"But would not all matter so affected assume at once the absolute zero of temperature and thus preclude life?"
"I don't think so. The stasis would be sub-atomic and instantaneous, you know; there could be no loss or transfer of energy. I don't see how gross matter could be affected at all. As far as I can see it would be an absolutely perfect suspension of animation. You and Dot lived through it, anyway, and I'm positive that that's what they did to you. And I still say that if anybody can do it, we can."
"'And that,'" put in Margaret roguishly, "as you so feelingly remark, 'is a cheerful thought to dwell on—let's dwell on it!'"
"We'll do that little thing, too, Peg, some of these times; see if we don't!" Seaton promised. "But to get back to our knitting, what's the good word, Mart—located us yet? Are we, or are we not, heading for that justly famed distant Galaxy of the Fenachrone?"
"We are not," Crane replied flatly, "nor are we heading for any other point in space covered by the charts of Ravindau's astronomers."
"Huh? Great Cat!" Seaton joined the physicist at his visiplate, and made complete observations upon the few nebulae visible.
He turned then to the charts, and his findings confirmed those of Crane. They were so far away from our own Galaxy that the space in which they were was unknown, even to those masters of astronomy and of intergalactic navigation, the Fenachrone.
"Well, we're not lost, anyway, thanks to your cautious old bean." Seaton grinned as he stepped over to an object-compass mounted upon the plane table.
This particular instrument was equipped with every refinement known to the science of four great Solar Systems. Its exceedingly delicate needle, swinging in an almost-perfect vacuum upon practically frictionless jeweled bearings, was focused upon the unimaginable mass of the entire First Galaxy, a mass so inconceivably great that mathematics had shown—and even Crane would have stated as a fact—that it would affect that needle from any point whatever, however distant, in universal space.