THE FLIGHT OF THE RING
I
"Turn her loose!" repeated Hooker, and stepped swiftly to the nearest
port-hole, while Rhoda, lying in her place of concealment behind
the chair, clutched at the floor in breathless apprehension. A
humming sound filled the air. Through the open door of the lighted
control-room, the girl could see the gyroscopes slowly beginning to
revolve. The Ring throbbed as if alive. Fear seized her. Perhaps she
could still escape from her voluntary imprisonment. Perhaps she could
even yet open the air-lock and leap safely back to earth. She almost
longed for her aunt.
And then her courage came back with a rush. There was her lover--her
funny little Bennie--staring out of the window, a strange expression of
exaltation on his face. Here was where she wanted to be--with _him_!
With him, on his strange, unearthly journey! With him amid the stars,
journeying to the music of the spheres!
Through the window she could see flickers of yellow light, and from
outside came a noise like escaping steam. The glow cast strange shadows
on Bennie's face, and gave his features a pallid tinge that frightened
her anew. The discharge from the tractor had risen to a muffled
roar--deafening. The floor trembled and quivered, and the glare,
now pouring through the deadlights, paled the electric lights of the
interior. There was a tremendous hullabaloo going on out there. She
clambered to her feet.
"Bennie!" she shouted instinctively, holding out her arms to him.
Amid the tumult, he turned to her a face like that of a man who sees a
ghost.
"My God!" he gasped. "How did you get here?"
She walked unsteadily toward him and clutched his arm.
"I'm going, too," she said. "I told you I would. I'm a stowaway."
Bennie put his arm around her waist and dragged her to the window.
"Now you're here," he cried hysterically, "just look at that!"
A typhoon of glare and noise was raging outside, roaring down from the
tractor through the center of the Ring, and a blinding cloud of dust,
illuminated by dazzling yellow light, was driving out and away from the
base of the staging in the gigantic circle. The earth below them was
completely concealed from view by clouds of vapor, dust, and steam,
shot through with phosphorescent gleams that made it look like the
mouth of some devilish caldron. From the swiftly spinning disks of the
gyroscopes in the control-room came a draft that blew the newspapers
off the table. The floor quivered under their feet, and ominous
creaking and snapping sounds reverberated through the outer shell, as
the beams of the staging were gradually relieved of the weight.
"We'll be clear in a moment!" yelled Bennie in her ear.
She clutched his arm tight.
"Will it hurt?" she asked, almost piteously.
"Not much," he answered. "Hold fast to the rail, and don't bend your
knees. We'll be going off with a pretty big acceleration."
The tumult increased in volume, and suddenly there came a crash
accompanied by the sound of splintering timbers as the staging
collapsed, blown to pieces by the blast. The floor seemed to sink away
from beneath their feet.
"We've blown that staging into the middle of next week!" chuckled
Bennie.
The room swayed as the Ring, lifted by the tractor, rocked drunkenly
from side to side for a second or two. Then, as the machine steadied
itself, there came an upward pressure from the floor again and a sudden
increase in their weight, which told them they were rising.
Rhoda, who, in the excitement of the moment, had forgotten Bennie's
instructions, felt her knees bend quickly under her and found herself
upon the floor, where an unseen, relentless force seemed to be pressing
her down. Above her, Bennie had dragged himself up the spiral stairway
to the small observing-stage which hung suspended from the ceiling, and
was now lying on his back, with his eye glued to the vertical telescope
that pointed up through the glass deadlight in the roof.
Burke, who, at discovering Rhoda's presence, had merely nodded and
grinned as if not at all surprised at her being there, stood at his
post near the side window with his hand on the control-lever. To him,
Bennie gave his orders from where he lay.
Medusa, the bluish green star which was their destination, swam in the
firmament well off toward the edge of the field of the telescope; the
direction of their flight must needs be altered until the asteroid
touched the illuminated cross-wires at the center. "More to the west!"
shouted Bennie. "More--more--still more! Hold it! Too far--back a
little! Now you're on the wire--a little south! More! Hold! There we
are! All right!"
He scrambled to his feet, and descending the stairs too hastily, landed
in a heap at the bottom.
"My Lord," he groaned, rubbing his shins; "I nearly broke my leg! Never
run down-stairs when you're going up. Be sure and remember that."
Rhoda, meanwhile, flat on the floor, half sick from the acceleration,
with her face pressed against the lower deadlight, watched the earth
rush downward and away. At first she could see nothing but the dazzling
cone of yellow light that shot away from them, like the tail of a great
rocket, but presently, by partially shielding her eyes with her hand,
she was able to discover a great and ever widening ring of yellow dust,
with riffles of light and shade chasing each other outward, and, in
the middle, a maelstrom of earth and shattered timbers. Then she saw
that the lights of the city and of the neighboring towns seemed to be
flowing in from all sides to a point just below her.
"Twenty thousand feet!" yelled Burke, shouting out the readings of the
manometer as they rose. "Thirty thousand!"
Hooker crawled along the floor to her side, and she clutched his hand.
"Oh, Bennie," she exclaimed, "it's perfectly wonderful! But I'm scared
almost to death."
With his head close to hers, he looked down into the black void at the
retreating earth.
"Sixty thousand!" sang out Burke.
The lights of Washington had now fused into a pale-yellow,
phosphorescent spot. A silver thread showed where flowed the Potomac,
and, off to the north, another path of luminous haze--Baltimore--was
gradually crawling in toward the first, and still farther off a third
and fourth--Wilmington and Philadelphia. The surface of the earth in
the moonlight had taken on a frosty, bluish tinge, while, from the
east, a darker shade was drawing in like a curtain--the sea.
"Ninety thousand; nearly twenty miles up--and running like a watch!"
chirruped Burke.
A few minutes, and the whole Atlantic seaboard was spread out below
them--New York, with its more congested illumination, glowing like a
planet. The whole mass of the globe's surface gradually came into view
as the Ring drove up and out of the earth's atmosphere, the mountain
ranges shining like necklaces of jewels and the Great Lakes showing as
darker patches, while everything else remained misty and obscured as by
a dense haze.
"One hundred and fifty thousand!" intoned Burke. "The manometer no
longer registers. We shall be out of the atmosphere presently. We're
getting into space!"
For a while, they remained silent. Then Bennie and Rhoda noticed that
the helium blast from the tractor had diminished in intensity, assuming
a pale straw-color, and its roar had subsided to a faint and scarcely
audible purr.
"What's happened?" she asked nervously. "Are we running down?"
"No," Bennie replied; "we're getting out into the ether. There is no
air to oppose the radiant discharge or to transmit the sound. But you
feel the drag, don't you? That shows that the tractor is still giving
the same lift."
"How fast are we going now?" she asked in awe.
Bennie glanced at his watch.
"It's just twenty minutes since we started. We must be doing about
twelve thousand feet a second, and are probably well over a thousand
miles from the earth already."
They lay speechless, gazing down through the deadlight for ten or
fifteen minutes--at the end of which period Bennie suddenly started to
his feet.
"By George, I almost forgot something!" he exclaimed. "It's time for me
to rig my ropes."
Hastily going to an adjacent cupboard, he removed several coils of
clothes-line, which he began to fasten systematically to small steel
staples attached to the floor, sides, and ceiling of the chart-room,
running them back and forth and diagonally across the interior.
"Is this wash-day?" jocularly inquired Rhoda.
"Those are life-lines," replied Bennie. "Another twenty minutes, and
we shall stop our engines and coast. Then you'll find it difficult to
get around without something of this sort. Gravitation will no longer
be felt. I figured it all out long ago. You see there isn't really
any 'up' or 'down' out here, and, if you get out of position, there
is nothing to pull you back where you belong again, unless you have
something to grab hold of."
In fact, the room now looked as if a gigantic spider had been at work
in it. Clothes-lines radiated everywhere from the chart-table, one
leading directly to the door of the air-lock, another to the wardrobe,
and the last into the control-room, where Atterbury was likewise
engaged in rigging more "aerial roads."
These precautionary measures having been arranged, they all partook,
at Bennie's suggestion, of a light supper, in order to avoid the
inconvenience to which they might be subjected in handling plates and
glasses when, later, the dynamo having been shut off, there should be
no downward pressure from the lift of the Ring.
"We've had the tractor running now for something over an hour,"
remarked Bennie presently. "Suppose we shut it off and coast for a
while. We must now be over twelve thousand miles from the earth, and
moving about seven miles a second. There's no longer the slightest
danger of falling back, and it's almost impossible, with all that light
in our wake, to see anything."
So saying, he walked heavily over to the speaking-tube and rang the
electric bell.
"Shut her off for a bit!" he shouted to Atterbury. "But stand by the
switch until I call you!"
Then he returned to the deadlight and threw himself on the floor again.
"We're going to get a new sensation now, all right," he said, "but
don't be alarmed. It isn't anything to worry about."
The shrill note of the dynamo dropped rapidly in pitch, and the
glowing wake of helium beneath the car faded away slowly and presently
disappeared.
The Ring was coasting.
It was at this precise moment that Thornton had lost it in the finder
of the big telescope at Georgetown. As the helium blast died away, a
curious sensation made itself apparent to all of them. The pressure
which had drawn them to the floor gradually relaxed, and their bodies
became lighter. Hooker placed his hands on the floor at his side and,
pushing down gently, raised himself to the full length of his arms,
easily supporting his weight on the tips of his two forefingers. Then,
suddenly, he raised his hands, and, to the surprise of his companions,
instead of falling, he slowly settled back to his original position,
like a body suspended in water.
"We shan't weigh anything in a moment," he announced. "The tractor is
still pushing a little, but, as soon as it stops entirely, good-by to
gravitation!"
There was now no sensation of movement in the car, which seemed, as
it were, to be hanging motionless in space. Like the inhabitants of
the earth, who are being carried through the universe at a speed of
sixty-eight thousand miles an hour, the travelers were unconscious of
their transportation.
"How do you mean--weigh nothing at all?" demanded Burke. "Isn't the
earth attracting us still?"
"Of course," retorted Bennie, "the earth is still attracting us, but
its only effect will be gradually to reduce our velocity."
"Oh dear, I certainly feel very queer!" suddenly declared Rhoda. "I
feel as one does in a 'flying' dream--terribly weird inside, I'm afraid
I am going to be ill."
"No, you're not," Bennie encouraged her. "That is just an impression.
You see, out here in space where we don't weigh anything, neither do
our insides. They just sort of float around, and all the supporting
membranes relax. It will pass off in a minute."
"Sure it will," put in Burke. "You get the same thing, only not as
bad, when you make a fast dive in an aeroplane or drop through an ether
whorl. I've noticed it often."
"Try holding your breath for a minute," suggested Doctor Bennie.
"I'd rather hold your hand, I think," she said softly, with a little
blush. "But I'm beginning to feel better already."
"Now the fun is going to start!" announced their commander. "I think
I'll leave you. Please excuse me for a moment."
He pressed quickly against the floor with his hands, and floated slowly
up into the air over their heads until he grasped the stage below the
telescope.
"I've got to take a squint at Medusa and see if we're on our direct
course," he called down over his shoulder, at the same time navigating
himself into position under the telescope. Holding the eyepiece lightly
between his fingers, he reclined easily in a horizontal position in an
attitude of rakish nonchalance in mid-air.
"We're a degree or two off, but it will do for the present," he said.
"Now, here I go again!" And, thrusting lightly against the telescope,
he sailed over their heads on his back with his arms at his side.
"Heavens!" cried Rhoda, half rising from her chair.
To her consternation, she also floated upward and, still in a graceful
sitting posture, sailed slowly up to the ceiling to Bennie's side.
Burke shook with laughter.
"Human Zeppelins, by thunder! How are you ever going to get down again?"
Rhoda wrapped her skirts tightly around her ankles with one hand and
waved to Burke with the other.
"Why don't you come up and join us? It's fine!"
Professor Hooker assumed an expression of great solemnity.
"Action and reaction--to use the words of one I. Newton--are equal and
opposite in their effects," he declaimed, giving Rhoda a slight push to
one side, which caused them to drift apart until they bumped lightly
against the opposite walls of the room. "Isn't this great? If we'd only
brought along some balls and cues, we could play billiards in three
dimensions."
Burke had thrust his face close to the deadlight and was peering down
into the abyss of space that yawned below.
"By George," he cried, "you're missing something! Better come down here
and take a look."
"But how shall I _get_ down?" gasped Rhoda, in great embarrassment.
"What on earth shall I do!"
"Not what you do on earth," grinned Bennie. "Grab a life-line and pull
yourself down. We're in the center of the universe--so to speak."
Together they slowly drew themselves back to the chart-table by means
of the clothes-lines and then to the deadlight.
The glare from the tractor had now entirely disappeared, and the Ring
swam in the Stygian darkness of space. Their first impression was
that the earth had vanished. In its place was a vast black firmament
crowded with millions of blazing worlds. Though the great orb of the
moon was full, and shone like a sun through the pure ether above
their heads, the lunar light, undiluted and undimmed by the earth's
atmosphere, diminished in no way the brilliancy of the stars. It was
a new and marvelous effect--the black-velvet robe of night studded
with incandescent and apparently motionless orbs, which gleamed like
resplendent meteors in countless myriads on every side, but with a calm
and absolutely steady light.
Then, as they looked, they saw, just below them, what appeared to be a
vast black hole in the darkness, covering perhaps one-tenth of the sky,
within which not a single star could be seen.
"Put out the lights," directed Bennie, rubbing off with his
handkerchief the condensation, due to the intense cold of
interplanetary space, which had formed on the inside of the deadlight.
And now, as their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, they saw that
the great circle in the galaxy of stars was not quite black but shone
with a pale-gray, ashen phosphorescence, through which they could
eventually discern the outlines of the continents of North and South
America. This huge circular disk, which blotted out so much of the
night below them, was naught but the dark side of the earth illumined
by the light of the moon alone.
For many minutes, they gazed in silent wonder at the distant globe. No
sound, no movement suggested the fact that they were flying through
space at the rate of twenty miles a second. The only indication of
their flight was the gradual, almost imperceptible shrinking that went
on in the size of the earth beneath their feet.
"Atterbury ought to see this!" exclaimed Burke suddenly, and, acting
upon his own suggestion, he moved himself, hand over hand, to the tube
and called to the engineer, who, after a few moments' delay, made
his appearance. He had hardly joined the others around the deadlight
when a silvery light manifested itself in the form of faint streamers
stretching out from one side of the dark circle of the earth below.
Each moment these streamers increased in length and brilliancy.
"What is going on down there?" cried Burke, in excitement. "Is the old
globe on fire?"
"That must be the sun's corona," answered Bennie. "We've been watching
an eclipse of the sun by the earth. It was night when we left
Washington, so, of course, the sun was _behind_ the earth. I hadn't
thought of it before. Now we are getting near the edge of the earth's
conical shadow, and before long shall be out in full sunlight."
"How wonderful!" gasped Rhoda. "That alone makes the trip worth the
taking!"
"Look!" cried Bennie. "The sun is coming--watch!"
A half-ring of luminous violet light now encircled the great disk of
the earth. Gradually it increased in brilliancy, changed to white,
and finally to orange-red. Then, as the Ring shot out of the cone of
the shadow, the rim of the earth kindled with a blinding glare as the
blazing orb of the sun emerged like a golden furnace.
Immediately the air turned warm, and the frost disappeared from the
glass of the window. Yet, in spite of the fact that the universe was
filled with light, the sky remained as black as midnight and was still
filled with undimmed stars. There being no atmosphere, no light came
from the sky, and the sun, burning out of a profundity of darkness,
produced no illumination inside the car except to project through the
glass window a circular spot of light upon the ceiling, which shone
there like an arc-lamp in an opal globe. Thus, the interior of the car,
in spite of the fact that they were in full sunlight, was illuminated
only by the light which radiated from the glowing spot over their
heads. And now the unimpeded rays of the sun, playing directly upon the
sides of the aluminum car, began to raise the temperature inside it to
a degree almost insupportable.
"Phew!" gasped Burke. "If we don't take care, we shall melt."
Bennie turned on a switch beneath the table, to the side of which was
attached a spirit thermometer. It indicated eighty-nine degrees.
"It will only take a few seconds to fix this," he assured Rhoda. "You
see those jacketed coils there--running around the room just above the
floor? That is our cooling apparatus. I have just turned it on. Watch
the thermometer."
The men had taken off their coats, and Rhoda was fanning herself
violently. But, even as they watched it, the thermometer began to fall
until the instrument registered less than seventy degrees.
"Really," exclaimed Rhoda, in admiration, "what a perfect housekeeper
you are! You don't happen to have a soda-fountain under that table, do
you?"
Bennie laughed.
"No; that was something I forgot. But I can give you a glass of
ice-water if you like."
"If you please," she acquiesced.
Bennie pulled himself over to the water-cooler, where he held a pitcher
under the spigot and opened the cock. But nothing happened.
"What's the trouble?" inquired Rhoda.
Bennie grinned.
"Of course," he answered, "the water won't run out, for there isn't any
gravity to make it."
He lifted the lid off the cooler and filled the pitcher by scooping up
the water. Then he floated back to Rhoda with the remark,
"I'll show you an experiment which no one has ever seen before."
Holding the pitcher upside down, he lifted it quickly away from the
water inside, which remained suspended in the air as a pulsating,
transparent mass of irregular form. Gradually the mass ceased its
pulsations and, as it did so, collected itself into a perfect sphere
resembling a crystal ball.
"See what surface-tension will do!" he exclaimed admiringly. "Did you
ever see a soap-bubble as beautiful as that?"
"How extraordinary!" murmured Rhoda. "Anyhow, it's just what I wanted."
And, leaning forward, she applied her lips to the floating sphere and
sucked in a deep draft of the icy fluid.
"The latest thing in hygienic drinking-fountains," she remarked, as she
settled herself back in her armchair. "I really don't need this chair
for repose, but without it I feel like a picture without a frame," she
added.
"This is crazy-house, all right!" nodded Atterbury. "Gee, but we've got
to be awful careful or we'll break every bone in our bodies!"
"If we can only manage to sit still for an hour," answered Bennie,
"we shall have our tractor running again. Just now, I feel like a toy
balloon!"
At this point, Burke elevated his legs and gave himself a shove with
his hands.
"So long!" he remarked, as he shot forward, and, floating horizontally
through the door of the control-room, disappeared.
"Easy way to go to work!" chuckled Atterbury. "Lie on your back and
kick yourself down-town. Watch _me_!"
He lifted himself with his forearms until he was poised like an athlete
above a pair of parallel bars. Then, extending his arms in front of
him, he gave a jerk with his legs and swam through the doorway after
Burke. Rhoda and Bennie looked at each other in amusement.
"Have you thought what is going to happen when we begin to get within
the sphere of Medusa's attraction?" she inquired.
"You mean that, since that is the direction of our flight, gravitation
will lift us _up_ instead of _down_?"
"Exactly. We shall have to walk on the ceiling with our heads toward
the floor."
"That won't be very convenient, will it?" he replied. "You know, I
never thought of that at all. All our fixtures will be in just the
wrong places. This table, for instance, will be way down below us and
upside down at that. No--I mean it will be upside down above us on the
ceiling. No--what _do_ I mean?"
"I don't know," she retorted. "If we are right side up, it will be
upside down, but if we are wrong side up, it will be right side down,
for if the up side becomes the down side then the wrong side will be
the right side, and the up side and the down side--"
"Stop--stop--For heaven's sake, stop!" shrieked Bennie. "You're talking
nonsense, anyway. We're going to turn the Ring over before we slow
down."
It is problematical in what result the complexities of the situation
would have involved them had not Bennie suddenly noticed that the
spot of sunlight upon the ceiling had shifted slightly to one side.
Calling Rhoda's attention to this unexpected phenomenon, they returned
to the deadlight, to find that the sun was no longer below them but
considerably to one side, and, shielding their eyes with their hands,
they were able to observe, where the vast black circle had been beneath
the car, a shining crescent, light-bluish white in color and fifteen or
twenty times the diameter of the moon. Neither Rhoda nor Bennie could
repress a gasp of awe as they saw, for the first time, the enormous
silvery arch of the earth pinned, as it were, against the utter
blackness of space, with all its seas and continents plotted like a map.
"The crescent earth!" she breathed, in wonder.
"The crescent earth!" echoed Bennie. "How marvelous--like the new moon!
I suppose we should call it 'the _new_ earth.' See, there is the whole
Atlantic coast line from Cape Horn to Hudson Bay--Florida and the Gulf
of Mexico, Greenland and the Arctic ice-cap! Look at the cloud-banks
over the Atlantic Ocean and along the west coast of South America.
Quick--get your camera and put in a telephoto lens!"
The camera was still hanging by its strap from Rhoda's shoulder, and
it took but a moment to exchange the lenses. Then she threw a puzzled
glance at her comrade.
"How shall I do it? I don't understand," she hesitated.
"You will have to take the picture through the deadlight," he answered.
"But how long an exposure shall I make?" she inquired.
"Oh--a tenth of a second," he suggested, "or a fifth, perhaps."
Rhoda was having a hard time to preserve her equilibrium and handle the
camera.
"Oh dear," she complained; "I can't keep still. This weighing nothing
is very awkward--you slip around so."
With Bennie's assistance, however, she managed to hold the lens firmly
against the deadlight.
"Push it down hard and squeeze the bulb," he directed.
While Rhoda was engaged in making different exposures, Bennie floated
up to the observation-stage to ascertain their direction. To his
astonishment, he discovered that Medusa was no longer in the field.
"There's something wrong!" he shouted to Burke. "We're way off our
course!"
"What's happened?" yelled Atterbury, shooting, in his favorite posture,
feet foremost, out of the condenser-room. "We're running all cock-eyed!
Look where the sun is--the earth!"
"They ought to be nearly in line," replied Burke, in a confused way.
"There's some new influence at work here."
"But I've lost Medusa entirely!" Hooker called down to them. "I can't
imagine what's up. Of course, we left the earth with its axial and
orbital velocities as well as our own. I thought I'd worked it out all
right, but I must have overlooked something. Anyhow, the first thing
to do is to get back on our course. Atterbury, start up your engines
half-speed; I'll call to you when I want your whole force. Burke, you
must slant the tractor over and turn the Ring until we are pointing
toward Medusa. I don't know just how she'll act, but I think we can
tip her almost any way we please. When we're pointed in the right
direction, we'll straighten out the tractor and give her full-speed
ahead. Are you ready?"
Atterbury darted back toward the condenser-room, and almost immediately
the hum of the dynamo began again. With its resumption, their weight
returned, but hardly enough to enable them to walk in comfort.
"Ah," exclaimed Burke, "It sure feels good to be on foot again! I was
getting darn tired of this spook business."
Under Hooker's directions, he moved the control-lever until Medusa swam
again into the field of the telescope. Then, as the green star neared
the center of the lens, Bennie ordered him to straighten the course and
directed Atterbury to turn on full-speed. The noise of the machinery
increased, and with it came a further increase in their weight. The
whole force of the tractor was again pressing them on toward their
distant goal. Bennie once more descended from the observation-cage and
took his place beside Rhoda at the deadlight on the floor of the car.
Hypnotized by the wonder and beauty of the crescent earth beneath them,
they hardly noticed that it was gradually shifting its place. Suddenly,
it slipped entirely out of sight.
"Hang it!" shouted Bennie, in despair. "We've lost control of the Ring!"
Where, before, the earth had been, there now appeared the stupendous
disk of the full moon.
At the same moment, Burke uttered an exclamation of fear.
"We're all out of kilter!" he cried. "I was looking down through the
observation-window at the earth, and--all of a sudden it wasn't there!"
"The Ring is evidently slowly turning over," stammered Bennie. "If our
tractor were not running, it wouldn't matter, but our direction must
now be changing from moment to moment. We may have been captured or
pulled out of our course by the moon! It's pretty near us, and you know
how Jupiter changes the orbits of the comets that pass near it."
At that moment, Atterbury appeared in the doorway.
"Shall I keep the engines running?" he asked. "Our uranium is getting
low, I'm afraid. The gage indicates that over seventy per cent has been
used."
"Troubles never come singly!" exclaimed the master of the Ring. "Here
we are, going we don't know where, gravitating around the moon,
perhaps, and our fuel giving out! We've got to get a fresh cylinder
into the tractor to get back, and it will be bad business making the
change in space. We ought to land and make repairs and get a fresh
start with new bearings."
"Land?" gasped Rhoda, in astonishment. "Where?"
"On the moon, of course. It's only ten thousand miles away, and we're
headed straight for her, apparently. Turn her over again, Burke, and
we'll slow down. It's going to be ticklish business, but I don't see
what else we can do. We may go to smash and we may not. It all depends
on whether we have time to overcome our velocity before we get there.
We could slue off and run by, of course, but our uranium might give
out, and then what should we do? Anyhow, there's no time to be lost."
Yet, accustomed as Rhoda now was to supernormal situations and
surroundings, Bennie's practical suggestion of landing on the moon,
which, after all, was the one celestial body with which they were at
all familiar, seemed utterly inconceivable of execution.
"The moon!" she repeated vaguely. "The moon!"
She had seen the moon off and on with the greatest regularity for
nearly thirty years--had photographed it, drawn pictures of it,
made calculations about it, and read all sorts of fanciful yarns
concerning it and its imaginary inhabitants. She really knew a good
deal about it and could call some of its mountains and dried-up seas
by name--Copernicus, for instance, and Tycho--but she had never taken
it seriously--had regarded it rather as a sort of stage-setting for
the earth. Thus, when Bennie proposed, almost casually, to set foot on
what had hitherto been nothing more than an abstraction or figure of
speech, it left her uncomprehending. She had always associated the moon
with harvest-fields, straw-rides, weddings, and green cheese. There was
a "man in the moon," a "lady in the moon" and "two children carrying
a pail" up there--in it. That was the moon of her childhood and when
she was "off duty"--the real moon. The other one--the imaginary moon,
far less real in every respect--was the one she knew in her work--a
dead world of pitted craters, dry oceans, marked with strange, shining
furrows and concentric circles, just so many thousand miles from the
earth and having regular habits that could be absolutely relied upon.
That was not the real moon at all. The genuine moon, as far as she was
concerned, was the old-fashioned one--that cast its yellow light over
pumpkin-sprinkled fields and down leafy lanes, or rose like a huge red
lantern out of a sparkling blue-black ocean. The real moon signified
coon-hunting, fried chicken, banjos, and "Merrily We Roll Along." The
imaginary moon meant the "Mappa Selenographica," by Beer and Madler.
"The moon!" she murmured again.
"Yes," remarked Bennie curtly; "the moon--that moon right up there"--he
glanced up and wrinkled his forehead--"that _ought_ to be there, I
mean! Say, there's something queer about all this! Hard alee, Burke!
Steer for the moon!"
The aviator pressed his control-lever, and once more the moon floated
overhead into their field of vision. But what a moon! Twenty-four times
her usual diameter--her circular craters plainly visible to the naked
eye, her physical configuration seemingly becoming more and more
distinct each moment.
"But can we land?" protested the girl, reawakening to the perils of
their position. "Suppose we can find no suitable spot--particularly
with our machinery out of control? There will be no landing-stage--"
"We must land!" he interrupted fiercely. "What's more, we've got to
turn the Ring upside down so as to land right side up. It's going to be
ticklish business, because we must bring our machine to rest within a
hundred miles or so of the lunar surface, and we're traveling more than
ten miles a second at the present moment."
"But _how_ can you turn the Ring upside down away out here in space?"
she expostulated.
"By slanting the tractor at its maximum angle," he answered. "Since
there is little gravitational force acting on us now, the Ring will
then rotate around its center of inertia and bring the moon below us.
We can then straighten out the tractor and use its full force to slow
down our velocity. As soon as we get within striking-distance of the
moon, we will reduce our power and come down by gravitational force."
"Have you ever--tried this--turning-maneuver?" she asked hesitatingly.
"No; we never have. But we ought to be able to do it--we must do it!
Atterbury, throw on your full power; and get ready, Burke, to put her
over! Hang on to the ropes, Rhoda, or you may get dizzy! As soon as
the tractor starts, we'll get back our weight and have a firm footing
again."
Rhoda took one last look at the moon blazing out of the darkness of the
sky overhead, grasped two of the clothes-lines, and closed her eyes.
Again the Ring vibrated to the whir of its propelling engines. Burke
threw over the control-lever as far as it would go; the helium ray
slanted off until it almost grazed the inner surface of the Ring, and
slowly the great machine turned over in space. Bennie, with his face
glued to the deadlight in the floor, watched the moon glide gradually
into his field of view, and when it was directly beneath them, he
shouted to Burke to straighten the tractor. Again the ray swung into
the center of the Ring, and they felt the pressure of the floor against
their feet.
Crowded about the deadlight, the passengers watched intently the
enormous yellow globe beneath them steadily increasing in diameter. In
twenty minutes, it filled half their field of vision; ten more, and its
rim was lost to them. They were settling down upon the moon!
Directly below lay the huge circular crater of Copernicus, frosty in
the sun's light, brilliant streaks radiating from its cone. Inside
the circumference of the extinct volcano, and parallel to it, was a
smaller crater, at the bottom of which glowed several dazzling points,
which Rhoda knew must be other cones. To the south stretched away vast
grayish-yellow, lava-strewn plains. Elsewhere, over the visible surface
of the moon, were distributed continents of highly irregular formation,
with strangely indented coastlines, rivaling in their conformation
those of Norway and Sweden. Concentric circles of great mountains
marked both the northern and southern hemispheres, most of them
craters of extinct volcanoes, and each glowing with its own individual
color or radiation. Here rose a sparkling white point of light, Mount
Eratosthenes; there, Mount Gay-Lussac; beyond, Mount Philolaus, and, to
the south, Doerfel, Leibnitz, and that most splendid of lunar glories,
Tycho, plainly visible in its dazzling beauty to the naked eyes of the
inhabitants of the earth.
The predominating color both of these craters and of the dead seas, or
plains, surrounding them seemed to be gray mixed with green or brown,
but, here and there, certain of them shone with a bluish tint, while
others glowed with a well-defined red or green. The great crater of
Copernicus steadily increased in size until Bennie estimated that they
were less than two thousand miles above it. The lunar surface was still
coming up toward them at an appalling velocity, and Bennie began to
have misgivings about their ability to stop in time.
"If we can't stop her, we're done for," he said. "We ought to have
reversed sooner. I thought we were going to run _by_ the moon, but we
were evidently pointed directly toward it."
"You forgot the moon's orbital motion, I think," put in Rhoda. "It got
in our way, that's all."
"It's too late to do anything now," said Bennie. "We're too near to
swerve off and run by." He looked at his watch. "If the tractor is
delivering its full power and runs for five minutes more, we ought to
be all right, but it's going to be a narrow squeak."
He hurried to the engine-room.
"Atterbury, give her more power!" he shouted.
The engineer threw a frightened glance at him.
"I'm at the last notch now. Look at the tractor! The inductor-tubes are
white-hot!"
With a feeling of utter helplessness, Bennie returned to Rhoda, who was
lying on the floor with her face pressed against the glass, and threw
himself at her side; and she clung to him, like a terrified child, as
together they looked down fearfully through the deadlight. The yellow
surface of the moon, gleaming like a mass of jewels, was rushing up at
them with sickening velocity. A few seconds more, and--He turned away
from the window.
"It's all up," he choked. "Good-by, Burke!"
Burke, standing rigid at the control, made no reply.
"We're slowing up; we're slowing up," whispered Rhoda suddenly. "Look,
Bennie! That crater below us! It's not getting any larger!"
Bennie arose and framed the great circle of the crater in the rim of
the deadlight.
"You're right!" he yelled exultantly. "We're hovering! We can land!
Burke, shut down the power quick, and stand by to pick up your
moorings!"
"I'm all ready," answered Burke, throwing over the rheostat that
controlled the current.
The Ring was hanging over a vast rocky plain, pockmarked with small
craters, furrowed with crevasses, and bristling with jagged ridges and
grotesque turrets and pinnacles. In the glare of the sun, it shone
dazzlingly white--like snow--so that it hurt their eyes, and Rhoda was
forced to turn hers away.
"How high up are we?" inquired Bennie.
"The manometer doesn't register," answered Burke. "There can't be any
atmosphere. We won't be able to use it for landing--more's the pity!
Just have to judge by appearances. I think we're hovering now--no--by
George, we're _rising_ a little!" He advanced the lever of the rheostat
another point. "_Now_ we're descending. This is about right, I reckon."
Slowly the Ring dropped toward the surface of the plain. Immediately
below them was a small forest of pinnacles.
"For heaven's sake, keep away from that!" shouted Bennie. "If you land
there, you'll spike the Ring on one of those things, just as if you
were playing ringtoss. There's a good place--that round, level spot
about three hundred yards to the left."
"Trust me for a bull's-eye!" laughed Burke, slanting the tractor, and
the ground slid slowly off to one side until they were clear of danger
and over the smooth patch, which looked as if it had been made to order
for their purposes.
Up--up--nearer and nearer--came the lunar plain. The helium ray was
now playing directly upon its surface, and throwing up great clouds
of white dust, which, as the Ring sank closer to the ground, rose and
completely enveloped it. Sight was no longer possible. They could not
be more than two hundred feet above the surface. Beneath and above
them, they could see only whirling clouds of white powder.
"Here goes for luck!" announced Burke, pulling back the lever.
They grasped the ropes tightly, standing on tiptoe for what seemed
ages. Suddenly, the Ring struck with a noise like that of a giant
sledge-hammer upon a boiler. The accompanying jar, however, was
comparatively slight. Burke touched his forelock.
"We have arrove!" he remarked, with a grin. "All out for the moon!"