"If this is Hades—"
They went to the control-room. The Mayor of Steadheim sat on the floor, staring incredulously about him. As they entered he grinned sheepishly.
"I was floating in the air and couldn't see a thing, and then the lights came on and the floor smacked me! What happened and where are we?"
Kim went to the instrument-board and plugged in the heaters—already the vision-ports had begun to frost—and the air-purifier and the other normal devices of a space-ship.
"What happened is simple enough," said Kim. "The last atom of power on board the ship here threw us into transmitter-field drive. And when that field is established it doesn't take power to maintain it.
"So we started to move! There's a relay that should have stopped us, but there wasn't enough power left to work it. So we traveled for probably five minutes on transmitter-drive."
"We went a long way, eh?" said the mayor, comfortably.
"We did," said Kim grimly. "To Ades from its sun is ninety million miles—eight light-minutes. Minutes, remember! The First Galaxy is a hundred thousand light-years across. Light travels a hundred thousand years, going ninety million miles every eight minutes to cross it.
"The Starshine travels a hundred thousand light-years in the ten-thousandth part of a second. In one second—a billion light-years. The most powerful telescope in the Galaxy cannot gather light from so far away. But we went at least three hundred times farther.
"Three hundred billion light-years, plus or minus thirty billions more! We went beyond the farthest that men have ever seen, and kept on beyond the farthest that men have ever thought of!