I smiled a little as I swung back from the control-panel along the flier's inside wall. I went from handhold to handhold with the pressure of its acceleration still upon me, until I had thrown myself into my metal bunk to fall almost instantly asleep, and to dream nightmare dreams of rushing on through endless space toward a goal that ever receded from us. And in the hours that followed, in the next three days that our space-flier shot on and on with Saturn growing ever greater ahead, the nightmare quality of my experience persisted. It seemed impossible, at times, that we four were in reality doing that which men had never done before; that we were flinging ourselves out into the great void, out through the solar system toward the planet that was its last outpost. We were watching and eating and sleeping, indeed, like men in a dream, so strange and utterly unreal seemed to us this unending rush through unending space. * * * * * But though we slept, and ate, and watched at the control-panel like men in a dream, there were times in those hours when realization of our position, of our great mission, came sharply home to us. Those were the times that Marlin trained his instruments upon the sun, which had by then dwindled to a tiny blazing disk behind us. And with those instruments Marlin found that the sun was still spinning ever faster and faster, its rotatory period decreasing still by the same amount each day, its day of division and doom steadily approaching. And with his own recorders Whitely found that the colossal force-ray from Neptune still was stabbing toward the sun, still turning it faster and faster toward its doom and that of its universe. That great force-ray, we found, was stabbing toward the sun on a line between our flier's course and Saturn, but was on a somewhat higher level, so that in reality the great ray did not lie between our flier and Saturn but above both. The consciousness we had of that great ray's existence and the knowledge we had of the doom it was loosing upon the peoples of our world served to prevent the dream-like lassitude of our conditions from overpowering us, and we were further awakened by the swift expansion of Saturn, ahead, as our flier neared it. For by then the great faceted ball of our flier was hurtling on through the void at five million miles an hour, slowly approaching the limits of its speed as our mighty rear force-ray drove us forward with tremendous power. And at that speed, in the next three days, Saturn loomed larger and larger ahead, until we saw at last that upon the fourth day's beginning we would pass the mighty planet. And at that our interest rose to excitement, because we would pass closer by Saturn than any of the planets in our straight flight out to Neptune, passing it indeed by no more than a million miles. So that as the last hours of those three days passed, we observed the big, yellow-glowing disk of Saturn ahead with intense interest.