There was no public celebration. Like Livingston, I had no close family, so that only a few of the family and friends of Peter Duroh and James Carruthers, our other assistant, were here on this momentous night in the little board hangar to see us off.

"Tell him to come in," Dr. Livingston was saying. "I want to start on the midnight hour."

The big, dark-haired young Duroh went to the incline that led down from the upper control turret room where we were now standing and shouted to Carruthers, who was still down, bidding good-bye to the visitors on the hangar floor.

"All right," he shouted up to us. "I'm coming." He came in a moment. He was Livingston's most competent technician, this James Carruthers. Like young Duroh, he had been with us almost from the start of the building of the Planeteer. He was an older man, rather a small, tight-lipped, sandy-haired fellow. Grim of aspect, usually silent, listening with alert, keen gray eyes.

"All ready," he said.

"Yes, bolt the door," Dr. Livingston agreed.

We waved our last farewells to the silent, awed little group of men and women down in the hangar, and I swung the big glassite bull's-eye door closed, bolted it and admitted the Erentz current into it.

Departure from earth.... There was no one who could have seen that pioneer departure, much less be on it, without a surging thrill and a trembling. Certainly I felt it. Excitement—and fear. There is no one who can face the unknown without a little shudder, no matter how adventurous and reckless he may be. I recall that we four, in the dimly starlit little turret—starlight which came down through the open roof of the hangar and through our glassite dome—stood grim, silent and awed. Then Dr. Livingston flung the current into the base gravity plates set for the repelling negation.

The Planeteer trembled just a little; and then slowly, silently was rising....

Departure from earth.... And we were just the second party of all earth people in history who had ever seriously tried it. The first, as you all recall, had been sixteen years before. The ill-fated Blake expedition—six men, one of them the strange, humanity-hating George Simpson, joining the explorers at the last moment, declaiming publicly that he wanted to leave the earth forever! Vowing that if Blake landed anywhere in the Universe, he, George Simpson, would remain there in preference to coming 

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