31,680 feet.  Like a flash I applied the formula while the giant’s muscles were yet tightening for the kick:  31,680 x 1/20 x 2 = 3,168, the square root of which is a fraction more than 56.  Fifty-six feet in a second, then, was the critical velocity with which I must be kicked off in order that I might never return.  I perceived at once that the giant would be able to accomplish it.  I turned and shouted up at him: 

“Hold on, I have something to say to you!”

I dimly saw his mountainous face puckered into mighty wrinkles, out of which his eyes glared fiercely, and the next moment I was sailing into space.  I could no more have kept a balance than the earth can stand still upon its axis.  I had become a small planet myself, and, like all planets, I rotated.  Yet the motion did not dizzy me, and soon I became intensely interested in the panorama of creation that was spread around me.  For some time, whenever my face was turned toward the little globe of Menippe, I saw the giant, partly in profile against the sky, with his back bent and his hands upon his knees, watching me with an occasional approving nod of his big head.  He looked so funny standing there on his little seven-by-nine world, like a clown on a performing ball, that, despite my terrible situation, I shook my sides with laughter.  There was no echo in the profundity of empty space.

Soon Menippe dwindled to a point, and I saw her inhospitable inhabitant no more.  Then I watched the sun and the blazing firmament around, for there was at the same time broad day and midnight for me.  The sunlight, being no longer diffused by an atmosphere, did not conceal the face of the sky, and I could see the stars shining close to the orb of day.  I recognized the various planets much more easily than I had been accustomed to do, and, with a twinge at my heart, saw the earth traveling along in its distant orbit, splendid in the sunshine.  I thought of my wife sitting alone by the telescope in the darkness and silence, wondering what had become of me.  I asked myself, “How in the world can I ever get back there again?” Then I smiled to think of the ridiculous figure I cut, out here in space, exposed to the eyes of the universe, a rotating, gyrating, circumambulating astronomer, an animated teetotum lost in the sky.  I saw no reason to hope that I should not go on thus forever, revolving around the sun until my bones, whitening among the stars, might be revealed to the superlative powers of some future telescope, and become a subject of absorbing interest, the topic of many a learned paper for the astronomers of a future age.  Afterward I was comforted by the reflection that in airless space, although I might die and my body become desiccated, yet there could be no real decay; even my garments would probably last forever.  The savants, after all, should never speculate on my bones.