got up and peered out the vision-ports. Dim, remote luminosities were visible, each one a galaxy of a thousand million suns!

"Hah!" grunted the mayor, "Not much to look at, at that! Now what?"

Kim spread out his hands and looked at Dona.

"Turning about and trying to go back," he said, "would be like starting from an individual grain of sand on a desert, and flying a thousand miles, and then trying to fly back to that grain of sand again. That's how the First Galaxy stacks up."

Dona took a deep breath.

"You'll find a way, Kim! And—anyhow—"

She smiled at him shakily. Whether or not they ever saw another human being she was prepared to take what came, with him. The possibility of being lost amid the uncountable island universes of the cosmos had been known to them both from the beginning of the use of the Starshine.

"We'll take some pictures," Kim told her, "and then sit down on a planet and figure things out."

He set to work making a map of all the island universes in view of the Starshine's current position, with due regard to the Starshine's course. On the relatively short jumps within a galaxy, and especially those of a few light-years only, he could simply turn the ship about and come very close to his original position—the line of it, anyhow.

But he did not know within many many billions of light-years how far he had come and he did know that an error of a hundredth of a second of arc would amount to millions of light-years at the distance of the First Galaxy.

The positions of galaxies about the First were plotted only within a radius of something like two million light-years. There had never been a point in even that! At fifteen hundred thousand times that distance he was not likely to strike the tiny mapped area by accident.

He set to work. Presently he was examining the photographs by enlarger for a sign of structure in one of the galaxies in view. One showed evidences of super-giant stars—which proved it the nearest. He aimed the Starshine for it. He threw the ship into transmitter-drive.

The galaxy was startlingly familiar when they reached it. The stellar types were normal ones and there were star-clusters and doubtless star-drifts too and Kim was wholly accustomed to astro-navigation now.

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