And now, too, the sun was flaming before us, in all the halo-like glory of its great corona, with a brilliance blinding to our eyes after the dim shades of Neptune and its moon. Yet even with that brilliance dazzling us we could make out plainer and plainer the sphere of Earth, seeming to our eyes a thin silver-blue crescent as it spun there between our inrushing flier and the sun, its tiny moon-spot growing brighter too. Marlin and Whitely and Randall watching tensely beside me, I cut out altogether the great force-ray at the flier's rear, which, even when our speed had reached its maximum, drove us straight onward and kept that speed unvarying against the gravitational influences from either side which were not large enough to require an opposing side-ray. Snapping that rear-ray out, I sent another force-ray from the flier toward the Earth-sphere ahead, and as that ray struck and pushed us back with immense power, the space-flier's colossal speed was gradually decreasing. * * * * * Once more we felt terrific upward and forward pressure in our chairs as the flier's speed steadily slowed, dropped swiftly from eight million miles an hour to six and then to five and then to three. And as we shot in thus toward Earth, the millions of miles dropping slower behind as our flier's great faceted ball clicked through space at slower and slower speed, I knew the same question was in the minds of my three friends as in my own. It was reflected in the tensely anxious eyes of Marlin and the imperturbable eyes of Whitely and the unwontedly grave eyes of Randall as the three stared ahead with me. Would the space-fliers that the World President and the World Congress had promised to build be ready? If not, we knew we certainly could not venture out to Neptune and put an end to the great doom-ray that the Neptunians were stabbing toward the sun. So that it was in a growing suspense of spirit that we watched Earth's sphere, with its crescent of bluish-white light at one side, expanding before us.