He had been trying to find some ray that would respond to the individual characteristics of the atoms under consideration. He had found it, but finding it he had met his death. The ray had attacked him somehow. It does not seem likely that he experimented on himself without trying it on some inanimate body first. But perhaps he did. At any rate, it did what he hoped, it scanned him, and recognized each individual atom, and each separate molecule, and as far as it went, it was successful. But in scanning him the ray released all the energy in the atoms of his body. He was killed instantly and most of his apparatus was utterly ruined. However, enough was saved to make a beginning possible for the others. And on this basis they built. As the ray scanned and recognized an atom it drew out its energy, to leave it free. This had fused the apparatus, stopped the ray, and killed the scientist. Knowing the danger, others experimented. By draining the energy away safely they scanned a small object, and sent the signals to another station where, by feeding the necessary energy into the machine, they were able to reconstruct it. The first step had been taken. But it required many years to develop this apparatus. Now came the greatest problem of all. They must find some means to send the material image to a predestined terminal without having a station there to receive it. This could be done with a three-dimensional shadow image. Could they do it with the solid bodies? The ten thousand years had dwindled steadily--five thousand had passed before the development of the fourth dimensional scanning. Morus Tol was still a young man when he was killed, but with four thousand two hundred years yet to go, they met their hardest problem, and they were without a genius to solve it. The long years had dwindled to less than two centuries before there came a man who solved the problem of a refinement of the vibration control. It is as impossible for me to describe the machines of that day as it would be for a blind man to describe red to another. It is a thing inconceivable to each. But it was done--only to find that the shock of the journey killed all living creatures. And then, ten short years before the sun at last faded forever, the last bridge was crossed. A man in a space ship was projected from a laboratory on Earth to a point near Venus. All the System watched that demonstration through the news machines. Long since they had decided where they would go. Now that they could travel with almost infinite speed, they chose a goal that would be safe to life for aeons to come. BETELGUESE! It was their goal now.