The complaints were loud, but they finally simmered down to an earnest demand to know how in the devil Arcot had managed to get off dead center. "Why, that was easy," he said airily. "I just turned on a little power; I fell under the influence of the weight and then it was easy to get to the control room." "Come on," Wade demanded. "The truth! How did you get here?" "Why, I just pushed myself here." "Yes; no doubt. But how did you get hold of anything to push?" "I just took a handful of air and threw it away and reached the wall." "Oh, of course--and how did you hold the air?" "I just took some air and threw it away and reached the wall." Which was all they could learn. Arcot was going to keep his system secret, it seemed. "At any rate," Arcot continued, "I am back in the control room, where I belong, and you are not in the observatory where you belong. Now get out of my territory!" Morey pushed himself back to the observatory, and after a few minutes, his voice came over the intercom. "Let's move on a bit more, Arcot. We still can't get both galaxies on the same plate. Let's go on for another hour and take our pictures from that point." Fuller had awakened and come in in the meantime, and he wanted to know why they didn't take some pictures from this spot. "No point in it," said Morey. "We have the ones we took coming in; what we want is a wide-angle shot." Arcot threw on the space-strain drive once more, and they headed on at top speed. They were all in the control room, watching the instruments and joking--principally the latter--when it happened. One instant they were moving smoothly, weightlessly along. The next instant, the ship rocked as though it had been struck violently! The air was a snapping inferno of shooting sparks, and there came the sharp crash of the suddenly volatilized silver bar that was their main power fuse. Simultaneously, they were hurled forward with terrific force; the straps that held them in place creaked with the sudden strain, and the men felt weak and faint. Consciousness nearly left them; they had been burned in a dozen places by the leaping sparks. Then it was over. Except that the ghost ships no longer followed them, the _Ancient Mariner_ seemed unchanged. Around them, they could see the dim glowing of the galaxies. "Brother! We came near something!" Arcot cried. "It may be a wandering star! Take a look around, quick!" But the dark of space seemed utterly empty around them as they coasted weightless through space. Then Arcot snapped off the lights of the control room, and in a moment his eyes had become accustomed to the dim lights. It was dead ahead of them. It was a dull red glow, so dim it was scarcely visible. Arcot realized it was a dead star. "There it is, Morey!" he said. "A dead star, directly ahead of us! Good God, how close are we?" They were falling straight toward the dim red bulk. "How far are we from it?" Fuller asked.