At ever slower speed we were rushing in toward it, and at last, moving at but a few hundred thousand miles an hour by this time, were driving in out of the void and past Earth's shining moon, gleaming in space to our right, its great ranges and strange craters clear to our eyes from its airless surface. But now all our eyes were on Earth ahead, since now through the drifting cloud-masses that floated in its atmosphere we could make out the great bluish globe's surface features, could see that western Europe and North Africa lay in the sunlight in that crescent of light at Earth's side, but that the North and South Americas lay in the shade of Earth's outer side, in the darkness of night. It was toward the dark half-seen outline of North America that I was heading the flier, for by this time, traveling still more slowly, our velocity now being less than a thousand miles an hour, we were entering Earth's atmosphere, the rarefied air of its outer reaches roaring about the flier as it shot through it. "Straight to New York--to the World Congress," Marlin was saying. "There's not a minute to lose." I nodded silently, at the same time snapping out the front-ray of the flier that was slowing our speed as we shot toward Earth's surface, and as its gravitation gripped the flier we were turning until instead of rushing onward we were falling to its surface from high above, as it turned in space before us, falling down toward the surface of the North American continent, whose outline was visible from our great height through the shifting cloud-screen. I felt my heart beating rapidly as we shot thus downward, forgot almost the mighty import of the mission on which we were returning in the mere fact of our return; for we were first of all men to venture thus into the outer void and to return from that void to Earth! And as we shot downward I saw the same thought mirrored in the faces of the others, staring down with me. Down--down--with an oblique ray I was making the space-flier fall slantingly, more and more slowly, toward the northeastern coast of the continent beneath, whose broad, brown surface stretched out greater and greater beneath us. Moments more and as the roar of air about us intensified, mingling with the throbbing of our generators, we shot down from the sun's light into the darkness of this dark side of Earth, this night of Earth's one side. But now its great surface was changing from convex to concave beneath us, and now as we shot lower still Randall pointed downward and northward with a low cry toward a spark of bright red light, the beam of the great air-beacon of the trans-Atlantic air-liners, at New York. Slower--slower--and in moments more the vast mass of its towering cylindrical buildings, ablaze with outlining lights, was coming into view, with midmost among them the greatest of all, the huge mass of the World Government building.