He got up. And so did I. All about the control room, men were picking themselves up, lifting their voices in astonishment, staring at a visiplate from which had disappeared that gigantic, threatening orb.
A visiplate in which was now depicted sweet, jet depths of darkness, pin-pricked with glowing points of light!
Cap Hanson's voice was a paean of joy.
"We're home again! Home in our own universe! By God—in our own solar system! For there's Io, the pretty little devil!"
Helen was crying, "Then you didn't fail, Hank! It worked! We're saved!"
And Biggs, only sane man in a roomful of delight-maddened lunatics, was ambling to the audio, face wreathed in a seraphic grin.
"Garrity?" he called down to the chief engineer. "Take a look out the viewpanes if you want to holler with joy. And then—set course for home! And, oh, yes, Garrity—set men to work immediately on the repairing of the temporal deflector."
So that was that. We took time off to recuperate. Some hours later we were standing in the Saturn before a large, cylindrical, glass-walled machine, Lancelot Biggs' "time-travel" gadget which had absorbed us up here into the future. That is most of us were still standing here in the Saturn.
Professor Hallowell had already been projected back to our time. So had Travis Tomkins, Midland's observatory expert, his arms loaded with books from the ship's library describing the great inventions of, as on the Saturn, the last two centuries—or, to us of 1940, the inventions of the next two hundred years.