About me, frantic figures boiled and churned. The skipper of the Saturn was bouncing about the control room like a bipedal gadfly, jerking switches, bellowing orders, pawing through charts that--to me at least--were a complete mystery. Dick Todd still sat, tense and grim-jawed, in his bucket-shaped pilot's chair. His fingers played the banked controls before him as the fingers of an accomplished organist seek stops, but so far as I could see, his movements availed nothing. For the object in the visiplate loomed larger and ever larger. Lancelot Biggs had wasted very little time scanning charts. Despairing of finding any record of this cosmic visitant, he had grabbed paper and pencil, and was now scrawling hasty calculations. Hank Cleaver was watching him. I glanced at Helen. She was watching Hank. Rather hopefully, I thought. Hank said, "What's it show, Lanse?" Biggs looked up at him haggardly. "The mass of that planet must be terrific. It has a heavy gravitational attraction. We're accelerating by leaps and bounds. At our present rate of acceleration, only about twenty minutes remain before we--we--" He paused, glancing helplessly at Helen MacDowell. There was a strange longing in his eyes. I remembered, all of a sudden, a fact he had mentioned. That somewhere back on Earth, a girl waited for him. A girl who had promised to be his wife. His next words showed that he shared my thought. "I don't mind checking out," he said quietly. "We who dare the spaceways risk that hazard always. But I wish I could have seen her once more before--" It was then that Hallowell pushed forward. He was scared, and plenty scared. So scared that his voice was a thin, bleating yammer. "Lieutenant, you can at least send us back to our proper time! You can't let us die like this! Without a chance--like trapped rats!" "Rats!" I said scornfully. "Speak for yourself, Hallowell!" But Lancelot Biggs nodded. "He's right. We still have twenty minutes. It is not right that you of another age should share our fate. We must get the temporal deflector into operation, send all of you back--" Hank cried sharply, "Just us? Why not everybody, Lanse? Let's _all_ escape to the twentieth century. The whole kit an' kiboodle!" But Biggs shook his head. "I'm afraid that is impossible, Hank. There are limitations to temporal transmission. You and your friends can enter _our_ time because there is no natural barrier, but _we_ cannot violate the established world-line of things that have been. We never were in your time, therefore we cannot now go there. But, wait--" He spun swiftly to a wall-audio, spoke to the engine room below. "Get the deflector ready. We're sending our guests back!" Then, nodding to all of us, "If you will come with me--" * * * * * We started for the door. But we had taken just a few steps when the audio buzzed. Biggs answered its call, listened for a moment, cried out,