d calm; impatient, perhaps, but not overly so.
The time had not yet come for him to leave Earth. All his striving would
be dashed if he left too soon.

The proud building rose a hundred miles from York City: _The Hawkes
Memorial Laboratory_. There, the team of scientists Alan had gathered
worked long and painstakingly, trying to reconstruct what old Cavour had
written, experimenting, testing.

Early in 3881 the first experimental Cavour Generator was completed in
the lab. Alan had been vacationing in Africa, but he was called back
hurriedly by his lab director to supervise the testing.

The generator was housed in a sturdy windowless building far from the
main labs; the forces being channelled were potent ones, and no chances
were being taken. Alan himself threw the switch that first turned the
spacewarp generator on, and the entire research team gathered by the
closed-circuit video pickup to watch.

The generator seemed to blur, to waver, to lose substance and become
unreal. It vanished.

It remained gone fifteen seconds, while a hundred researchers held their
breaths. Then it returned. It shorted half the power lines in the
county.

But Alan was grinning as the auxiliary feeders turned the lights in the
lab on again. "Okay," he yelled. "It's a start, isn't it? We got the
generator to vanish, and that's the toughest part of the battle. Let's
get going on Model Number Two."

By the end of the year, Model Number Two was complete, and the tests
this time were held under more carefully controlled circumstances. Again
success was only partial, but again Alan was not disappointed. He had
worked out his time-table well. Premature success might only make
matters more difficult for him.

3882 went by, and 3883. He was in his early twenties, now, a tall,
powerful figure, widely known all over Earth. With Jesperson's shrewd
aid he had pyramided Max's original million credits into an imposing
fortune--and much of it was being diverted to hyperspace research. But
Alan Donnell was not the figure of scorn James Hudson Cavour had been;
no one laughed at him when he said that by 3885 hyperspace travel would
be reality.

3884 slipped past. Now the time was drawing near. Alan spent virtually
all his hours at the research center, aiding in the successive tests.

On March 11, 3885, the final test was accomplished satisfactorily.
Alan's ship, the _Cavour_, had been completely remodeled to accommodate
the new drive; every test b