“Here comes the sheriff. It’s all right!” Click exclaimed.
And the three, setting down the case of dynamite, sprinted for the gap in the fence.
“All right nothing!” moaned the professor. “We’ll have to testify, go through all sorts of red tape, be photographed, held for a trial—”
He staggered to the metal table, lurched into the chair.
“You put in the provisions, Dot?”
“Yes, Father.”
Professor Wagner pulled a lever. Then Click Kendall gasped his utter incredulity.
For the sheriff and his companion drifted down and away. There was no sensation of motion. It was merely that in place of watching the striding figure of the sheriff he suddenly saw the top of the broad-brimmed hat, then caught the oval of an upturned, open-mouthed face.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Click. “What’s happened?”
He saw Professor Wagner at the table, crouched over, studying the instruments. He wanted to see what was going on, ask him what was happening.
He took a swift stride, and then found himself shooting up toward the pointed dome of the shell. Frantically he waved his arms, kicked his feet. All to no avail. He drifted up until he touched the roof.
He pushed his hands against the metal to ward off the impact, and found himself descending, squarely for the professor’s head.
Click tried to avert that collision. His efforts availed nothing. He saw that he would fall squarely on the man’s head.
“Look out!” he yelled.
Professor Wagner looked up. As he did so, Click fell directly into the upturned features.
To his surprise there was no shock of collision. The professor did not crumple to the floor, crushed beneath the weight of the falling body. Instead Professor Wagner brushed Kendall away with his uninjured hand as one might brush off a fly.
And Click Kendall found himself floating through space until he fetched up against the far side of the shell.
“Watch out where you’re going!” snapped Professor Wagner. “You might interfere with my instruments!”
Click Kendall was too astounded to even attempt an answer.
It was the girl’s voice that gave him the explanation.
“You see there isn’t any gravitation up here,” she said. “There’s a window in the floor. Take a look through it. Dad, do let me take a look at that shoulder. You’re losing blood.”
The man gave the instruments a final adjustment.
“All right. We’re safe here. I just got the missing factor in my calculations this morning, and I’m not exactly certain of the coefficient of balance and repulsion. But we can keep an eye out. Kendall, keep your eye to the window in the floor. If we start drifting down warn me at once. All right, Dot. I don’t think it’s serious, but I can’t afford to lose any blood. I think the collar bone’s fractured. You’ll find the medicine chest under the table; but no opiates. Must have my senses clear.”
Click dropped to the floor.
“Call me if I can help,” he said, then looked through the glass window.
What he saw made him believe he was dreaming.
The shell hung suspended at about a thousand feet. Below him, the fenced portion of the ranch stretched in a square, a square that was rapidly filling with moving figures.
He could see the winding glitter of dusty road, the thicket of brush, could see the hills beyond, then the shimmering ribbon of placid river. Far over to the right was Centerberry with its smokestacks, its clusters of trees, white houses. But the elevation of the shell was hardly high enough to give him other than a hazy view of the place.
Click glanced again at the grounds below.
To his surprise they seemed to have moved to the right.
But he could see the road, see, also, the sudden increase in traffic as automobiles came crawling along to ascertain what it was all about. Click thought how weird the shimmering metal beehive had appeared when he had first beheld it floating like a bubble in the air, and realized how much more of a spectacle it was now, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet up in the air, glittering in the slanting sunlight of mid-afternoon.
No wonder that automobilists, glancing upward, suddenly turned from their course to come tearing along the branch highway, jolting and rattling along the last few dust-covered miles.
The roadway around the fence was blocked. Black automobiles parked before the torn section as thick as iron filings clustering to the ends of a magnet.
Kendall looked up.
“We seem to be drifting to the southwest,” he said.
Professor Wagner, stripped of shirt, was watching his daughter’s skillful fingers as she packed antiseptic lint into the puncture in his shoulder.
“That’s the wind, a gentle northeast breeze. I don’t care about that. It’s the height. How are we staying up?”
“I should say we were holding our elevation pretty well.”
The lines of the scientist’s pain-tortured face relaxed a bit.
“Mathematically we should be rising a trifle. The heated air must have an up current. And there should be a slight drift to the westward. That Is, the motion of the earth should not entirely be counteracted by the motion of the atmospheric blanket. However, we’ll take a look at that presently. In the meantime, we’ve got to complete our preparations.”
“Keep a sharp watch,” snapped the girl.
Click resumed his station.
His mind seethed with a tumbling confusion of thoughts. It was impossible to concentrate. Try as he might, no single line of thought could shut out the overwhelming influx of new sensations.
He knew the country well. He could recognize many of the ranches as places where he had hunted. Now the country seemed strangely new, viewed from this angle. It was so different from riding in an airplane. Here was no roaring of motors, no shrieking of wind, no altering perspective. Nor was it quite the same as being in a balloon.
A drifting shadow came scudding over the ground. Click wondered what was causing that shadow. A rushing shape screamed past his window, just below. The bell rocked and spun with the twisting air currents.
“There’s an airplane come to look us over!” yelled Click.
Professor Wagner muttered his irritation.
“I’ll attend to them,” he snapped.
Click returned to his window, located the shadow, then peered from one of the windows in the side.
He knew that plane. It was Bill Savier, an old-timer in the game, and with him was a helmeted individual who fairly screamed “newspaper reporter” to Click’s trained eye.
The Graflex camera covered with a wooden shield to protect the bellows, the whipping coat, the grease-stained collar, all told their own story. Here was a reporter snatched from a desk and rushed aloft by a frantic editor.
The plane banked so the reporter could get a better picture. The lens of the Graflex glittered darkly as it was pointed at the bell.
And then, suddenly, the plane vanished. It simply wasn’t. Click saw blue sky, unbroken by any flitting plane as it banked and wheeled.
He looked down at the window in the floor, and gasped.
The plane was far, far below, a mere speck, zooming upward with all the power of its mighty motor. And it actually seemed to be falling, so rapid was the ascent of the bell. There was a bursting sensation in his eardrums. A sudden nausea gripped him.
He felt weak, tried to shout, but was unable to do more than make a few squeaky noises in his throat.
The ground below that had been so plainly visible, seemed mantled by a haze. The timbered hills had flattened out until they were only a dark stretch of green. The winding ribbon of the river had become a thread so fine as to be almost invisible. There was a rushing scream of whipping air skidding past the pointed dome of the bell, a strange rocking sensation.