"We'll try it again," he said. He pressed the stud....
6
Haven at Last
An increasing sense of futility and depression crept over Kim and Dona during the next few days.
They visited four solar systems, separated by distances which would have seemed unthinkable before the alteration of the overdrive.
There was no longer any sensation of travel, because no distance required any appreciable period of time. Once, indeed, Kim commented curtly on the danger that would exist if they went too close to the Galaxy's edge. With only the amount of received light to work the cut-out switch, under other circumstances they might have plunged completely out of the Galaxy and to unimaginable distances before the switch could have acted.
"I'm going to have to put a limiting device of some sort on this thing," he observed. "With a limiting device, the transmitter-drive can't stay on longer than a few micro-seconds. If we don't, we might find ourselves lost from our own Galaxy and unable to find it again. Not that it would seem to matter so much."
His skepticism seemed justified. The Starshine was the only vessel now plying among the stars. It had been of the last and best type, though by no means the largest, ever constructed, and by three small changes in its overdrive mechanism Kim had made it into something of which other men had never dreamed.
For the first time in the history of the human race, other galaxies were open to the exploration and the colonization of men. It was probably possible for the cosmos itself to be circumnavigated in the Starshine. But its crew of two humans could find no planet of their own race on which they dared to land.
They approached Voorten II, and found a great planet seemingly empty of human beings. There were roads and cities, but the roads were empty and the cities full of human skeletons. Kim and Dona saw only three living beings of human form, and they were skin and bones and shook clenched fists and gibbered at the slim space-craft as it hovered overhead. The Starshine soared away.