midnight
My destination lay some thirteen hundred miles southeast of Great New York . I could do a good normal three-ninety in this fleet little Wasp , especially if I kept in the rarer air-pressures over the zero-height . The thousand-foot lane had a southward drift , this night . I was making now well over four hundred ; I would reach Nareda soon after midnight . The Continental Shelf slid beneath me , dropping away as my course took me further from the Highland borders . The Lowlands lay patched with inky shadows and splashes of moonlight . Domes with upstanding , rounded heads ; plateaus of naked black rock , ten thousand feet below the zero-height ; trenches , like valleys , ridged and pitted , naked in places like a pockmarked lunar landscape .