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Don Merria much of it at two miles a second, and now the violet-and-yellow thread, after widening to a ribbon, was staying the sa to do but bullet toward it through the incredible flaw that split thean alht, and nothing to be but one great piloting eye, and suffer what thoughts to come that would, since he couldn&039;t spareshove, he fired the a with the verniers

Don Merriah a planet&039;s core He had passed through its very center, and so far the trip had been glitter and blur and blackness and a violet thread halving a spacescreen turnedeyes and the picture of hilass bee with a Prince Rupert&039;s Drop tail buzzing through a ripple in a stack ofdown a poisoned corridor wide as his elbows - to brush a wall, what a faux pas!

Toward reen fire, but no guessing what made them

The milkiness in the spacescreen, at any rate, should be erosion from the fantastic thin-armed dust swirls that at one point had alht, too, sooner than he&039;d hoped, and had to ailimmers, and that was deceptive because the yelloas intrinsically brighter than the purple and tempted him to stay too far away froan to narrow and he kneas the doom of him, worse than collision course, for there came unbidden to his ether behind hiht, and then - in ponderous reaction and by the fierce - to crash together ahead of hih h to beat him to the impact point

Then, just as he see he&039;d moon-traversed close to two thousand ether

And then, as incredible as if he&039;d found a life after death, he burst out of the blackness into light, with stars showing off to all sides and even old shock-headed Sol shooting his blinding white arrows

Only then did he take in what lay straight ahead of hi as Earth seen from a two-hour orbit This vast, ht, where Sol lay beyond, but to the left inky black save for three pale greenish oval glow-spots curving off the disk in the distance

The unblurred night line between the radiant and the inky heht as he watched, just as Sol was slowly drifting toward the violet horizon He realized that back there in the ht of the violet ribbon, not because the jaws of the ht side of the planet ahead had moved over and looked down the chasm at him

He at once accepted the fact that it was a ht orbit around it, because that alone, as far as he could reason, could explain the sights and happenings of the past three hours: the light deluging Earth&039;s night side, the highlight in the Atlantic, and above all the shattering of Luna

And, beyond reason, there was that inside hi it - that cried out to believe it was a planet

He swung ship, and there, only fifty miles below hilaring white with sunlight He could see where the chasm walls had truly crashed shut behind hi into sunlit vacuuht line, and by the surrealist, jagged-squared chessboard of lesser cracksoutward fro!

He was poised fifty - over what every

Then, because he didn&039;t want to plunge - not yet, at least - at a low-spotted black hemisphere now beneath his jets, he fired the main jet to kill that part of his velocity - at last checking the tank gages and discovering that there was barely enough fuel and oxidizer for this e planet - inside even the tight orbit of the moon

He knew that the sun would soon sink fro ether into the shadow-cone - into the night - of aroo, West Ger toward exasperation to the de news flash from across the Atlantic He switched it off with a twist that almost fractured the knob and said to Hans Opfel: "Those Americans! Their presence is needful to hold the Coradation to the Fatherland!"

He stood up from his desk and walked over to the sleekly strea ha factor influencing the tide at the point on Earth&039;s hydrosphere for which the raph-papered dru the exact tides at that point, hour by hour

At Delft they had a machine that did it all electronically, but those were the feckless Hollanders!

Fritz Scher said dramatically: "The moon in orbit around a planet from nowhere? Hah!" He tapped the shell of the nificantly "Here we have the moon nailed down!"

The "Machan Lu over North Vietna the tiny inlet south of Do-Son Bagong hung noted, by a faray piling that was practically a h tide was perhaps a hand&039;s breadth higher than he&039;d ever encountered it here A good omen! Tiny ripples shivered across the inlet mysteriously A sea hawk screahten up as the big air-suspended bus whipped smoothly on toward London Bath was far behind and they were passing Silbury Hill

He listened idly to the solemn speculations around hi over the wireless concerning a flying saucer big as a planet sighted by thousands over the United States Really, science fiction was corrupting people everywhere

A coarsely attractive girl from Devizes in slacks, snood, and a sweater, who had transferred aboard at Beckhampton, now dropped into the seat ahead of him and instantly fell into s, with exactly equal enthusiasm, on the saucer reports - and the little earthquake that had nervously twitched parts of Scotland - and on the egg she&039;d had for breakfast and the sausage-and- to have for lunch In honor of Edward Lear, Richard offhandedly shaped a li Girl of Devizes Whose thoughts came in two standard sizes: Whileas theof it kept him amused all the way to Savernake Forest, where he fell into a doze