"As a physicist, Red-Top, you're a fine little beauty-contest winner." Seaton grinned. "You forget that with the velocity she had, the _Lark_ couldn't have been stopped within three months, either--yet she seemed to stop. How about that, Mart?" "I have been thinking about that. It is all a question of relative velocities, of course; but even at that, the angle of departure of the two spaces must have been extreme indeed to account for our present location in three-dimensional space." "Extreme is right; but there's no use yapping about it now, any more than about any other spilled milk. We'll just have to go places and do things; that's all." "Go where and do what?" asked Dorothy pointedly. "Lost--lost in space!" Margaret breathed. As the dread import of their predicament struck into her consciousness she had seized the arm rests of her chair in a spasmodic clutch; but she forced herself to relax and her deep brown eyes held no sign of panic. "But we have been lost in space before, Dottie, apparently as badly as we are now. Worse, really, because we did not have Martin and Dick with us then." "'At-a-girl, Peg!" Seaton cheered. "We may--be lost--guess we are, temporarily, at least--but we're not licked, not by seven thousand rows of apple trees!" "I fail to perceive any very solid basis for your optimism," Crane remarked quietly, "but you have an idea, of course. What is it?" "Pick out the Galaxy nearest our line of flight and brake down for it." Seaton's nimble mind was leaping ahead. "The _Lark's_ so full of uranium that her skin's bulging, so we've got power to burn. In that Galaxy there are--there _must_ be--suns with habitable, possibly inhabited, planets. We'll find one such planet and land on it. Then we'll do with our might what our hands find to do." "Such as?" "Along what lines?" queried Dorothy and Crane simultaneously. "Space ship, probably--_Two's_ entirely too small to be of any account in intergalactic work," Seaton replied promptly. "Or maybe fourth-, fifth- and sixth-order projectors; or maybe some kind of an ultra-ultra radio or projector. How do I know, from here? But there's thousands of things that maybe we can do--we'll wait until we get there to worry about which one to try first." XV. Seaton strode over to the control board and applied maximum acceleration. "Might as well start traveling, Mart," he remarked to Crane, who had for almost an hour been devoting the highest telescopic power of number six visiplate to spectroscopic, interferometric, and spectrophotometric studies of half a dozen selected nebulae. "No matter which one you pick out we'll have to have quite a lot of positive acceleration yet before we reverse to negative."