A moment later, having done so, Marlin and Randall freed themselves of the straps of the bunks and climbed across the flier to take their places beside Whitely in watching for the great menacing asteroids. And as we passed on through the belt of those whirling perils, Marlin and Whitely and Randall watched for hour on hour there beside me, though so vast was the maximum speed at which our flier was going now, more than eight million miles an hour, that before they could more than get a flashing glimpse of a nearby asteroid we would have passed it. We were relying almost wholly on blind chance to take us through the asteroidal belt at that lightning speed, yet so desperate was this grim race back to Earth from the solar system's edge, that we preferred to trust thus to chance, rather than to slow our speed or to delay by an hour our arrival on Earth. And chance, for the time, favored us, for some hours later we had won through the perils of the asteroidal belt without more than a few split-second glimpses of the great whirling spheres of peril. And then, as we shot across the orbit of Mars with the planet's dull red shield still farther to the right, I began to slow our terrific speed, for by this time the Earth was expanding rapidly before us.
And now, too, the sun was flaming before us, in all the halo-like glory of its great corona, with a brilliance blinding to our eyes after the dim shades of Neptune and its moon. Yet even with that brilliance dazzling us we could make out plainer and plainer the sphere of Earth, seeming to our eyes a thin silver-blue crescent as it spun there between our inrushing flier and the sun, its tiny moon-spot growing brighter too. Marlin and Whitely and Randall watching tensely beside me, I cut out altogether the great force-ray at the flier's rear, which, even when our speed had reached its maximum, drove us straight onward and kept that speed unvarying against the gravitational influences from either side which were not large enough to require an opposing side-ray. Snapping that rear-ray out, I sent another force-ray from the flier toward the Earth-sphere ahead, and as that ray struck and pushed us back with immense power, the space-flier's colossal speed was gradually decreasing.
Once more we felt terrific upward and forward pressure in our chairs as the flier's speed steadily slowed, dropped swiftly from eight million miles an hour to six and then to five and then to three. And as we shot in thus toward Earth, the millions of miles dropping slower behind as our flier's great faceted ball clicked through space at slower and slower speed, I knew the same question was in the minds of my three friends as in my own. It was reflected in the tensely anxious eyes of Marlin and the imperturbable eyes of Whitely and the unwontedly grave eyes of Randall as the three stared ahead with me. Would the space-fliers that the World President and the World Congress had promised to build be ready? If not, we knew we certainly could not venture out to Neptune and put an end to the great doom-ray that the Neptunians were stabbing toward the sun. So that it was in a growing suspense of spirit that we watched Earth's sphere, with its crescent of bluish-white light at one side, expanding before us.
At ever slower speed we were rushing in toward it, and at last, moving at but a few hundred thousand miles an hour by this time, were driving in out of the void and past Earth's shining moon, gleaming in space to our right, its great ranges and strange craters clear to our eyes from its airless surface. But now all our eyes were on Earth ahead, since now through the drifting cloud-masses that floated in its atmosphere we could make out the great bluish globe's surface features, could see that western Europe and North Africa lay in the sunlight in that crescent of light at Earth's side, but that the North and South Americas lay in the shade of Earth's outer side, in the darkness of night. It was toward the dark half-seen outline of North America that I was heading the flier, for by this time, traveling still more slowly, our velocity now being less than a thousand miles an hour, we were entering Earth's atmosphere, the rarefied air of its outer reaches roaring about the flier as it shot through it.
"Straight to New York—to the World Congress," Marlin was saying. "There's not a minute to lose."
I nodded silently, at the same time snapping out the front-ray of the flier that was slowing our speed as we shot toward Earth's surface, and as its gravitation gripped the flier we were turning until instead of rushing onward we were falling to its surface from high above, as it turned in space before us, falling down toward the surface of the North American continent, whose outline was visible from our great height through the shifting cloud-screen. I felt my heart beating rapidly as we shot thus downward, forgot almost the mighty import of the mission on which we were returning in the mere fact of our return; for we were first of all men to venture thus into the outer void and to return from that void to Earth! And as we shot downward I saw the same thought mirrored in the faces of the others, staring down with me.
Down—down—with an oblique ray I was making the space-flier fall slantingly, more and more slowly, toward the northeastern coast of the continent beneath, whose broad, brown surface stretched out greater and greater beneath us. Moments more and as the roar of air about us intensified, mingling with the throbbing of our generators, we shot down from the sun's light into the darkness of this dark side of Earth, this night of Earth's one side. But now its great surface was changing from convex to concave beneath us, and now as we shot lower still Randall pointed downward and northward with a low cry toward a spark of bright red light, the beam of the great air-beacon of the trans-Atlantic air-liners, at New York. Slower—slower—and in moments more the vast mass of its towering cylindrical buildings, ablaze with outlining lights, was coming into view, with midmost among them the greatest of all, the huge mass of the World Government building.
As our space-flier dropped slowly toward that mighty structure beneath my controlling hands, as it dropped toward the swarms of bright-lit aircraft that were moving to and fro over the great city, so familiar was the scene beneath to us four cosmic voyagers that almost did our great journey, our mighty flight out through the sun's planets through the countless leagues of space to great Neptune, and our grotesque and dream-like adventures upon Neptune and its moon, seem to us indeed no more than dreams. But as we shot lower we were startled from this strange state of mind by one of the aircraft beneath, showing the customary red and green position-lights along its hull, driving up through the darkness toward our smoothly falling space-flier. We saw the three men in the control-room of the craft gazing amazedly toward the gleaming, faceted metal ball of our flier as they circled us, and then from their craft had burst out a score of brilliant vari-colored signal-lights. And as these blazed out there came a moment later an answering blaze of lights from each of the swarming craft below, that shot up now in hundreds toward our falling flier, crowding crazily about it!
Down through the darkness we dropped still, those swarms of aircraft almost jostling us as they seethed thickly in terrific excitement about us. As we shot downward over New York's surface we saw that across all the vast city, and far across the great air-docks to the south even, signal-lights were blazing out, a wild panorama of bursting lights stretching out in all directions! From beneath, too, there came up to us now a terrific roar of mingled voices, the vast crowds in the streets of the huge city sending their cheering cries up to us in a great thunder-roll of sound as we fell toward them. And as I held the space-flier to its smooth drop downward amid the swarming aircraft, I saw that Marlin and Randall, and even Whitely, were gazing across those vast, shouting throngs and across the swarms of madly-darting aircraft that encircled us, with somber, thoughtful faces.