So perfectly clear was their view through the lux metal wall and the black, empty space that all sense of distance was lost. It seemed more a miniature model of their universe--a tiny thing that floated close behind them, unwavering, shining with a faint light, a heatless illumination that made everything in the darkened observatory glow very faintly. It was the light of three hundred million suns seen at a distance of three million million million miles! And it seemed small because there was nothing with which to compare it. It was an amazingly beautiful thing, that tiny floating disc of light. Morey floated over to the cameras and began to take pictures. "I'd like to take a color shot of that," he said a few minutes later, "but that would require a direct shot through the reflector telescope and a time exposure. And I can't do that; the ship is moving." "Not enough to make any difference," Arcot contradicted. "We're moving away from it in a straight line, and that thing is three quintillion miles away. We're not moving fast enough to cause any measurable contraction in a time exposure. As for having a steady platform, this ship weighs a quarter of a million tons and is held by gyroscopes. We won't shake it." While Morey took the time exposure, Arcot looked at the enlarged image in the telectroscope and tried to make angular measurements from the individual stars. This he found impossible. Although he could spot Betelgeuse and Antares because of their tremendous radiation, they were too close together for measurements; the angle subtended was too small. Finally, he decided to use the distance between Antares and S Doradus in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, one of the two clouds of stars which float as satellites to the Galaxy itself. To double-check, he used the radius of the Galaxy as base to calculate the distance. The distances checked. The ship was five hundred thousand light years from home! After all the necessary observations were made, they swung the ship on its axis and looked ahead for a landing place. The nebulae ahead were still invisible to the naked eye except as points, but the telectroscope finally revealed one as decidedly nearer than the rest. It seemed to be a young Island Universe, for there was still a vast cloud of gas and dust from which stars were yet to be born in the central whorl--a single titanic gas cloud that stretched out through a million billion miles of space. "Shall we head for that?" asked Arcot at last, as Morey finished his observations. "I think it would be as good as any--there are more stars there than we can hope to visit." "Well, then, here we go!" Arcot dived for the control room, while Morey shut off the telectroscope and put the latest photographs in the file.