For hours he labored with all the power of his wonderful brain, now stored with all the accumulated knowledge of thousands upon thousands of years of Norlaminian research. He stopped occasionally to eat, and once, at his wife's insistence, he snatched a little troubled and uneasy sleep; but his mind drove him back to his board and at that board he worked. Worked--while the hands of the chronometer approached more and ever more nearly the zero hour. Worked--while the _Skylark's_ immense stores of uranium dwindled visibly away in the giving up of their inconceivable amounts of intra-atomic energy to brace the screens which were dissipating the inexhaustible flood of cosmic force being directed against them. Worked--in vain. At last he glanced at the chronometer and stood up. "Twenty minutes now--time to go," he announced. "Dot, come here a minute!" "Sweetheart!" Tall though Dorothy was, the top of her auburn head came scarcely higher than Seaton's chin. Tightly but tenderly held in his mighty arms she tipped her head back, and her violet eyes held no trace of fear as they met his. "It's all right, lover. I don't know whether it's because I think we're going to get away, or because we're together; but I'm not the least bit afraid of whatever it is that's going to happen to us." "Neither am I, dear. Some way, I simply can't believe that we're passing out; I've got a hunch that we're going to come through. We've got a lot to live for yet, you and I, together. But I want to tell you what you already know--that, whatever happens, I love you." "Hurry it up, Seatons!" Margaret's voice recalled them to reality, and all five were wafted upon beams of force into the spherical launching space of the craft in which they were to venture into the unknown. That vessel was _Skylark Two_, the forty-foot globe of arenak which from Earth to Norlamin had served them so well and which had been carried, life-boatlike, well inside the two-mile-long torpedo which was _Skylark Three_. The massive doors were clamped and sealed, and the five human beings strapped themselves into their seats against they knew not what emergency. "All ready, folks?" Seaton grasped the ebonite handle of his master switch. "I'm not going to tell you Cranes good-by, Mart--you know my hunch. You got one, too?" "I cannot say that I have. However, I have always had a great deal of confidence in your ability. Then, too, I have always been something of a fatalist; and, most important of all, like you and Dorothy, Margaret and I are together. You may start any time now, Dick." "All right--hang on. On your marks! Get set! _Go!_"