Staring ahead into space from the control-chair of our racing flier, I heard Whitely's voice from beside me. "Seventeen days," he was saying. "And in two more days we ought to reach Earth." I nodded abstractedly, gazing ahead. "Two days at the most," I said. "We're inside Jupiter's orbit now, and once through the asteroidal belt, there'll be nothing to delay us." For as Whitely and I gazed outward, Marlin and Randall sleeping now in two of the space-flier's bunks, we could see that we were approaching, indeed, that belt of whirling asteroids that marked the division between the four inner and the four great outer planets of the solar system. To the left, dropping behind us, gleamed the gigantic cloud-belted sphere of Jupiter with its stately train of attendant moons, as great a mystery to us as when we first had passed it. A side force-ray was holding the flier out still from the mighty planet's attraction, while ahead and to the right from us now gleamed crimson Mars. Yet it was not these that held the eyes of Whitely and myself, nor even the increasing fiery circle of the sun before us, but the bluish-white little spot of light that was expanding slowly in size and brilliance as we shot on toward it, the little spot of bluish light that was our planet, Earth. For days we had gazed toward that little light-spot as our space-flier went on and on through the solar system's vast reaches toward it. For seventeen days, now, even as Whitely had said, we had been racing inward from Neptune at utmost speed on our desperate journey back to our own world. The space-flier's great rear force-ray, pushing back against giant Neptune, had hurled the flier in through the outer reaches of our universe with an acceleration of velocity that was so great as to prove almost our undoing. For more than once that terrific pressure of that acceleration on us, despite our shock-absorbing apparatus, had so affected our bodies as to overcome us with successive fits of nausea and unconsciousness. And once, just after we had swept in past great Saturn and its mighty rings, fearful of those great rings after our former misadventure with them, I had awakened from my sleep-period to find Randall and Marlin, in the control-chairs, quite unconscious from the flier's terrific acceleration, the flier itself speeding onward without any guiding hand on its controls.