It was another week before the test chamber was ready to begin its journey, and everyone in the valley turned out to watch its departure.

     The modified chamber, standing in the middle of Graduation Gield well away from the nearest buildings and sources of magical interference, was possibly the most unlikely looking spaceship in the history of any universe. It consisted of two boxes. A relatively small transparent box, looking like a cube of glass, sitting on top of a much larger steel box; smooth and silvery and gleaming in the morning sunlight. Various bits of hardware and equipment could be seen in the upper, transparent box, marring the perfection of its crystal clarity, and a ladder reached up to it, leaning against the bulk of the teleportation chamber. A couple of senior wizards were walking slowly around it, giving it a close examination to make sure all was well and casting the occasional diagnostic spell, looking for problems not visible to the naked eye.

     "Here they come!" shouted someone, and the whole crowd craned their necks to see a man and a trog making their way across the field from the teaching buildings. These were the lucky two (or unlucky, depending upon your point of view) who had been chosen to make the journey to Kronos. The man was Gunther Fugh, a middle aged wizard who'd played a large part in the rebuilding of Kronosia and who was, therefore, familiar enough with it to construct the mental image necessary for the teleportation spell, and the trog was Karog Gunlubber. A cleric of Caratheodory, the God of Mathematics.

     Although most of the navigation would be carried out by observers down on Tharia, with instructions relayed up to the test chamber by means of Coronets of Farspeaking, it had been decided to include a cleric of Caratheodory as a member of the test chamber's crew, along with various navigation and measuring devices, so that they would be able to navigate themselves, should it become necessary for them to do so.

     For the strange and rather reclusive worshippers of the God of Mathematics, the mental manipulations that the constant stream of incoming data would require were a form of worship, the only satisfactory way of communicating with their bizarre and unpredictable deity. So holy and revered was the practice, though, the formulating and solving of obscure theorems that had no meaning to those outside their faith, that the majority of them considered it sacrilegious and demeaning to apply it to everyday world problems. When, during the goblin wars for instance, a cleric of Caratheodory had used mathematics to work out the trajectories of catapulted boulders so that they would hit the enemy with greater accuracy, he had been shunned by his order and forbidden to return to the tunnels of his birth, forcing him to live the rest of his days among humans, who had benefited greatly from his presence.

     Fortunately, Karog belonged to a small breakaway sect who thought that mathematics was glorified and made meaningful by its application to real world problems, and it was members of this sect, the application heretics, who most often came into contact with members of other races, the Purists being much more stay at home-ish. Even if he'd been raised as a Purist, though, Karog had grown fond enough of the humans among whom he'd lived most of his life that he thought he would have used his mathematics to help them anyway. The final approach to the tiny moon, in particular, was something with which the ground observers would be of little help and which Gunther and Karog would have to handle on their own.

     The crowd shouted and cheered as the two made their way to the test chamber, and Gunther grinned nervously, the noisy acclaim reminding him that this could be his last great adventure. He had volunteered without hesitation when Saturn had approached him a week before, but as time had passed and the big moment loomed closer he'd begun to find himself growing more and more apprehensive about it. Was it too late to back out now? Of course not. They couldn't force him, but if he did refuse to go through with it he'd be letting down the whole valley and he'd have to live with the memory of it for the rest of his life. At the moment he was a hero! Everyone loved him, and if they succeeded in their mission and returned safely to Tharia they'd be celebrities for the rest of their lives, but right now he would have traded all that for a life of quiet obscurity. Why did I volunteer? he asked himself for the hundredth time as they paused beside the ladder, waiting for the testing wizards to complete their examinations. Why? I must have been mad! He waved back at the crowd, partly to take his mind off what he was about to do.

     Karog did not wave, prevented from doing so by his dignity as a trog and by the fact that he was a follower of the greatest of all the Gods and therefore above such things. He grinned with pleasure, though, behind the swathes of cloth that hid every part of his face except his eyes, knowing that his participation in the mission would do a great deal to bring his deity into public view, possibly attracting new devotees and putting him higher in his Lord's favour whether the mission was a success or not. Never mind what the stuffy Purists back in the tunnels thought. They might condemn and revile him for what he was doing, but he just couldn't see how using the gifts of Caratheodory in the real world could possibly be bad. They'd come around, he was sure of that. Give it time. Let them see the new prominence and celebrity he was bringing to the faith, and they'd come around to his way of thinking.

     Such thoughts would have been sinful had they occurred to a priest of Samnos or a cleric of Caroli, both followers of Gods who demanded meekness and humility from their worshippers, but Caratheodory made very few demands upon the personalities and lifestyles of his followers. Some clerics of Caratheodory were good people, well liked and admired by the communities in which they lived, while others were thoroughly nasty and unpleasant. Caratheodory made no distinction between them. He judged his followers solely upon how good they were at mathematics, the Art of Numbers, and He couldn't care less whether they applied it in the real world or not.

☆☆☆

     Elmias Pastin tut tutted and shook his head as Gunther and Karog began to climb the ladder. "All wrong," he muttered. "They're doing it all wrong."

     "What do you mean?" asked Thomas anxiously.

     "There should be a countdown," the old wizard muttered unhappily. "You always have a countdown for a space launch. It's traditional!"

     "He must be talking about another universe he's been to," whispered Lirenna, softly enough that only her husband could hear. "He told me once of civilisations where people travel from one world to another in airtight steel canisters, taking weeks or months to make the voyage. Maybe they have countdowns before they take off."

     "What's a countdown?" asked Derrin excitedly.

     "It's where you count backwards," explained Elmias, placing a cold, gnarled hand on the boy's shoulder. "It goes like this. FIVE! FOUR! THREE! TWO! ONE! LIFT OFF! WE HAVE A LIFT OFF!" He put his lips together and puffed out his cheeks to make a roaring, whooshing sound that made several members of the crowd turn around and stare at him as if he were mad. "It's one of the most awesome sights in any universe! A tiny tin box lifting off on a pillar of smoke and fire! One day you'll see it for yourself, my boy. I'll take you to a launch. You simply haven't lived until you've seen a space rocket taking off."

     Thomas and Lirenna shared an amused glance, wondering how much of what the old wizard said was true and how much was just tall tales made up for the amusement of children. There was no doubt that he'd seen many strange and wonderful things on alien worlds throughout the planes of existence, but some of the things he came out with were just too ridiculous for words.

     Gunther and Karog reached the top of the ladder, opened the small hatch in the side of the test chamber and squeezed inside. Through its transparent walls the crowd could see the human wizard placing a gold and silver coronet on his head and see his lips move as he spoke to someone. A Farspeaking spell of some kind, obviously. They spent a few minutes sorting themselves out, and then they settled down in the padded leather seats that had been fitted just the day before.

     A moment later the joined chambers began to rise. Slowly at first, as if struggling against a great weight, as indeed they were, but then with steadily greater speed, the crowd cheering and applauding as they shrank to a tiny speck high above them. A few moments later they disappeared from sight altogether, but the crowd stayed where it was for several minutes longer, everyone craning their necks back and shading their eyes with their hands as if they could follow the test chamber's entire journey by sheer willpower.

     Eventually, though, it became clear that there was nothing else to see and the crowd began to break up and drift away, wandering back to their work in twos and threes, talking and chattering in rapid, excited voices.

     "You see?" said Elmias, shaking his head in disappointment as he and the Gowns also began to head back. "Without a countdown, it's just not the same."

☆☆☆

     "Can you hear me?" asked Gunther, feeling the tingle in the scalp that told him the coronet's magic had been activated. "Saturn, are you there?"

     "I can hear you," replied Saturn, the voice appearing in Gunther's head as clearly as his own thoughts. "The linked coronets have been tested over a distance of three thousand miles, totally free of interference."

     "Give Robyn a kiss for me," said Gunther in relief. "It's such an obvious idea, it took a real genius to think of it."

     He sensed Saturn's annoyance and disapproval at the flippant suggestion, but no clear words came over. He left the coronet on his head, though, ready for any further messages that might come in. "The link's good," he told the trog. "We should be able to communicate over any distance without any difficulty."

     "Good," replied Karog distractedly. "We'll need all the help we can get to find Kronos’s orbit."

     He was scribbling calculations on a bryvol pad with the tip of his bullet fingernail and only half paying attention to what the wizard was saying. They sat down in the padded leather seats, buckled the restraining straps across their bodies, and Karog tucked his trophy cords into his belt. He didn't want them waving all over the place in the low gravity, obscuring his vision.

     "Quite a turn out," said Gunther with a nervous smile, looking out at the crowd through the transparent wall. "Half the valley must have turned out to see us off."

     Karog just grunted as he clipped his various bits and pieces of equipment into their holders. The human shrugged and spoke the word that reactivated the Coronet of Farspeaking.

     "We're ready to take off," he said, speaking out loud for the trog's benefit, although Saturn would have heard him just as well if he'd simply formed the words in his head. "We can go whenever you give the word."

     "Go as soon as you're ready," replied Saturn. "Kronos is now directly overhead and will make three complete orbits during the time it takes you to get there. Time it right and you'll meet it this time tomorrow, but if you arrive late you'll have to wait another eight hours for it to come around again."

     "Understood." He turned to the trog, wiping his sweaty hands on his trouser leg. "Ready?"

     "Yes," replied Karog. "Go as soon as you like."

     "Okay," said Gunther, therefore. "Here we go then." He muttered a prayer to the Gods and spoke the words that activated the test chamber's levitation spells.

     There was a long groan of tortured metal as the test chamber tried to lift the weight of the teleportation chamber beneath it. Gunther tensed up anxiously, but Karog had done the calculations and knew that the structural strength of the lead box was easily capable of withstanding the load. "Praise Caratheodory," he muttered to himself, clutching his holy Book of Axioms in his gloved hands. "Praise the Lord of Numbers, source of all true knowledge and wisdom." He heard a whimper of fear from beside him and patted the human on the knee. "Trust Caratheodory," he advised. "His numbers never lie."

     "I'm okay," said Gunther, struggling to get himself under control. "I thought I was ready for it, but that sound... I thought the chamber was going to tear itself apart!"

     "Look down," said the trog with a smile that was only visible as a twitch in the layers of cloth veiling his face.

     The human stared at him, then looked out through the transparent wall and gave a gasp of surprise. The valley was already miles below them and they were passing the level of the highest mountain peaks. "By the Gods!" he cried. "I didn't feel a thing! I never thought it would be this smooth!"

     "It's your magic," pointed out the trog. "You should have had an idea what it would feel like." He gave a sigh as he unveiled his head and pulled off his gloves. He and Gunther had been friends for some time and the human wizard had grown used to the sight of his sagging, wrinkly skin. It meant that the trog could relax and breathe freely now that they were out of sight of the crowd of spectators.

     "Yes, but this is perfectly new. No-one's ever done this before. Even the Agglemonians never did anything like this. We're entering completely new territory! There are no precedents against which to compare it. We tested it, raising the test chamber a few feet off the ground, but there was simply no way to tell what it would actually feel like to actually do it." He realised he was babbling and stopped himself with an effort. "I'm okay," he repeated. "I'm okay."

     The mountains shrank beneath them, partially obscured by streaks of cloud as they passed through the high altitude layer of freezing cold winds that encircled the whole globe. Their eyes widened with wonder as the mountains merged together to form ice covered ridges between which ran a maze of narrow, deep sided valleys, the lower slopes of which might possibly have been traversed by a suitably equipped and dedicated team of explorers. Nowhere was there a continuous route that led all the way to the tiny patch of warmth and greenery that was Lexandria Valley, though. The valley was the centre of a maze that had no solution, and over the centuries the Blue Mountains had cruelly taken the lives of many people whose only crime had been a failure to appreciate this simple fact.

     Towards the horizon the valleys were hidden, though, and they could only see the mountains. Jagged knives of black rock and dazzling bright, windblown ice, those in the distance progressively hidden by layers of icy haze until they were lost in the greyness of infinity. It seemed to the two awestruck observers that the whole world was mountains, that they could circle the globe and see nothing else. "By the Gods!" whispered Gunther over and over. It seemed to be the only thing he could say, the only thing he would ever be able to say. "By the almighty Gods!"

     As they rose higher the sky darkened, the blue turning into a dark indigo in which some of the brightest stars could be seen, and the curvature of the horizon became gradually more noticeable. The planet was enveloped by a rainbow. Blue down by the surface where the atmosphere was densest, thinning to violet and black and then a thin, almost imperceptible layer of golden red where the highest, most rarefied layers of atmosphere finally gave way to empty space.

     "It's like the view through the Lenses of Farseeing," breathed Gunther in awe, "but we're seeing it for real, for the first time ever. We're the first people in all history to see this."

     "And probably the last as well," agreed Karog. "If our mission is a success, people will be able to teleport up to Kronos again. There will never again be any need for anyone to make the journey we're making now."

     "They won't know what they're missing," said Gunther sadly. "That's the trouble with teleporting. You go straight to your destination and you see nothing of the wonders that lie in between. We must remember this, my friend, and tell them about it when we return home. Maybe we can persuade others to come up here."

     "Guided tours around the upper atmosphere?" said the trog with a smile. "The University equivalent of a boat trip around the lighthouse. You can try, I suppose. Maybe they'll charge a small fee for the trip. I never heard a wizard pass up the chance to make money."

     "A trog says that!" cried Gunther in amused outrage. "How much do you trogs charge for your iron and all your alchemical products? I know for a fact that you produce optical fibre by the mile and glowbottle activating fluid by the gallon, but you charge for it as though you had to go all the way to the Pit for it and pay for it with your blood."

     The trog shrugged. "We make the stuff, we can charge what we like for it. If you want it cheaper, try making it yourself."

     "That's exactly what we are doing," smiled the wizard. "I know of half a dozen kingdoms that have human alchemists working on the problem right this minute. Mark my word, master trog. The days of the supremacy of the trog alchemists are numbered. Why I could tell you..."

     He froze, what he had been about to say forgotten as Saturn's voice interrupted his thoughts. "Is everything all right?" the senior wizard asked tersely. "What's going on up there?"

     "Everything's fine so far," replied Gunther. "The sky's almost completely black now. I've never seen so many stars! There are streaks of some kind of colour around the red sun, looks like the rainbow colours made by oil on water. I can see Sereena and..."

     "Spare me the running commentary," snapped Saturn impatiently. "We can see you in our telescopes and you're drifting into the constellation of the archer. You need to move further south."

     "Right," replied Gunther, chastened. He spoke the relevant words of command and the levitation spells driving the test chamber changed their direction of thrust a little. The chamber's occupants felt a slight lurch as they made their minor course correction, and another squeal of tortured metal came from the weld between the two chambers. Gunther's heart leapt into his throat, but nothing else happened and the sound faded away. "Drass!" he swore, wiping cold sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. "I wish it wouldn't keep doing that!"

     "What happened?" demanded Saturn. "Is something wrong?"

     "No," replied the younger wizard bravely. "Everything's fine. How's our course now?"

     "It'll take them a while to work that out," replied Karog. "The ground observers have to note our position over the next few minutes and then the clerics of Caratheodory have to turn that data into a three dimensional position. Even the best of us needs a little time to do the calculations."

     Sure enough, it was several minutes before Saturn spoke again. "You seem to be fine now," he said, "but be careful not to overcompensate. Your course has got to be spot on to hit Kronos’s orbital torus."

     "We know," replied Gunther irritably. "We'll keep in touch."

     He spoke the word of command that broke the farspeaking connection but which left it open to incoming messages. Saturn would probably have to guide them through other course corrections and they had to be ready to receive them. For the time being, though, there was nothing to do but admire the view and find ways to pass the time and he adjusted the straps holding him down in the chair to make himself more comfortable.

     "Fancy a game of Klann?" he asked.