With the utmost acceleration of speed that we could stand, though, our space-flier was now hurtling outward, its great force-ray pushing against Saturn with more and more power and sending us flashing forward with greater and greater velocity. In the next dozen hours of our flight we had reached again to the speed of five million miles an hour that had been ours before we had met with our misadventure at Saturn. And as we hurtled on Neptune was slowly largening before our eyes, its distant, tiny little spot of calm green light becoming bigger, brighter, though very slowly. But the eyes of Marlin and Whitely and Randall and myself were always upon that green light-spot as we hurtled on, hour following hour and day following day in our eventless onward flight through the solar system's outer immensities of space. And still our speed was steadily growing until at last, by the time we approached Uranus' orbit, we were flying through the great void at the space-flier's utmost velocity, more than eight million miles an hour. That was a speed colossal, yet so accustomed had we four become to the space-flier's tremendous velocities that it seemed not unusual to us. Flashing through the void as we were, the only objects by which one could measure speed were the planets before and behind us, and these changed in size so slowly as to make our speed seem small. The greatest change to us in the attaining of the space-flier's immense utmost speed was the change of conditions inside the flier itself. Formerly the pressure of our constant acceleration had replaced to some degree the effects of gravitation, that pressure forcing us always towards the flier's rear, as we turned more and more power into our giant pushing ray, as we shot out with greater and greater speed. But now, with our utmost speed attained and that acceleration's pressure missing, we floated inside the flier as though entirely weightless, being attracted only very slightly toward the walls by the slight gravitational attraction of the flier's mass itself. So that now the straps across chairs and bunks and the handholds here and there on the walls that we had provided proved indispensable to us, indeed. * * * * *