"I saw a wandering asteroid--a few hundred miles perhaps in diameter. It was whirling on its axis like a ball thrown into the air. A whimsical humor--a madness perhaps--had descended upon me. There was nothing but the asteroid momentarily close before us, and I called to Martt to throw attraction into the bottom of the vehicle. The asteroid came rushing. But shrinking--shrinking until I laughed aloud to see it dwindle to a ball I could have held in my hand; and dwindle further until impotently it struck the floor window with a tiny point of fire from its fusing rock and metal. A burning cinder which scarce would have hurt me had I caught it in my naked hands. VI "How long my mood of ironic madness may have lasted I can not say. I barely noticed our actual entry into the Galactic Plane. Enormous suns whirling past, now relatively not many times bigger than the vehicle itself. Others, distant a mile or so--or a billion miles if you want the other viewpoint--with their magnified drift making them dart crazily past. I gave no heed to passing time; I remember only that at last the star-field beneath us was thinning out. Stray clusters--a myriad glowing little balls hurled aside by our rush. But there were visibly less and less of them, until, quite suddenly, I realized that unbroken inky darkness lay ahead. And to the sides and above us, the star clusters, nebulæ swirling like silver mist--it was all fading. Winking little points up there behind us--winking and vanishing. "We were in blackness unbroken. Dropping into a void of blackness with velocity inconceivable. Suddenly I was frightened. Stiff from so long upon the floor, I rose and hurried to Martt. We shut off the size-switch; made all the faces repellent. But there was nothing to repel; nothing to stop our downward rush into that blackness. It seemed all at once a blackness pregnant with unseen things of fearsome aspect. . . . The size-dials showed us to be near unit 50,000,000. Fifty million times our original size! The vehicle 500,000 miles high! "The relative Time-dials--showing relative earth-Time--were whirling. Our Time in the vehicle was less than a single second to a year on earth. My mind leaped back to you. Every second we lived there in the vehicle you here on earth were living more than a year. A century of yours was little more than a minute to us. The earth's future, whirling on a thousand years while Martt and I sat there confused at the instrument table. A tiny little earth, spinning like a top upon its axis, flashing around its tiny sun with a complete revolution every second!