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suppose, I've never been out in deep space at all. Besides a few hops to the moon. I've taken only two flits, and they were both only interplanetary—one to Mars and one to Venus. I never could see how you deep-space men can really understand what you're doing—either the frightful speeds at which you travel, the distances you cover, or the way your communicators work. In fact, according to the professors, no human mind can understand figures of those magnitudes at all. But you must understand them, I should think . . . or, perhaps . . ."
    "Or maybe the guy isn't human?" Kinnison laughed deeply, infectiously. "No, the professors are right. We can't understand the figures, but we don't have to—all we have to do is to work with 'em. And, now that it has just percolated through my skull who you really are, that you are Gladys Forrester, it's quite clear that you and I are in the same boat."
    "Me? How?" she exclaimed.
    "The human mind cannot really understand a million of anything. Yet your father, an immensely wealthy man, gave you clear tide to a million credits in cash, to train you in finance in the only way that really produces results—the hard way of actual experience. You lost a lot of it at first, of course; but at last accounts you had got it all back, and some besides, in spite of all the smart guys trying to take it away from you. The fact that your brain can't envisage a million credits hasn't interferred with your manipulation of that amount, has it?"
    "No, but that's entirely different!" she protested.
    "Not in any essential feature," he countered. "I can explain it best, perhaps, by analogy.
    You can't visualize, mentally, the size of North America, either, yet that fact doesn't bother you in the least while you're driving around on it in an automobile. What do you drive? On the ground, I mean, not in the air?"
    "A DeKhotinsky sporter."
    "Um. Top speed a hundred and forty miles an hour, and I suppose you cruise between ninety and a hundred. We'll have to pretend that you drive a Crownover sedan, or some other big, slow jalopy, so that you tour at about sixty and have an absolute top of ninety. Also, you have a radio. On the broadcast bands you can hear a program from three or four thousand miles away; or, on short wave, from anywhere on Tellus. . ."
    "I can get tight-beam short-wave programs from the moon," the girl broke in. "I've heard them lots of times."
    "Yes," Kinnison assented dryly, "at such times as there didn't happen to be any interference."
    "Static is pretty bad, lots of times," the heiress agreed.
    "Well, change 'miles' to 'parsecs' and you've got the picture of deep-space speeds and operations," Kinnison informed her. "Our speed varies, of course, with the density of matter in space; but on the average—say one atom of substance per ten cubic centimeters of space—we tour at about sixty parsecs an hour, and full blast is about ninety. And our ultra-wave communicators, working below the level of the ether, in the sub-ether. . ."
    "Whatever that is," she interrupted.
    "That's as good a definition of it as any," he grinned at her. "We don't know what even the ether is, or whether or not it exists as an objective reality; to say nothing of what we so nonchalantly call the sub-ether. We can't understand gravity, even though we make it to order.
    Nobody yet has been able to say how it is propagated, or even whether or not it is propagated—no one has been able to devise any kind of an apparatus or meter or method by which its nature, period, or velocity can be determined. Neither do we know anything about time or space. In fact, fundamentally, we don't really know much of anything at all," he concluded.
    "Says you . . . but that makes me feel better, anyway," she confided, snuggling a little closer. "Go on about the communicators."
    "Ultra-waves are faster than ordinary radio waves, which of course travel through the ether with the velocity of light, in just about the same ratio as that of the