"Sleep, by all means. There's no meteoric stuff out here, and we won't arrive before ten o'clock tomorrow, I-P time," and, tired out by the events of the long day, man and maid sought their beds and plunged into dreamless slumber.
While they slept, the "Forlorn Hope" drove on through the void at a terrific but constantly decreasing velocity; and far off to one side, plunging along a line making a sharp angle with their own course, there loomed larger and larger the masses which made up the nucleus of Cantrell's Comet.
Upon awakening, Stevens' first thought was for the comet, and he observed it carefully before he aroused Nadia, who hurried into the control room. Looming large in the shortened range of the plate, their objective hurtled onward in its eternal course, its enormous velocity betrayed only by the rapidity with which it sped past the incredibly brilliant background of infinitely distant stars. Apparently it was a wild jumble of separate fragments; a conglomerate, heterogeneous aggregation of rough and jagged masses varying in size from grains of sand up to enormous chunks, which upon Earth would have weighed millions of tons. Pervading the whole nucleus, a slow, indefinite movement was perceptible—a vague writhing and creeping of individual components working and slipping past and around each other as they all rushed forward in obedience to the immutable cosmic law of gravitation.
"Oh, isn't that wonderful!" Nadia breathed. "Think of actually going to visit a comet! It sort of scares me, Steve—it's so creepy and crawly looking. We're awfully close, aren't we?"
"Not so very. We'd probably have lots of time to eat breakfast. But just to be on the safe side, maybe I'd better camp here at the board, and you bring me over something to eat."
"All x, Chief!" and Stevens ate, one eye upon the screen, watching closely the ever-increasing bulk of the comet.
For many minutes he swung the Forlorn Hope in a wide curve approaching the mountain of metal ever and ever more nearly, then turned to the girl.
"Hold everything, Nadia—power's going off in a minute!" He shut off the beam; then, noting that they were traveling a trifle faster than the comet, he applied a small voltage to one dirigible projector. Darting the beam here and there, he so corrected their flight that they were precisely stationary in relation to the comet. He then opened his switches, and the Forlorn Hope hurtled on. Apparently motionless, it was now a part of Cantrell's Comet, traveling in a stupendous, elongated ellipse about the Master of our Solar System, the Sun.
"There, ace, who said anything about weight-fiends? I was watching you, and you never turned a hair that time."
"Why, that's right—I never even thought about it—I was so busy studying that thing out there! I suppose I've got used to it already?"