Rovol flicked a finger, a massive pair of plunger switches shot into
their sockets, and Seaton, seated at his board and staring into his
visiplate, was astounded to find that he apparently possessed a dual
personality. He _knew_ that he was seated motionless in the operator's
chair in the base of the rigidly anchored primary projector, and by
taking his eyes away from the visiplate before him, he could see that
nothing in the laboratory had changed, except that the pyrotechnic
display from the power-bar was of unusual intensity. Yet, looking into
the visiplate, he was out in space _in person_, hurtling through space
at a pace beside which the best effort of the _Skylark_ seemed the
veriest crawl. Swinging his controls to look backward, he gasped as he
saw, so stupendous was their velocity, that the green system was only
barely discernible as a faint green star!

* * * * *

Again looking forward, it seemed as though a fierce white star had
separated from the immovable firmament and was now so close to the
structure of force in which he was riding that it was already showing a
disk perceptible to the unaided eye. A few moments more and the
violet-white splendor became so intense that the watchers began to build
up, layer by layer, the protective goggles before their eyes. As they
approached still closer, falling with their unthinkable velocity into
that incandescent inferno, a sight was revealed to their eyes such as
man had never before been privileged to gaze upon. They were falling
into a white dwarf star, could see everything visible during such an
unheard-of journey, and would live to remember what they had seen! They
saw the magnificent spectacle of solar prominences shooting hundreds of
thousands of miles into space, and directly in their path they saw an
immense sunspot, a combined volcanic eruption and cyclonic storm in a
gaseous-liquid medium of blinding incandescence.

"Better dodge that spot, hadn't we, ace? Mightn't it be generating
interfering fourth-order frequencies?" cried Seaton.

"It is undoubtedly generating fourth-order rays, but nothing can
interfere with us, since we are controlling every component of our beam
from Norlamin."

Seaton gripped his hand-rail violently and involuntarily drew himself
together into the smallest possible compass as, with their awful speed
unchecked, they plunged through that flaming, incandescent photosphere
and on, straight down, int