ents, the velocity was gone, and I hung poised. I saw Grantline's
bloated form not over fifty feet from me. He waved an arm at me.

Out here in the void I lay weightless, as though upon an infinitely
soft feather bed. I could kick, flounder, but not endow myself with
motion. I craned my neck, gazed around through the bulging vizor pane.

The Earth and the Sun hung level with the white star-dots strewn
everywhere. I could not see that unknown light-beam from Greater New
York; it was shafting out now in the other direction, so that the
Earth hid it from me. Venus was visible to one side of the Sun. The
enemy light-stream from Grebhar was apparent; and as I turned my body
and bent double to look behind me, I saw Mars and the sword-like ray
from Ferrok-Shahn. The beams streamed off like the radiance of the
Milky Way, faintly luminous but seemingly visible for an infinite
distance.

The _Cometara_ was obviously falling now toward the Moon, drawn
irresistibly, and all of us with her, toward the lunar surface. It
seemed so close, that black and white mountainous disc. We were, I
suppose, some twenty thousand miles from it, gathering speed as it
pulled at us. But that motion was not apparent now. Distance dwindled
all these celestial motions, so that all the firmament seemed frozen
into immobility.

But there was some motion. Twenty or more bloated figures, the
survivors from the wreck of the _Cometara_, were encircling it in
varying orbits, revolving around it like tiny satellites. Some were
closing in, drawn against it. I saw one plunge against the wrecked
dome, and begin crawling like a fly. And I found that the forces of
the firmament were molding my orbit also. My outward plunge was
checked. I poised for an indeterminate instant, and then I took my
orbit. I too, was a satellite of the _Cometara_.

I gazed at the wreck of the _Cometara_. My ship! My first command! So
smoothly, confidently rising from the Earth only a few hours ago; and
she had come to this. She lay askew in the heavens. The dome was
cracked throughout all its length and smashed like a shell at the
sterntip.

I could see the interior litter beneath the dome, the twisted and
strained lines of the hull. A dead ship now, the mechanisms stilled;
dead and silent inside, with all the warmth gone out of it. All the
air dissipated, so that in every cubby, every dark corridor of that
broken hull there was the coldness and silence of interplanetary
space.

I