"The velocity indicators, as well, were in rapid motion. The indicator of the miles-per-hour unit was an indistinguishable blur. And miles per minute--and per second--we could read none of them, so fast were they moving. The light-year distance pointers were in motion. We were piling up light-years of distance every moment. The total stood--as momentarily I read it--at between eleven and twelve thousand light-years of total distance traveled. Light, speeding at 186,000 miles a second, must go a year to make a light-year unit of distance. And we had gone nearly 12,000 light-years! I read our present velocity on the light-year velocity-dial. It was 3480 light-years per hour! And still rapidly accelerating! "The panic of fear possessed us at the strangeness of it all--at that void of blackness--soundlessness--into which we were plunging; and even our plunge unmarked by the faintest trembling of the vehicle. A panic. I started to use the aurometer to search for your ray. Absurd! The absurdity of it made me laugh hysterically. Your ray had been extinguished thousands of years in my Past. I tried the myrdoscope--to locate the image of the girl--to verify our direction, for abruptly I realized I had, in that empty black void, nothing by which I might locate our position. "The myrdoscope was inoperative! I could not locate the girl-image--nor anything else. I tried with the electro-telescope at its greatest power--tried frantically to pick up some star-image behind us. I could not. I did not think they were as yet beyond its range--it merely had gone dead. The current in it would not hum. It was dead like the myrdoscope. We wondered then if our dials were working accurately. In our panic we doubted everything. And knew, with a stark terror upon us--knew that we were lost. Lost perhaps in Size and Time. And lost in black Space, empty, soundless, unfathomable!" _CHAPTER 7_ "A SINGLE STARLIT NIGHT--AN ETERNITY" Brett had momentarily paused in his narrative, but when we would have plied him with questions he waved us aside.