"Oh, Kim!" she cried softly. "It's unthinkable!"

He watched the meters. Suddenly, the engines caught. For the fraction of a second they ran irregularly. Then all was normal. There was light. There was weight. An indignant roar came from forward.

"If this is hades—"

They went to the control-room. The Mayor of Steadheim sat on the floor, staring incredulously about him. As they entered he grinned sheepishly.

"I was floating in the air and couldn't see a thing, and then the lights came on and the floor smacked me! What happened and where are we?"

Kim went to the instrument-board and plugged in the heaters—already the vision-ports had begun to frost—and the air-purifier and the other normal devices of a space-ship.

"What happened is simple enough," said Kim. "The last atom of power on board the ship here threw us into transmitter-field drive. And when that field is established it doesn't take power to maintain it.

"So we started to move! There's a relay that should have stopped us, but there wasn't enough power left to work it. So we traveled for probably five minutes on transmitter-drive."

"We went a long way, eh?" said the mayor, comfortably.

"We did," said Kim grimly. "To Ades from its sun is ninety million miles—eight light-minutes. Minutes, remember! The First Galaxy is a hundred thousand light-years across. Light travels a hundred thousand years, going ninety million miles every eight minutes to cross it.

"The Starshine travels a hundred thousand light-years in the ten-thousandth part of a second. In one second—a billion light-years. The most powerful telescope in the Galaxy cannot gather light from so far away. But we went at least three hundred times farther.

"Three hundred billion light-years, plus or minus thirty billions more! We went beyond the farthest that men have ever seen, and kept on beyond the farthest that men have ever thought of!

"The light from the island universes we can see through the ports has never yet reached the First Galaxy since time began. It hasn't had time! We're not only beyond the limits that men have guessed at, we're beyond their wildest imagining!"

The Mayor of Steadheim blinked at him. Then he 

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