The ship swam slowly upward. Suddenly there was a momentary impression of reeling, dancing stars. Kim swung the bow about.
"Now for Ades!" he said gleefully. "Did you know, Dona, that once upon a time the word Ades meant hell?"
The stars reeled again....
They found Ades. Knowing how, now, it was not too difficult. There were two positions from which it could be detected. One was a position in which it was on a line between the Starshine and the sun. The other was a position in which the invisible planet, the space-ship, and the sun formed the three points of a right-angled triangle with Ades in the ninety-degree corner.
Kim sent the little ship in a great circle beyond the planet's normal orbit, watching for it to appear where such an imaginary triangle would be formed. The deflected light of the sun would spread out in a circular flat thin plane, and somewhere about the circuit the Starshine had to run through it. It would be a momentary sight only, and it would not be bright; it would be utterly unlike the steady radiance of a normal planet. Such flashes, if seen before, would have been dismissed as illusions or as reflections from within the ship. Even so, it was a long, long time before Dona called out quickly.
"There!" she said, and pointed.
Kim swung the Starshine back. He saw the dim, diffused spectre of sun's reflection. They drove for it, and presently a minute dark space appeared. It grew against the background of a radiant galaxy, and presently was a huge blackness, and the Starshine's space-radio loop was once more filled with a highly improbable electrical amperage by the supercooled generator in the airlock.
The ship ventured cautiously into the black.
And later there were lonely, unspeakably desolate little lights of the lost world down below.
Kim drove for them with a reckless exultation. He landed in the very centre of a despairing small settlement which had believed itself dead and damned—or at any rate doomed. He shouted out his coming, and Dona cried out the news that the end of darkness was near, and men came surging toward her to listen. But it was Dona who explained, her eyes shining in the light of the torches men held up toward her.