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ment to see her in his vision, with another lovely woman beside him. Eve seemed to know what he was thinking. Her countenance took on a beauty that enveloped Adam’s emotions almost divinely. Such music, such a woman! Such an astronomical velocity: fifty million miles per hour! Eve halted his racing thoughts with her voice. “Look toward the floor of the ship, Adam. It is now transparent.” He looked and saw tiny darts of lightning like St. Elmo’s Fire shoot out from the ship. They became larger and brighter by the moment. Eve explained before he could ask about them. “Yes, Adam; that is the discharge you read about in Orfeo’s story. Our ship is now coasting and uses no energy. We are approaching the sun and its radiation is becoming more intense, so the Little Dipper merely discharges it all back into space. Now look above at our monitor ship. It will slow down by a few aw a 1 » million miles per hour.” Almost as she said it the monitor ship went out of sight. My God, Adam thought, now all other life but mine and Eve’s is east of the sun. Adam and Eve in the Little Dipper, actually racing into the sun! “We are decelerating rapidly, Adam, but we shall still enter the sun at more than a million miles per hour. We will need the inertial force as well as our magnetic propulsion, whatever is available to us in the sun, in order to penetrate deeply into it. Otherwise we would merely be belched back and away from it. When you hear a ping it will indicate we have traversed the orbit of Mercury. The monitor ship will await us when we emerge, if we emerge, from the sun. That Big Dipper has been in the sun also, as I told you.” There were a few seconds of silence. Then, amidst the notes of the music, a reverberating “ping” sounded. Adam and Eve looked at each other, nodding a little. They knew that not even the most remote and dead planet was closer to the sun than they were now. The lightning discharge from the ship’s bottom was furious, the streaks reaching away from the Little Dipper many yards into space. 193 INTO THE SUN AND OUT AGAIN