She had her way, but early the next morning Seaton was again at the keyboard, wearing a complex headset and driving a tenuous fabric of force far out into the void. After an hour or so he tensed suddenly, every sense concentrated upon something vaguely perceptible; something which became less and less nebulous as his steady fingers rotated micrometric dials in infinitesimal arcs. "Come get a load of this, folks!" he called at last. "Mart, what would a planet--an inhabited planet, at that--be doing 'way out here, Heaven only knows how many light-centuries away from the nearest Galaxy?" * * * * * The three donned headsets and seated themselves in their chairs in the base of the great projector. Instantly they felt projections of themselves hurled an incomprehensible distance out into empty space. But that weird sensation was not new; each was thoroughly accustomed to the feeling of duality incident to being in the _Skylark_ in body, yet with a duplicate mentality carried by the projection to a point many light-years distant from his corporeal substance. Their mentalities, thus projected, felt a fleeting instant of unthinkable velocity, then hung poised above the surface of a small but dense planet, a planet utterly alone in that dreadful void. [Illustration: _Dorothy, Margaret and Crane donned headsets and seated themselves in the base of the great projector._] But it was like no other planet with which the Terrestrial wanderers were familiar. It possessed neither air nor water, and it was entirely devoid of topographical features. It was merely a bare, mountainless, depthless sphere of rock and metal. Though sunless, it was not dark; it glowed with a strong, white light which emanated from the rocky soil itself. Nothing animate was visible, nor was there a sign that any form of life, animal or vegetable, had ever existed there. "You can talk if you want to," Seaton observed, noticing that Dorothy was holding back by main strength a torrent of words. "They can't hear us--there's no audio in the circuit." "What do you mean by 'they,' Dick?" she demanded. "You said it was an inhabited planet. That one isn't inhabited. It never was, and it can't possibly be, _ever!_" "When I spoke I thought that it was inhabited, in the ordinary sense of the word, but I see now that it isn't," he replied, quietly and thoughtfully. "But they were there a minute ago, and they'll probably be back. Don't kid yourself, Dimples. It's inhabited, all right, and by somebody we don't know much--or rather, by something that we knew once--altogether too well." "The pure intellectuals," Crane stated, rather than asked. "Yes; and that accounts for the impossible location of the planet, too. They probably materialized it out there, just for the exercise. There, they're coming back. Feel 'em?"