"Noir's the light absorbing element nobody has lived to analyze. We know it absorbs all organic life as it does light, electricity, even sound. It's the black scourge of space."
"And we're going to play around it, eh? To bring back the descendants of the lost Atlantis. And where do they go, providing we take 'em off?"
Shadrak waved a hand vaguely over the horizon. "Here, till we find a planet suitable. You see, we're responsible. We moved them to Spor. Now it's our duty to remove them again."
Jim spoke. "We're ready, whenever you are sir."
Now a lot happened before we curved around the sinister prong of the Noir, the Milky Way lost behind, even Orion and his companions. We had ceased marveling at the repellor motors, operated within compact cases by the efficient robot machines. And I must put in a word for the way they lifted our big ship from Mars. You don't use rockets any more. They catapult you, shooting you ten thousand miles outward with rocket tubes sunk into the ground. You use inverted, concave affairs to catch the power. And too, we had our first acquaintance with the auxiliary repellors used inside the ship to offset inertia. This gave us the same gravity as Earth. And Shadrak called at regular periods on the relief screen, the new device that gives solidity to an image. He told us a lot about the transplanted sons and daughters of ancient Atlantis, and we had the mentameters to make immediate contact with their language and knowledge. Shadrak had thought of everything.
The solar system which Shadrak called Maj, crawled around the crescent of Noir, and we sighted the third planet, giving a ruddy glow. That gave us a kick, but I felt a shiver as I watched that ebon horn blotting out the sky, reaching hungrily toward Maj. Jim said the movement of Noir had been constant at 110 kilometers a second, but that the speed was building up. He called for a robot check on the tip of Noir and Spor. After careful study, Jim flashed the telescreen for Shadrak. "Noir tip at 60 plus 382," he reported.
Shadrak looked grave. "That gives you no more than four months," he said. "If the movement accelerates, it will be quite earlier. After you land, arrange for periodical checks."
It was time now to begin deceleration. We fixed on the sun of Maj. At first we couldn't feel a change. It was ten hours before the planets slowed down, and we curved to meet the pull of Maj. Two days elapsed by our chronometers before we entered the gravity pull of Spor and began our spiral descent, much as we would had it been the smaller Pelios. Our electroscopes found a city, towers and walls gilded by a rising sun. I worked out the course for Jim and we picked a plain nearby. We settled on a regular nest of repellor beams, to find an army gathered without, an army of men and women and children, not at all frightened and apparently not hostile.
"Look," Jim cried. "They look like the museum pictures of 2000. The same kind of cars, and streets."