"Let us finish first. The panic that was upon us with this knowledge--belief--that we were lost out there in Time and Size and Space did not last long, for we fought against it. And presently we were calmer--able to reason. Our size-dials were at rest--we had shut off the switch. By earth standards the vehicle was 500,000 miles in height. Our relative Time was a century of yours, to a little more than a minute of ours. Some 8,000 years into your earth-future had already piled up on the earth standard Time-dial--and we were adding one hundred years to it almost every minute. Our velocity had reached a maximum of 3480 light-years per hour--and we were 12,000 light-years from earth. The velocity was now lessening a trifle; it dropped nearly to an even 3,000. With unchanging size now, with nothing near us to repel or attract, the ether-friction overcame inertia to reach a balance of forces. "We conquered our fear--began to reason what we should do. It was of course futile to look for your aural ray. It had been extinguished thousands of years. We wanted to go on to our destination, and it was the non-operation of the myrdoscope which worried and puzzled us. . . . I was sure, Father, that up to this point in the voyage I had made no serious error of direction. The image of the girl should have been before us. But the myrdoscope would not work." "The Time----" I suggested. "Ah, no, Frank! We had progressed very little into the Time of that girl's life. She should still have been reclining there on the bank; or at least the bank itself should have been there. We puzzled over what could be the trouble with the myrdoscope. We found the trouble----" "I found it," said Martt eagerly. Brett nodded. "Yes, it was Martt who reasoned it out. A curious explanation--and one, I think, which involves the greatest of all the issues we had encountered. The myrdoscope would not operate for a very big, but very simple reason. You would think to find the answer in Science? Not so. It was a theosophical reason, Father." Brett was very earnest, and very solemn. "It was my purpose, you understand, to reach the girl at the _exact moment_ we had always seen her. We planned to make our Time before reaching her, coincident with hers of that given instant. Remember that. Consider then: At this other instant when now we were trying to see her through the myrdoscope, our Time-rate had carried us about 8,000 years into earth's future. But also, it had carried us some forty minutes into the girl's future. "Not science now. Metaphysics, perhaps--and certainly Theology, and Theosophy. We were destined _to be with the girl during those forty minutes_. And we could not now look ahead and _see ourselves_--see our future actions.