The enveloping room of the workshop seemed gliding backward. Not a tremor of the vehicle. Mascar’s figure moved slowly backward and downward beyond my sight. The workshop walls were sliding past. The rectangle of its open end seemed expanding, coming toward us.
And then we were outside, in the starlit night. A dark hillside was dropping away. A silver ribbon of river was slipping beneath us, dropping downward, like a plummet falling.
The red ray had vanished. Dr. Weatherby’s voice, calm now, with a touch of triumph to it that all had gone so well, said,
“Mascar has extinguished the red ray. We used it only for starting. We must start slowly, Leonard.”
The river had vanished. A huge Polar liner—I recognized its group of colored lights as Ellison’s, flying in the forty thousand-foot lane—showed overhead. But it, too, seemed falling like a plummet. It flashed straight down past our window and disappeared.
Dr. Weatherby went to the instrument table. Time passed. It seemed only a moment or two though.
Dolores murmured, “Are we still moving, Jim? You must tell me. Tell me everything you see.”
The room was stiflingly hot. We were all gasping.
“I’ve turned on the refrigeration,” said Dr. Weatherby, “to counteract the heat of the friction of our passage through the atmosphere. It will be cool enough presently. Come over here. Don’t you want to look down?”
We gathered over the instrument room’s floor window. Stars were down there, white, red, and yellow stars in a field of dead black: a narrow crescent edge of stars, and all the rest was a gigantic dull red surface. Visibly convex! Patches of dark, formless areas of clouds. An ocean, the vaguely etched outlines of continents, the coastline of the Americas.