They took off at noon on a cloudy winter day. They spent the afternoon dividing their attention between the test-flight instruments and the surrounding sky. They hadn't the money to afford elaborate recording mechanisms to graph every moment of the flight onto neat tape-spools; they had to rely on the human eye, the questionably analytical human mind, and the servo-mechanism of a human hand wielding a pencil on a loose-leaf notebook. And they constantly expected to see a razor-winged jet fighter hurtling down from the stratosphere above them, its cannon sparkling the bright flame-color of death. They didn't talk much that afternoon. They took turns at the controls and eating until each had consumed his dinner, then gathered tensely in the control pit as the ship bored rumblingly into the black night. Ahead of them was the Mexican Border. Below them and around them, almost scraping the ship's belly, as low as they were, was the jumbled, boulder-strewn Arizona desert bathed in frosty white moonlight. Above were the cold, twinkling stars, the black heavens--and who could tell what radar-equipped night fighter poised above them, ready to peel off and plummet downward, guns blazing-- Then the Border was behind them. They took turns at the controls and instruments again, catching a few winks of sleep between turns. Morning dawned, and they approached the Gulf of Mexico. Morrow checked their supplies--food and water for the trip, parts and materials stowed in the spacious cargo deck for repairs on the ship if necessary--and they took turns at breakfast. Then he and Foster sat down to an argument about the scientific implications of the gravitors. Foster was of the opinion that Einstein's theory no longer was valid, that Milne's work came closer to the truth but was still vague. Morrow thought differently, and they argued together amicably. Noon passed, and they were over the green expanse of the Gulf. Smitty called their attention to the short-wave radio. The newscasts were quite interesting. A professional hunter in Nevada, hired to exterminate a mountain lion which had been slaughtering a rancher's cattle, was surprised when a ship that looked "like a big, black whale" thundered over his head and plunged down behind a nearby ridge. The hunter rode hastily around the ridge, expecting to find the wreck, but the ship had vanished completely "as if the ground up and swallered it!" A Greyhound bus proceeding across Arizona nearly swerved off the road when "a long, black torpedo at least a hundred feet long" came across the sky "so fast the air thunder-clapped behind it" and left "a trail of blue fire" behind it. Passengers on the bus verified the driver's story, with some minor variations. Two farmers standing in a field in northern Nebraska saw a flight of six "fish-shaped" objects go over, each having a shadow "big as a barn" on the snow.