"Are we crazy—or is it Hastur?" burst out Bob Vickers.
Hartnett smiled. "These distortions are purely illusionary. It's the effect of the rotation."
Slowly, strangely slow, the Columbia dragged itself forward, sliding along the planetoid's surface, more fantastically distorted to their eyes every instant. Now it seemed to shrink before them until it appeared that the entire world was smaller than their ship, that the Columbia was balancing precariously on the ridiculous little globe of it, and the first spurt from the rockets would send them off into space. Then Hastur was an incredible long, winding ribbon, lined with impassable mountains on either side, and they must travel along the millions of miles of it, as on a runway until at last they came to the rim. Then it was a geometrical nightmare, a riot of planes and angles which hurt their eyes to see; up from the surface reared hideously formed ridges and equally ghastly orifices yawned before them. And before them stretched leagues upon leagues of glassy surface ... then ...
The weird terrain was slipping away from them; they felt themselves buffeted as the entire ship was rocked violently. "We've hit it," yelled Bob.
Below them Hastur was already a sphere, and, as Timbie's fingers pressed buttons releasing full fire on the rockets, it became again the incredible globe they had seen when approaching it. They were free.
Dorothy raised her hand to her face to wipe away a tear that was streaming down her cheek, smiled despite herself when her mailed finger touched the glassite of her helmet.
"Goodbye, Harry," she whispered.
“WE have here," declared Edgar, picking his nose, "a small list of the mysteries of Hastur. So far as I can see, the only way really to break them is to make up another expedition sometime."
"Read 'em off, bucko," said Dorothy.
"First of all—what is Hastur made of? Why, with the terrific speed of rotation, doesn't it fly to pieces?"
"I devoted five pages to that in my book," put in Hartnett. "To sum up briefly: there's no reason I know why it should be, but it is. Therefore, there must be a reason." They glared at him. "Good way of wasting time," he protested.
"Then," continued Edgar, "we have the matter of the reverse English radio reception. And I shall personally slay and dismember anyone who tries to pass it off merely as `Einstein effect'." He looked up. "Well?"
Dorothy smiled. "We like living, Edgar."
"Speaking of 'Einstein effect'," broke in Hartnett, "I presume you realize by now that all the weird things we saw were enormously distorted. The stars, for example, were never actually closer. That was easy to realize, because no more than the customary amount of light was visible, and no gravitational eccentricities were noted."
"What about the thing that nearly wiped us out?" asked Bob Vickers. "A meteor—and a very small one at that. It landed a little distance away from the ship. Had it hit us, it wouldn't have blotted us Out, but could have caused considerable damage nontheless."
"And the—creatures?" "Microscopic. Had we been able to move at the time, we could have ploughed right through them. I've seen those illusions a number of times—we wasted quite a bit of ammunition on them before we got wise.
"And just imagine their consternation when they saw us, apparently microscopic, too, yet always out of grasp. That's why the cone-creature was flailing away at nothing at all. It was trying to catch us."
"Can you explain wave n?" burst in Edgar.
"I have seven pages on that in my book," smiled Hartnett. "Summed up, I say: wave n was discovered while we were looking for something else. We played around with it until it began to sit up and say 'uncle.' We don't know from nothing about it."
Nick puzzled. "What kind of a book is this, Steve?"
Hartnett laughed. "A joke. A beautiful joke on the dear public. Three hundred pages of pompous drivel, harebrained speculations, pseudo-science, and what not.
"I made a solemn vow many years ago, Nick, that if I ever became an explorer, I would write a book to end all travel books, in retaliation for the ghastly piles of dung about which pedants rave so heartily and which are crammed down the throats of otherwise innocent schoolboys.
"Here on Hastur I had the time to do it—and it was a good way of keeping my spirits up. Oh yes—I worked on solid stuff, too—but that isn't for public consumption; too deep."
"But seriously," broke in Edgar, "haven't you any idea as to the reason for the signals in reverse English?"
"I don't want to be personally slain and dismembered, Edgar. That tabu explanation very frankly is the only one I've found so far. The signals were warped—unless you want something utterly fantastic like their traveling around the universe, or being slipped through the continuum."
"What does that mean?" asked Dorothy.
"Nothing. It's a sort of gibberish which some people use to explain things otherwise inexplicable." He paused as the familiar figure of Grenville, wreathed with beatific smiles, entered the room. "What's in the bottle?"
"I have here," sighed the chemical engineer, "the ne-plus-ultra of our own private rocket-blast. It's smooth!"
"Yeah? What happened to your fingernails?"
"I got hungry!—Okay, if you don't trust me, I'll sample it first." He uncorked the bottle and took a mighty quaff of the curiously-colored contents.
"If he starts rolling over on the floor, kicking feebly, we'll know that it's a good roach spray if nothing else," observed Edgar.
Hastur was behind them now; soon the contracels would be flashing them back to Earth. Dorothy drew close to Nick, glad that the cumbersome suits were no longer necessary.
It would be a little blue sweater, she thought, just for luck.