Hanson said, "You mean we—hurled over Jupiter?"
"No, sir. We went right through it! At that tremendous speed, our dimension-extension was zero. Hence it did not affect, nor was it affected in any way by, the bulk and mass of Jupiter.
"It's as though an exceedingly fine wire, moving at lightning speed, were to be propelled through a cake of ice. Only in our case, the 'wire' was of zero dimension, and the cake of ice—Jupiter—did not even recognize that it had been penetrated.
"But—" I shook my head. "But Mr. Biggs realized what this daring scheme meant. It meant that in addition to our size being reduced to the infinitesimal, our mass would be raised to the infinite—for that is the corollary of the contraction theory.
"There had to be some way of getting us back to our normal shape and size. The only possible method was by the forcible alteration of our mass. And—Biggs adopted this method. He placed himself in the life-skiff, gave the necessary orders from there. Then, after the danger had been averted, he deliberately cast off from the Saturn, tossed himself away from us, a living sacrifice to the mathematical gods, that we might be safe."
Todd said, "Our mass, for a moment, was infinite—but when he, however briefly, broke clear, it became less than infinite, giving us a chance to cut the motors—"
"That's right."
Hanson's eyes were round and wild and fearful.
"But then—where is he! We've got to turn around right away. Find him! We can't go back without—"
I shook my head.