ed would be almost unlimited;
inconceivable!

He stopped his car where the mountain road held straight for a hundred
feet, and he looked out over the coastal plain spread like a toy world
far below.

"Now, how about it?" he asked himself. "Blake thinks I am making a
fool of myself. Perhaps I am. I wonder. It's a long time since I fell
for any fairy stories. But this thing has got me. A sort of hunch, I
guess."

* * * * *

The sun was shining now from a vault of clear blue. It was lighting a
world of reality, of houses where people lived their commonplace
lives, tiny houses squared off in blocks a mile below. There was smoke
here and there from factories; it spread in a haze, and it meant
boilers and engines and sound practical machinery of a practical world
to the watching man.

What had all this to do with Venus? he asked himself. This was the
world he knew. It was real; space was impenetrable; there were no men
or beings of any sort that could travel through space. Blake was
right: he was on a fool's errand. They couldn't tell him anything up
here at the observatory; they would laugh at him as he deserved....

Wondering vaguely if there was a place to turn around, he looked ahead
and then up; his eyes passed from the gash of roadway on the
mountainside to the deep blue beyond. And within the man some driving,
insistent, mental force etched strongly before his eyes that picture
and its problem unanswered. There was the ship--he saw it in
memory--and it went up and still up; and he knew as surely as if he
had guided the craft that the meteor-like flight could be endless.

Lieutenant McGuire could not reason it out--such power was beyond his
imagining--but suddenly he dared to believe, and he knew it was true.

"Earthbound!" he said in contempt of his own human kind, and he looked
again at the map spread below. "Ants! Mites! That's what we
are--swarming across the surface of the globe. And we think we're so
damn clever if we lift ourselves up a few miles from the surface!

"Guess I'll see Sykes," he muttered aloud. "He and his kind at least
dare to look out into space; take their eyes off the world; be
impractical!"

He swung the car slowly around the curve ahead, eased noiselessly into
second gear and went on with the climb.

* * * * *

There were domed observatories where he stopped: rounded structures
that gleamed silvery in the air; and off