After a little more banter all round, the travellers discussed the situation more seriously. In the first place, the star was accompanying Venus, and at no great distance, comparatively. For millions of miles the _Regina_ had gone out of her course so that the voyagers could test, retest, and confirm its position and movement, and so far as human means could ascertain, Venus had permanently attached to herself a satellite. As seen from Earth Venus would now be a morning star rising nearly four hours before the sun; for some weeks previously she had been moving to the left, crossing the constellation Leo and was, on that particular day close to β in Virgo; she had only just passed the period of her greatest brilliancy as a morning star, and from Earth would appear like a crescent moon. Between Venus and β in Virgo this ‘Nova,’ or satellite, should now be seen, for the first plan, drawn before the mutineers were landed, had been most carefully compiled; the exact spot was now marked on the plan, but no star was there. Again were the calculations checked over, and again the result showed the position as being between Venus and β in Virgo, as now seen from Earth. “We shall have to do something!” exclaimed Rollsborough. “We cannot return to Earth and leave our fellow creatures to their fate.” “Certainly not!” replied Dennis, “but what are we to do? We are still racing rapidly onward with the impetus obtained from the sun; we can slow up by converting the repulsive force into attractive, but we shall lose the speed and cannot get it again until we come to some world from whose gravity we can get a rebound. It is impossible for us to stand still in space; we can only do that when within the force of gravity of some other world.” “Can you alter direction?” asked Sorrel. “Yes, to a certain extent, but every deviation in space means loss of speed, and we may now be going miles out of the right course every second,” answered Gilbert, as they all stood talking together and asking all manner of questions. “_We_ are not lost,” remarked Ross, “but we are practically in the same state when in any and every direction we go we may be wrong.” “If we turn, can you get force enough to travel, and if we stop, what would happen? annihilation?” “We can turn, certainly,” was the reply, “but as Oakland says, we shall lose speed we cannot regain, and if we lost all, we should have little or no de-atomising force and only a slight repelling force, and be thrown entirely on our engines, which now we use only in atmosphere; with a speed of a few hundred miles an hour obtained in this way it would take us years to get anywhere, almost. We should have to become negative and allow ourselves to be drawn into the gravity of the nearest large star, which in this case is the sun, and we should fly back on to his surface like a comet.” “Then we should be lost?”