Seaton soon finished his calculations. He then read off from the great graduated hour-space and declination-circles of the gyroscope cage the course upon which the power bar was then set, and turned with a grin to Crane, who had just opened the shutter for his first time exposure. "We were off plenty, Mart," he admitted. "The whole gyroscope system was rotated about ninety degrees minus declination and something like plus seven hours' right ascension, so we'll have to forget all our old data and start out from scratch with the reference planes as they are now. That won't hurt us much, though, since we haven't any idea where we are, anyway. "We're heading about ten degrees or so to the right of that nebula over there, which is certainly a mighty long ways off from where I thought we were going. I'll put on full positive and point ten degrees to the left of it. Probably you'd better read it now, and by taking a set of observations, say a hundred hours apart, we can figure when we'll have to reverse acceleration. "While you're doing that I thought I'd start seeing what I could do about a fourth-order projector. It'll take a long time to build, and we'll need one bad when we get inside that Galaxy. What do you think?" "I think that both of those ideas are sound," Crane assented, and each man bent to his task. * * * * * Crane took his photographs and studied each of the six key nebulae with every resource of his ultrarefined instruments. Having determined the _Skylark's_ course and speed, and knowing her acceleration, he was able at last to set upon the power bar an automatically varying control of such a nature that her resultant velocity was directly toward the lenticular nebula nearest her former line of flight. That done, he continued his observations at regular intervals--constantly making smaller his limit of observational error, constantly so altering the power and course of the vessel that the selected Galaxy would be reached in the shortest possible space of time consistent with a permissible final velocity. And in the meantime Seaton labored upon the projector. It had been out of the question, of course, to transfer to tiny _Two_ the immense mechanism which had made of _Three_ a sentient, almost a living, thing; but, equally of course, he had brought along the force-band transformers and selectors, and as much as possible of the other essential apparatus. He had been obliged to leave behind, however, the very heart of the fifth-order installation--the precious lens of neutronium--and its lack was now giving him deep concern. "What's the matter, Dickie? You look as though you had lost your last friend." Dorothy intercepted him one day as he paced about the narrow confines of the control room, face set and eyes unseeing.