far as I can see, the only way really to break them is to make up another expedition sometime.” “Read ’em off, bucko,” said Dorothy. “First of all—what is Hastur made of? Why, with the terrific speed of rotation, doesn’t it fly to pieces?” “I devoted five pages to that in my book,” put in Hartnett. “To sum up briefly: there’s no reason I know why it should be, but it is. Therefore, there must be a reason.” They glared at him. “Good way of wasting time,” he protested. “Then,” continued Edgar, “we have the matter of the reverse English radio reception. And I shall personally slay and dismember anyone who tries to pass it off merely as ‘Einstein effect’.” He looked up. “Well?” Dorothy smiled. “We like living, Edgar.” “Speaking of ‘Einstein effect’,” broke in Hartnett, “I presume you realize by now that all the weird things we saw were enormously distorted. The stars, for example, were never actually closer. That was easy to realize, because no more than the customary amount of light was visible, and no gravitational eccentricities were noted.” “What about the thing that nearly wiped us out?” asked Bob Vickers. “A meteor—and a very small one at that. It landed a little distance away from the ship. Had it hit us, it wouldn’t have blotted us out, but could have caused considerable damage nonetheless.” “And the—creatures?” “Microscopic. Had we been able to move at the time, we could have ploughed right through them. I’ve seen those illusions a number of times—we wasted quite a bit of ammunition on them before we got wise. “And just imagine their consternation when they saw us, apparently microscopic, too, yet always out of grasp. That’s why the cone-creature was flailing away at nothing at all. It was trying to catch us.” “Can you explain wave n?” burst in Edgar. “I have seven pages on that in my book,” smiled Hartnett. “Summed up, I say: wave n was discovered while we were looking for something else. We played around with it until it began to sit up and say ‘uncle.’ We don’t know from nothing about it.” Nick puzzled. “What kind of a book is this, Steve?” Hartnett laughed. “A joke. A beautiful joke on the dear public. Three hundred pages of pompous drivel, harebrained speculations, pseudo-science, and what not.