And as Whitely and I gazed out through the flashing flier's windows, we knew that scant enough was the time left for us in which to do these things. Even if we were safe on Earth in the next two days, as we hoped, there would remain but little more than forty days before the coming of the dread cataclysm that threatened, and it would require half that time for the space-fliers of Earth to make their way back out across the solar system to Neptune. So that now there lay over my mind that deepening shadow of impending colossal disaster that had hovered over all our minds during the strange days of our racing inward through the solar system, making me gaze somberly enough toward the bluish light-spot in the darkness of space far ahead that was our goal now. To the left, though, Jupiter's great globe had dropped far behind now, and as I saw that I cut out our side-ray, and turned toward Whitely. "We're at the edge of the asteroidal belt now," I told him, "but I'm not going to slow our speed. We'll just flash on through it and take our chance." He nodded gravely. "I'll wake Marlin and Randall now to help me keep watch," he said. A moment later, having done so, Marlin and Randall freed themselves of the straps of the bunks and climbed across the flier to take their places beside Whitely in watching for the great menacing asteroids. And as we passed on through the belt of those whirling perils, Marlin and Whitely and Randall watched for hour on hour there beside me, though so vast was the maximum speed at which our flier was going now, more than eight million miles an hour, that before they could more than get a flashing glimpse of a nearby asteroid we would have passed it. We were relying almost wholly on blind chance to take us through the asteroidal belt at that lightning speed, yet so desperate was this grim race back to Earth from the solar system's edge, that we preferred to trust thus to chance, rather than to slow our speed or to delay by an hour our arrival on Earth. And chance, for the time, favored us, for some hours later we had won through the perils of the asteroidal belt without more than a few split-second glimpses of the great whirling spheres of peril. And then, as we shot across the orbit of Mars with the planet's dull red shield still farther to the right, I began to slow our terrific speed, for by this time the Earth was expanding rapidly before us.