"All ready, Dr. Livingston," I said.
"Eh? Oh, yes. Well, that's fine, John. We'll start at once."
"I checked the ventilators," Duroh said.
The big, beetle-browed Peter Duroh--dark-haired, handsome young giant
who had been working for us nearly a year--stood beside me. It was the
great night--our time of departure at last had arrived, with the little
_Planeteer_ glistening and ready.
To you who read this, familiar now with the great finned cylinders
which the last half century has produced on earth for the conquest of
Interplanetary space, our little space-ship was inadequate and queer
indeed. Unlike modern vessels, Dr. Livingston had built the _Planeteer_
in the shape of a huge bell-like globe. Huge, to us then. But its
maximum equatorial diameter was a scant fifty feet.
Strange little ship indeed. Its interior was of three stories--the
largest--the middle one--our several rooms of living quarters, ample
enough for four of us. Below that, in the base, were the mechanism
rooms. And the top level, fairly near the apex, was in effect a mere
circular turret, with a glassite dome over it completing that segment
of the outer shell.
It is not my purpose here to describe Dr. Livingston's pioneer
mechanisms. All that is technological history in the chronicles of the
development of space-navigation. But I do wish to point out that Dr.
Livingston, in his essentials of mechanism, has not been improved upon
even in this last half century. The _Planeteer_ was double-shelled,
the six-inch space between the reinforced walls containing the swiftly
vibrating, oscillating electronic current now known as the Erentz
principle--the absorption of the outer pressure, translated by the
swiftly flying electrons of the current into harmless kinetic energy.
And we had, in segments, throughout the globe-shaped walls, gravity
plates for the neutralization of gravity; its intensification; and the
negative force of repulsion.
We had air-renewers--antiquated now, I admit--but still very
serviceable to us; and ventilating and temperature systems. We had no
electronic rocket-streams for atmospheric flight; that, as you all
know, came much later.
It was, by earth-time, just midnight when we were ready to start. Dr.
Livingston was excited, confused now that the time was at hand. But the
other three of us, outwardly at least, were calm enough, eager only to
be sure every preparation was in order.
There was no public celebration. Like Livingston, I had no close
family, so that only a few of the family and friends of Peter Duroh
and James Carruthers, our other assistant, were here on this momentous
night in the little board hangar to see us off.
"Tell him to come in," Dr. Livingston was saying. "I want to start on
the midnight hour."
The big, dark-haired young Duroh went to the incline that led down from
the upper control turret room where we were now standing and shouted to
Carruthers, who was still down, bidding good-bye to the visitors on the
hangar floor.
"All right," he shouted up to us. "I'm coming." He came in a moment. He
was Livingston's most competent technician, this James Carruthers. Like
young Duroh, he had been with us almost from the start of the building
of the _Planeteer_. He was an older man, rather a small, tight-lipped,
sandy-haired fellow. Grim of aspect, usually silent, listening with
alert, keen gray eyes.
"All ready," he said.
"Yes, bolt the door," Dr. Livingston agreed.
We waved our last farewells to the silent, awed little group of men and
women down in the hangar, and I swung the big glassite bull's-eye door
closed, bolted it and admitted the Erentz current into it.
Departure from earth.... There was no one who could have seen that
pioneer departure, much less be on it, without a surging thrill and
a trembling. Certainly I felt it. Excitement--and fear. There is no
one who can face the unknown without a little shudder, no matter how
adventurous and reckless he may be. I recall that we four, in the dimly
starlit little turret--starlight which came down through the open
roof of the hangar and through our glassite dome--stood grim, silent
and awed. Then Dr. Livingston flung the current into the base gravity
plates set for the repelling negation.
The _Planeteer_ trembled just a little; and then slowly, silently was
rising....
* * * * *
Departure from earth.... And we were just the second party of all
earth people in history who had ever seriously tried it. The first,
as you all recall, had been sixteen years before. The ill-fated Blake
expedition--six men, one of them the strange, humanity-hating George
Simpson, joining the explorers at the last moment, declaiming publicly
that he wanted to leave the earth forever! Vowing that if Blake landed
anywhere in the Universe, he, George Simpson, would remain there in
preference to coming back to earth!
Well, the fanatic Simpson certainly had had his way in that! The Blake
ship--even more antiquated than our _Planeteer_--safely left earth's
atmosphere and plunged away. And never was heard of again!
Dr. Livingston's clutch on my arm and his excited murmured words jerked
me out of my roving awed thoughts. "We're starting, boy--good luck to
us--"
I could only nod and try to smile as I swallowed the lump in my throat.
Leaving earth. There was a jumbled prayer then in my mind and heart
that the great Creator would take care of us and give us luck....
The little group of people down on the hangar floor were waving now,
queerly foreshortened as in a second they dropped away. Then we were up
in the starlight; mounting with the bleak Maine coast and its string
of lights shrinking beneath us.... Swift acceleration. Soon we were
in the stratosphere; and then in a great curving crescent--product of
our repulsion and the tangental force of the earth's rotation--we were
hurled off into space....
"Well, we did it, John--we did, didn't we?" Dr. Livingston said.
"Now--do you want some rest? Go on down if you like." He was seated
in his shirtsleeves by his little instrument table, with its humming
bank of dials and levels. He mopped his dripping forehead with his
handkerchief. It was hot as the shades of hell now in the _Planeteer's_
interior--the friction of our rapid rise through the atmosphere, with
which our temperature-controls were unable to cope. But we knew it
would cool off quick enough presently.
"I'll stay here with you a while," I said. "I can't get used to it
yet--wonderful, sort of frightening, isn't it?"
"And beautiful, John. Profitable, too--with the Xalite we'll bring
back--turn it over to the authorities. And then, with our money,
build another ship. A larger one. I'm going to devote my life to the
development of space-travel. Why, John, can't you envisage--a big
vessel, with passengers, bringing people from Mars maybe, if it's
inhabited--"
Poor Dr. Livingston. His life was destined to be cut so short! How wise
of the Creator that he so seldom gives us any hint of what is to come,
so that at least we may dream....
We had said nothing to Duroh and Carruthers about the Xalite, fearing
that they might be tempted to tell others, family and friends, and
before our departure the secret would be out. When we reached Zura,
it was our plan to tell them, of course. And from the beginning Dr.
Livingston had always insisted that he would see they shared equally
with him and me.
My mind went back now to that night when he had first told me our
plans; that weird face at our window, and someone who simultaneously
had seemed to be eavesdropping upon us from the corridor. We had been
apprehensive--if our secret was known--that something might occur to
stop our departure, that some other expedition might hurriedly be made
ready to try and get to Zura. But so far as we could know, nothing of
the kind had happened.
"You see, John, with what we know now of space-flying," Dr. Livingston
was saying, "the whole realm of the Solar System will be open to us in
another twenty or thirty years. Why, with real money at our command,
you and I--"
A shout from the living compartments under us checked him. Then there
was the sound of a scuffle, and big Peter Duroh's roar:
"Why, damn you, come out of there! Grab him, Jim!"