instead of lying down
in the middle of the swing, they could look about. Then it occurred to
Phil to time the interval between the nebula and the mountain-range.
When the exact halfway point was determined, and after several more
swings, they could see dimly the windows and machinery of Tony's
laboratory flash by when they passed the middle.

"I don't mean to be a crepe-hanger, but how do you know we will stop
at the right point?" Phil asked.

"I don't," replied Ione cheerfully. "But mathematics says so. A freely
oscillating segment of space would naturally come to equilibrium in a
position parallel to the rest of its own space, would it not?"

There came a swing when they did not reach the nebula on the one hand
and the mountain-range on the other. After that, views dropped off
from either end of the swing quite rapidly, and before many minutes,
they looked into Tony's laboratory a large portion of the time. For
many seconds the laboratory held; then it would gradually fade, and
reappear again, only to fade into empty nothingness all around.

"The old cat's dead," Phil finally announced.

They sat and stared about them as the laboratory held steady and no
further intervening periods of blankness intervened. They both sighed
deeply and slumped over on the ground to rest.

"Bang! bang! bang!"

* * * * *

Some sort of hammering woke them up. They looked about them in a daze.
It was broad daylight, and things looked queer in the laboratory.
There was a smell of scorched rubber and hot oil. Great loops of wire
sagged down from above. Several nondescript heaps stood about that
might once have been machinery, but now suggested melting snow-men,
all fused into heaps. At a table sprawled a queer, misshapen figure
that suggested human origin. Both of its hands were burned to cinders
to the elbows. Great holes were scorched into the clothes. But the
face was recognizable. Tony's playthings had got him at last.

"Looks like something's happened in here!" Phil gasped, in amazement.

"I'll bet it has, too," Ione exclaimed. "This is the first time it
occurred to me that our recoil from throwing the safe overboard and
the oscillation of our space-segment must have created a tremendous
electrical field in the tetra-ordinate apparatus. The reaction is
reversible, you see. The field swings the space-segment, or the
swinging of the space-segment creates the field. And the field was too
much for