Time passed slowly. Karog won every game they played until Gunther was sick of it and refused to play any more. "I should have brought a set of dice," he muttered grumpily as he put the Klann board back among his possessions. "I never knew a trog who could play well at dice."

     "I also wish you had brought your dice," replied the trog in amusement. "Watching you trying to throw dice in this gravity would make the time pass like nothing else."

     Gunther glared, and the trog chuckled under his breath, the loose, pale skin of his cheeks quivering with his amusement. Gunther turned to the window to watch the view and Karog pulled out his bryvol pad again. The sound of his busy, scratchy scribbling brought Gunther's attention back again and he looked to see the pad rapidly filling up with formulae and equations, as incomprehensible to him as the contents of a spellbook would have been to the trog.

     Karog hummed a tune to himself as he scribbled, a tune Gunther recognised as being from a song in praise of Caratheodory. The trog seemed to be in a state of religious fervour as his fingernail scratched its way back and forth across the pad, as if he was in direct communication with the deity he worshipped. Maybe he is, thought the wizard, and he leaned over to watch closer, fascinated despite himself. If, as the clerics of Caratheodory believed, all forms of mathematics and calculation were a form of prayer, then maybe what he was seeing really was a form of communication between a man and his God.

     Whether or not Karog really was communicating with Caratheodory, though, Gunther knew enough about this strange religion to know that the 'conversation' was almost surely one way. Caratheodory was the one God who, more than any other, truly seemed not to care what went on in the material universes. Even his followers and worshippers frequently felt that they were nothing more than a bothersome distraction to Him, but they prayed and worshipped nonetheless because, to them, the subtle manipulation of numbers had a purity and simplicity that they had failed to find in the outside world.

     It was a never ending source of wonder to them that such simple things as numbers were capable of such endlessly wonderful combinations and permutations, and that it could all be done by the application of just a few simple rules, and yet all that they had done so far, all the theorems and hypotheses that had so far been formulated and solved by clerics across the world over thousands of years, were as nothing compared to the staggeringly advanced mathematics performed by the God of Numbers Himself. They worshipped Him, therefore, for no better reason than sheer breathless admiration of His accomplishments, and although the God for the most part ignored their comparatively feeble efforts, every so often a priest would suddenly gain a particularly brilliant insight that would momentarily gain Caratheodory's attention.

     When that happened, the God would reward him by posing him a mathematical puzzle of his own; a morsel tossed to a particularly entertaining pet that would keep the cleric, and most likely his descendants for generations to come, busy for the rest of their lives. It was what every priest of Caratheodory lived for, and although it hadn't yet happened to Karog he thought it possible that it might happen during the course of this journey if he used these hours of free time to good use. Most of what he was doing was well explored territory, but there was always the possibility that he might run across a root of an equation that everyone else had considered trivial but which would turn out to open the door into a whole new field of discovery. It had happened before.

     Gunther watched him enviously. He'd brought a couple of books along, hoping they would keep his mind occupied during the long journey, but his nagging fears, fueled by the occasional creak and groan that kept coming from the weld between the two chambers, made it impossible for him to concentrate on them. He tried looking out at the planet spread out below instead, but that only reminded him of how high up they were, and getting higher by the second. He tried talking to Karog, but the trog was too involved with his mathematics and only grunted his replies. And Saturn, down on Tharia, was never in the mood for small talk even at the best of times.

     In the end, therefore, he just slumped in his seat, trying to make the time pass faster by sheer force of will. Kronos was due to pass by overhead soon, having completed the first of three orbits around Tharia, and that would tell them that they'd accomplished the first third of their voyage. It would also tell them that two thirds of their voyage was still to come, of course, throwing Gunther into new pits of depression, and this was not improved by a message that came from Saturn a few minutes later.

     "You should be about to enter the densest region of the skydeath belt," he commented conversationally, as if remarking on the weather. "No need to worry, though. The lead shielding provided perfect protection for the lab animals and it will for you too. You'll be through it in a few hours."

     "Thanks," replied Gunther, who would have preferred not to know. It occurred to him suddenly that the lead's effectiveness against the skydeath hadn't been tested since it had been made transparent. It had been magically altered to let light through. What if it let the skydeath through as well? He began to tremble uncontrollably as he debated with himself whether to turn the chamber around and head back to the ground, but it was very probably too late. If the lead had been rendered useless, they had already been up there long enough to receive a lethal dose, and if they were going to die anyway they might just as well complete the mission first.

     "The lead will protect us," he muttered, making it almost a prayer. "Light and skydeath are not the same thing. Making it transparent to one won't make it transparent to the other."

     "Mmm?" said Karog absently, looking up from his calculations. "Did you say something?"

     "No," said Gunther miserably. "No, nothing."

     The twenty four hours of their journey to Kronos were the longest of his entire life. He failed to get a single wink of sleep and was thrown into a fresh panic by several things that happened during the course of their journey. When they were about halfway to Kronos he was terrified to see a ghostly nimbus of light dancing about on the surface of the chamber. It lasted for several minutes and reminded the human wizard of a crowd of ghostly pixies dancing gleefully to celebrate his imminent death, while the phlegmatic trog calmly tried to reassure him that it was just some kind of natural phenomenon. Gunther laughed almost hysterically. "A bolt of lightning is a natural phenomenon," he pointed out, "but you wouldn't want to be hit by one!" Karog conceded the point but continued to insist that the effect was probably harmless.

     A few hours later, as Kronos was passing by above them for the second time, now as large as the yellow sun, Gunther was looking down at a vast ocean that appeared to cover an entire hemisphere of Tharia. He was contemplating the sheer size of the ocean, completely empty of even the smallest islands as far as he could see, when he saw brilliant streaks of light passing across it. A meteor shower, seen from above! The sense of wonder he experienced was a welcome relief from the fear until he remembered that each shooting star was caused by a lump of rock heated by friction as it sped through the atmosphere at great speed.

     "Er, Karog," he said, his voice trembling, "How fast would you say those meteors are traveling?"

     The trog scowled in annoyance at the interruption, but he erased the formulae from his bryvol pad and scribbled a few numbers on it. "About fifty thousand miles an hour," he said. "Four times faster than Kronos."

     Gunther swallowed nervously. "And what would happen if one of them hit us? I suppose they're so small we'd barely feel the impact."

     He smiled hopefully and the trog scowled again before scribbling a few more numbers. "Don't worry about it." he said at last, looking at the answer.

     There was a look on the trog's face that frightened the wizard, though. "What?" he demanded. "What would happen if one of them hit us?"

     "I said don't worry about it," repeated Karog. "The chances of it happening are tiny. We're a very small target. Besides, we're shielded by six inches of lead all around."

     "Yes, yes of course," said Gunther, relaxing in relief. "Six inches of lead. But it would only take a small amount of damage to ruin the levitation spells. We'd be left adrift with no way to control our course. We'd drift through space forever with no hope of rescue!"

     "You're forgetting that we're attached to a teleportation chamber," pointed out Karog with increasing annoyance, "and that we're both wearing Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing. All we're got to do is leave this chamber and make our way to the teleportation chamber. We'd be back on Tharia within five minutes."

     "Yes, yes of course. But what if it was the teleportation chamber that was hit? The explosive release of magic..."

     "In the name of the Gods!" exploded Karog, his patience snapping at last. "Yes, all right, you're right! We're both going to die! Now will you please SHUT! UP!"

     Gunther stared at him in shock and amazement, stunned by the outburst. "Okay, okay," he muttered unhappily. "Just trying to make conversation."

     "If you're so terrified of all this," said the trog, regretting his outburst, "then why did you volunteer for it? Someone else could just as easily have taken your place.

     "No-one else knows the park caverns as well as I do," replied the human miserably. "I stand the best chance of teleporting safely. Others might have tried, but with a greater chance of failure, causing his death and yours. Maybe killing some of the people on Kronos as well. I couldn't allow that. How could I have lived with myself? At least this way I get all the fear and unpleasantness over with in one go."

     Karog stared at him in surprise, and his eyes softened a little. "It's okay to be scared," he said at last. "What we're doing would terrify any sane man. Do me a favour, though, would you? I'd appreciate it if you could suffer in silence."

     Gunther laughed in relief. "I'll do my best," he promised.

☆☆☆

     More time passed, during which Saturn sent up occasional warnings that they were drifting off course in one direction or another, and Gunther made the necessary course corrections to bring them back onto their proper path. He also brightened the flashing light spells cast on the teleportation chamber as they grew further from the ground observers, so that the tiny capsule could still be seen from the ground.

     Shortly after that, the human wizard managed to snatch a couple of hours of sleep, comforted by the knowledge that they were entering the skydeath minimum, the region of space extending from nine to eleven thousand miles above the surface of Tharia in which the mysterious, deadly force, whatever it was, was absent. When he awoke, still tired but able to think clearly once again, he managed to take a bite to eat. As he was chewing on a mouthful of egg and bacon pie, Karog unstrapped the wooden range finder and made his first measurement of their height above Tharia.

     The range finder was a simple hinged V of wood with a ruler, marked in tenths of inches, crudely bolted across its open end to form a narrow triangle. It was intended to help them determine their distance from Kronos, a task for which the ground observers could give them little assistance, but it could equally well measure their distance from Tharia and it had been decided that he would use it towards the end of their journey to double check the figures passed on to them by the ground observers.

     A sheet of paper in front of him held a list of the diameters of several major geographical features, cross checked against their apparent diameters as seen from several different heights, just in case the trog was unable, for one reason or another, to make the calculations and Gunther was forced to use it. The trog aligned the range finder on the island continent of Garon, which was now dead centre below him. "Nine and three tenths of an inch," he said, sliding the hinged third side along the ruler so that each of the long sides pointed towards opposite coasts. He did the calculations in his head. "That puts us nine thousand seven hundred miles up."

     "Saturn puts it as nine thousand three hundred miles," said Gunther, looking worried again. "A difference of four hundred miles, and the teleportation spell has a maximum range of only one hundred miles. We're going to have to make the final approach by the seat of our pants."

     "The what?" said Karog in confusion. "What have the seats of our pants got to do with it?"

     Gunther smiled in embarrassment. "Sorry. It's one of Elmias’s old sayings. He's always coming out with bits and pieces of nonsense he's picked up in one alien dimension or another. I think it means that we've just got to do the best we can. Use our best aim."

     "Maybe we should begin to decelerate now," the trog suggested. "We don't want to overshoot."

     "Right," agreed the human. He gave the command, and they lurched in their seats as they felt the change in velocity. Once again the weld screamed in protest but Gunther forced himself to ignore it.

     "I can see Kronos," said Karog, looking off to his left. He held up the range finder again, this time using it to measure the distance between the smallest moon and a nearby star. It was the moon's movement with respect to Tharia that was important. If it was moving away from Tharia they were still below it, but if it moved in the opposite direction they had flown too high and needed to reduce their altitude. If it failed to move at all but only got bigger, they were in the right place.

     "There's a drassing comet right behind it," he swore, tugging his trophy cords with his free hand. "Makes it hard to see the drassing star. What's out altitude?"

     "Saturn says we're right slap in its orbit," replied the wizard. "But if our altitude can be four hundred miles out..."

     "We'll soon see if our altitude's correct," interrupted the trog, squinting with concentration. "It's motion against the star will tell us everything. Kronos seems to be moving up, so we're still below it."

     "How far below it?"

     "Can't tell. It's moving so drassing slowly..."

     "That's good. It means we're still a good way off. Plenty of time to line ourselves up."

     "Yes, but when it begins to move, it'll move fast. Logarithms, you know?"

     Gunther shook his head. He recognised at as a Caratheodorian holy word but he had no idea what it meant. He decided to shut up and let the trog concentrate.

     Kronos swelled larger, equaling the size of the yellow sun, then doubling it. Soon its motion was easily visible to both of them, and to their delighted surprise they saw that they appeared to be dead on target. Gunther cancelled all the levitation spells, bringing them to a dead stop, but as the minutes passed and the tiny moon continued to grow larger it began to slip off to the right as the capsule, no longer help up against the force of gravity, began to fall back towards Tharia. The wizard cursed loudly and hurriedly reactivated some of the spells to put them back in place.

     The tiny moon was now moving visibly, though, slipping off from in front of the comet, and Gunther felt himself slipping into panic as he increased the spells to their full power. Damnation! he cursed to himself. I forgot about Tharia's gravity! We were in position! We were in the perfect spot right in front of Kronos and I let us fall back! Stupid! Stupid! He watched anxiously as Kronos continued to move against the stars, still growing larger. Was it moving slower? Were they edging in front of it once more? He gave the word of command again, trying to urge the capsule to even greater speed.