“Here!” cried Arturo. “Get away, you!” He moved with irritable aggression at a man who crowded us, gaping curiously. A flight into the void, by air! This was an aërocar, waiting here for us. A white structure of thin, flexible metal, some twenty feet long by four feet wide--open and flat like a long toboggan. There were seats on it, two abreast. A low railing, with bulging pontoons glowing dimly yellow. A streamlike thing; its forward end held a V-shaped windshield six feet high. Behind it a group of controls. Like a bowsprit of some ancient sailing vessel, a metallic tube projected out front. It glowed with a greenish phosphorescence. We climbed on board. None of the attendants came with us; a group of them stood staring, whispering among themselves. Entt spoke to them briefly. The car trembled. The bowsprit tube in advance of us grew more intensely luminous, like a wire electrically heated in the darkness. The air around the tube snapped with a myriad tiny sparks. Arturo said: “That air out front is dissolving--we’ll move forward into the vacuum.” The glowing pontoons along our sides hissed with a downward thrust of gas. We lifted. The metallic stage with its staring group of figures dropped away. Entt tilted the luminous tube a trifle upward. We slid forward into the vacuum. Faster. The wind went rushing past us. We slid out and upward into the blackness of the void, with its tiny points of light twinkling like stars in the distance. * * * * * I have flown, off and on, all my life. But this flight in the void of the abyss had an eerie unreality. Unreal, like the magic fancy of a child. Witches on a broomstick, with the rushing night around them, slanting up into the stars. Or a magic strip of carpet, this white thing upon which we crouched. Rushing through the wind; flexible, bending, undulating throughout its length beneath us. We spoke very little; the noise of the wind tore at our words. I pulled at Arturo’s arm. “How long--this flight?” “An hour and a half, perhaps.” My eyes seemed growing accustomed to the darkness; I strained them into the black space dotted with stars. Not many; occasional groups of them, above us, and as I gazed down over the low rail, I could see them twinkling underneath. The immensity of celestial space, as though we were rushing through it, out among the stars. The sensation was suddenly dispelled. These were not stars, gigantic, infinitely far away, but points of man-made light, comparatively close. Gazing down, with vision expanding now in the darkness, I made out a vague black surface sliding under us. It lay, not horizontal, but sloping at a sharp angle, and I knew then that we were flying tilted partly sidewise. And while I stared, it swung level as we righted. A dark surface of land; and the stars were lights down there. I saw them now as different colors, and in groups which might serve as landmarks.