“We have calculated,” he went on, “the space co-ordinates with great precision. That is how we have been able to select the destination for this carrier now. You cannot travel upon impulse by this method. Our engineers, as you might call them, must go in advance with recording apparatus. Nothing can be done blindly.”
It brought to my mind the three pilots now operating our vehicle. I mentioned the lens on their left eyes like a monocle.
“With that they can see ahead of us a great distance. It flings the vision—like gazing along a beam of light—to space-time factors in advance of our present position. In effect, a telescope.”
THERE were a few hours of the journey when Don and I slept, exhausted by what we had been through. Tako was with us when we dozed off, and I recall that he was there when we awakened. How much time passed we could not tell.
“You are refreshed?” he said smilingly. “And hungry again, no doubt. We will eat and drink—and soon we will arrive at the predestined time and place.”
We were indeed hungry again. And while we were eating Tako gestured to the window. “Look there. Your world seems visible a little.”
Just before we slept it had seemed that mingled with the shadows of Tako’s world was the gray outline of an ocean surface beneath us. I gazed out at the dim void now. Our flight was far slower than before. We were slackening speed for the coming halt. And I saw now that the shadows outside were the mingled wraiths of two spectral worlds, with us drifting forward between and among them. The terrain of Tako’s world was bleaker, more desolate and more steeply mountainous than ever. There were pits and ravines and gullies with jagged mountain spires, cliffs and towering gray masses of rock.
And mingled with it, in a general way coincidental with it in the plane of the same space, we could see now the tenuous shapes of our own world. Vague, but familiar outlines! We had passed Sandy Hook! The ocean lay behind us. A hundred feet or so beneath us was the level water of the Lower Bay.
“Don!” I murmured. “Look there! Long Island off there! And that’s Staten Island ahead of us!”
“Almost at our destination,” Tako observed. And in a moment he gestured again. “There is your city. Have a good look at your dear New York.”