I puzzled out at last that my best chance would be to drop back towards the moon as near as I dared in order to gather velocity, then to shut my windows, and fly behind it, and when I was past to open my earthward windows, and so get off at a good pace homeward.  But whether I should ever reach the earth by that device, or whether I might not simply find myself spinning about it in some hyperbolic or parabolic curve or other, I could not tell.  Later I had a happy inspiration, and by opening certain windows to the moon, which had appeared in the sky in front of the earth, I turned my course aside so as to head off the earth, which it had become evident to me I must pass behind without some such expedient.  I did a very great deal of complicated thinking over these problems—­for I am no mathematician—­and in the end I am certain it was much more my good luck than my reasoning that enabled me to hit the earth.  Had I known then, as I know now, the mathematical chances there were against me, I doubt if I should have troubled even to touch the studs to make any attempt.  And having puzzled out what I considered to be the thing to do, I opened all my moonward windows, and squatted down—­the effort lifted me for a time some feet or so into the air, and I hung there in the oddest way—­and waited for the crescent to get bigger and bigger until I felt I was near enough for safety.  Then I would shut the windows, fly past the moon with the velocity I had got from it—­if I did not smash upon it—­and so go on towards the earth.

And that is what I did.

At last I felt my moonward start was sufficient.  I shut out the sight of the moon from my eyes, and in a state of mind that was, I now recall, incredibly free from anxiety or any distressful quality, I sat down to begin a vigil in that little speck of matter in infinite space that would last until I should strike the earth.  The heater had made the sphere tolerably warm, the air had been refreshed by the oxygen, and except for that faint congestion of the head that was always with me while I was away from earth, I felt entire physical comfort.  I had extinguished the light again, lest it should fail me in the end; I was in darkness, save for the earthshine and the glitter of the stars below me.  Everything was so absolutely silent and still that I might indeed have been the only being in the universe, and yet, strangely enough, I had no more feeling of loneliness or fear than if I had been lying in bed on earth.  Now, this seems all the stranger to me, since during my last hours in that crater of the moon, the sense of my utter loneliness had been an agony....