“Gracious alive! That doesn’t seem possible. How far is it up there, Josh? But o’ course nobody knows that.”
“I read where one fella said we were twenty-five million million miles from the nearest star.”
“Twenty-five million million!” she gasped.
“Yes, sir—twenty-five million million miles. How’s that sound to you? An’ lissen here: The sun and the planets—what they call the solar system—are travelin’ through space more’n a million miles a day. Right now you an’ me’s goin’ a million miles a day, Madge! Don’t it make you feel dizzy? Well, we’re travelin’ more’n a million miles a day, remember. Well, then, it would take us seventy thousan’ years to get to the nearest star.”
“Aw, you’re just makin’ that up, Josh! Pretty soon I’m goin’ to ask you again, and I’ll bet you’ll forget how many miles you said.”
“All right—try me,” invited Joshua.
“I will, all right. But tell me where we’re going so fast, if you can.”
“I can’t do that. Nobody can, I guess. But I know the direction that we’re travelin’ in. We’re travelin’ towards a point between the Constellation of Lyra and the Constellation of Hercules. There—see where I’m pointin’? That’s about where we’re headed for. But you needn’t be pickin’ up your baggage or puttin’ on your hat, Madge. Remember that it ud take us seventy thousan’ years to get to the nearest star. But we ain’t travelin’ that way, it happens. Why, just think! In ten minutes from now we’ll be seven thousan’ miles from where we are in space this second!”
“It sounds perfectly awful, Josh,” she murmured. “It’s kinda creepy, isn’t it?”
“And by to-morrow evenin’,” he went on remorselessly, “we’ll be more’n a million miles from the region of space that we’re in right now. I remember readin’: ‘Prisoners are we on a rudderless ship lost in an ocean of space, voyaging we know not whither—truly symbolic of the spiritual status of man.’”