the atmosphere, and were anchored out, in large space-colonizing detachments, even considerably beyond its limits. Travelling had long been driven off into the pure surrounding ether, and there truly the rate of speed and the roominess of space were as yet all that could be desired.
Brown and I still took regularly our half-holiday Saturday trip; but it was now a considerable way, even beyond the atmosphere, into outside space. I comforted Brown with the calculation that even the comparatively small space between us and Sirius could pack within one narrow belt the whole of our world's population, and even the additions for some centuries more ahead into the bargain. Although the world's population seemed then in a thorough jam as compared with now, yet none seemed to feel inconvenienced. No one wished to retreat to the smaller days of the past; but at the same time every one wondered, just as we ourselves now do in the twenty-ninth century, how people could possibly get on, with our then pace of progress, after a still further thousand years.
The great feature of the time was that we had attained to the ter-cross. The phosphate supply question was all past and done with, because we could now interconvert all the varieties of material substance, reducing them all, by command of adequate intensity of heat, to the one simple element of matter, and reconstituting the due proportions of chemical diversity as required exactly for our life and food and all other wants. The danger of the future, although still at a reasonably safe distance, was not a scarcity of phosphates or of any other substance in particular,
