A heavy explosion--a jerk--a rabid greenish-white mountain of water aft--the deck beneath my feet began to move, soft as rubber; and everything below, the whole life, forever.... For a second, falling deeper and deeper into a sort of funnel, becoming more and more compressed--the icy-blue relief-map of the City, the round bubbles of cupolas, the lonely leaden finger of the Accumulating Tower.... Then instantaneously a cotton curtain of cloud.... We pierced it, and there was the sun and the blue sky! Seconds, minutes, miles--the blue was hardening, fast filling with darkness; like drops of cold silver sweat appeared the stars.... A sad, unbearably bright, black, starry, sunny night.... As if one had become deaf, one still saw that the pipes were roaring, but one only saw, dead silence all about. The sun was mute. It was natural, of course. One might have expected it; we were beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. The transition was so quick, so sudden that everyone became timid and silent. Yet I ... I thought I felt even easier under that fantastic, mute sun. I had bounded over the inevitable border, having left my body somewhere there below, and I was soaring bodiless to a new world, where everything was to be different, upside down. "Keep the same course!" I shouted into the engine-room, or perhaps it was not I but a phonograph in me, and the same machine with a mechanical, hinge-like movement handed the commander's trumpet to the Second Builder. All permeated by that most delicate, molecular quiver known only to me, I ran down the companionway, to seek.... The door of the saloon.... An hour later it was to latch and lock itself.... At the door stood an unfamiliar Number. He was small, with a face like a hundred or a thousand others which are usually lost in a crowd, but his arms were exceptionally long,--they reached down to the knees as though by mistake they had been taken from another set of human organs and fastened to his shoulders. The long arm stretched out and barred the way. "Where do you want to go?" It was clear that he was not aware I knew everything. All right! Perhaps it was necessary that it should be so. From above him, in a deliberately significant tone I said: "I am the Builder of the _Integral_ and I am directing the test flight. Do you understand?" The arm drew away. The saloon. Heads covered with bristles, gray iron bristles, and yellow heads, and bald, ripe heads were bent over the instruments and maps. Swiftly, with a glance, I gathered them in with my eyes, off I ran, back along the long passage, then through the hatch into the engine-room. There it was hot from the red tubes, overheated by the explosions; a constant roar,--the levers were dancing their desperate drunken dance, quivering ceaselessly with a barely noticeable quiver; the arrows on the dials.... There! At last! Near the tachometer, a notebook in his hand, was that man with the low forehead.