Three months gone!
The next instant, I thought, the rocket would strike the Sun! No, its original momentum carried it by. Yet the star of day filled an enormous fiery circle. The rocket flung about it like a stone on a string. Then, like the stone when the string breaks, it hurtled outward again into space.
The incredible truth came slowly to me—
The Astronaut was now a comet!
Some freak of celestial mechanics, while my numb hands slept on the firing levers, had flung it into an elliptic orbit. A sealed vault flying in the void, like the fabulous coffin of Mohammed, it was destined to flash again around the Sun, recede, drop again ... forever!
All that cycle happened, with the thought.
Years, I knew, had passed. Time was rushing by me like a river. I could sense the swift rotation of the planets, their deliberate orbital swing, even the northward drift of the whole solar system. And yet again I was amazed by the range and vividness of this new intuition.
For, thinking of Crosno back upon the Earth, I suddenly could see his place beside the Hudson, as clearly as if I had been floating above the trees. The old house was shabbier than ever, sagging. Behind it stood a tall white monument, upon which I read: Hilaire Crosno, 1889-1961.
Sixty-one!
Already it was twenty years and more since I had left the Earth. And it seemed the merest instant! For a moment I was stunned. Then I wanted desperately to know what the decades had done to my son. And that uncanny perception showed him to me.