"I believe that it is." Crane, the methodical, had been thinking deeply, considering every phase of their peculiar predicament. "Coexistent, but different in all its attributes and properties. Since we may be said to be experiencing two different time rates simultaneously, we cannot even guess at what our velocity relation is, in either system of coördinates. As to what happened, that is now quite clear. Since a three-dimensional object cannot exist in hyperspace, it of course cannot be thrown or forced through hyperspace. "In order to enter this region, our vessel and everything in it had to acquire the property of extension in another dimension. Your forces, calculated to rotate us here, in reality forced us to assume that extra extension, which process automatically moved us from the space in which we could no longer exist into the only one in which it is possible for us to exist. When that force is no longer operative, our extension into the fourth dimension will vanish and we shall as automatically return to our customary three-dimensional space, but probably not to our original location in that space. Is that the way you understand it?" "That's a lot better than I understood it, and it's absolutely right, too. Thanks, old thinker! And I certainly hope we don't land back there where we took off from--that's why we left, because we wanted to get away from there. The farther the better," Seaton laughed. "Just so we don't get so far away that the whole Galaxy is out of range of the object-compasses we've got focused on it. We'd be lost for fair, then." "That is a possibility, of course." Crane took the light utterance far more seriously than did Seaton. "Indeed, if the two time rates are sufficiently different, it becomes a probability. However, there is another matter which I think is of more immediate concern. It occurred to me, when I saw you take that pinch of tobacco without opening the tin, that everywhere we have gone, even in intergalactic space, we have found life, some friendly, some inimical. There is no real reason to suppose that hyperspace is devoid of animate and intelligent life." "Oh, Martin!" Margaret shuddered. "Life! Here? In this horrible, this utterly impossible place?" "Certainly, dearest," he replied gravely. "It all goes back to the conversation we had long ago, during the first trip of the old _Skylark_. Remember? Life need not be comprehensible to us to exist--compared to what we do not know and what we can never either know or understand, our knowledge is infinitesimal." She did not reply and he spoke again to Seaton: