Strange good news! There was a note of suppressed excitement in those three words which somehow communicated to me so that as I flew my little car up to the Maine woods that evening I was tensed to hear what it could be. My name is John Taine, as naturally you must have realized from my preface. There is nothing of me that can be of interest to this narrative previous to that spring morning of 1990. I quite imagine I was a drab enough sort of young fellow. Certainly my work as mechanic in the building of stratosphere ships had brought me little money and no claim to achievement. But Dr. Livingston liked me; for a year now I had been working for him, building to his specifications that primitive little space ship with which he hoped to pioneer on an exploratory flight to some other world. Livingston was an inventor and scientist of very great genius. But unfortunately, being a dreamer, a gentle fellow and trusting--completely no businessman--he had gone through life impoverished. We had been much pinched for funds in our work. Our little flyer indeed was now not finished, and I was on an enforced vacation, with our funds exhausted, waiting until Dr. Livingston might find some sponsor to refinance us. Strange good news? Assuredly I was hoping that he would have a few decimars in hand now--or even a few thousand gold dollars with which we might continue the work. * * * * * His pleasure and excitement were obvious when he greeted me in the laboratory of his isolated little Maine home, upon my arrival just after dusk that evening. "Good news, John. It certainly is. I couldn't tell you before what I've been trying to do here while work on the _Planeteer_ had to stop. But I've accomplished my purpose." "Money--" I said. "Money, yes. Oh, yes, indeed, John. And fame. The accomplishment of our desire--to make a flight into Interplanetary space, and come back again. We've got it all within our reach now. Sit down, John--I'll tell you what I've done." I had never seen Dr. Livingston so excited. He was a small man, forty perhaps, though he looked somewhat older with his thin face and his shaggy, longish iron-gray hair. He had no family; he lived here alone, with only one deaf old woman for his housekeeper. We were in his chemical laboratory now--a littered room on the ground floor of his home, which was a few miles out in the country from a small town of the Maine coast. We were building the _Planeteer_ here, in a big impromptu frame hangar which was set on the wooded hilltop a hundred yards or so from the house. But work on the _Planeteer_ had ceased. Our two assistants who had been engaged with me now, like myself, were laid off. There was no one here tonight save Livingston and me and the old woman who now had gone to her room upstairs.