Bennie set his teeth and walked over to the speaking-tube which communicated with the condenser-room.
"All right, Atterbury!” he called sharply. "Turn her loose!”
V
The gate of the entanglement opened just enough to permit the exit of the motor bearing the irate Tassifers, and was instantly closed behind it. But once outside, it was impossible to proceed further, for the crowd had now swelled to such proportions that it absolutely blocked all movement.
"We’re stuck—and that’s all there is about it. They might just
as well have let us stay inside," scolded Mrs. Tassifer. "We might as well make up our minds to stop right here and see whatever is to be seen. Don't let those men climb on the roof of the car, Bentham. Just look at them!"
Tassifer had caught out of the comer of his eye the dangling ends of a pair of trousers supplemented by a heavy pair of mud-covered shoes swaying outside the window of the limousine.
"Here you! Come down out of that!" he roared, grabbing at the legs and loosening the owner from his perch. "If anybody’s going to sit up there, I'm going to! I paid for this car."
The man landed heavily amid the jeers of the onlookers, and Bentham, opening the door climbed on the driver’s seat and swung himself up to the roof. Here, at a height of nine feet above the crowd, he had a magnificent view on all sides.
The great bulk of the Ring loomed dark in the moonlight. High in the heavens, a little east of the meridian and not far from the red-flushed planet Mars, Medusa shone with a pale, greenish light. It was easy for a trained eye to pick it out, though it was not a conspicuous object, even at its present distance of less than two million miles.
"Speech! Speech!" yelled the spectators, instinctively recognizing that Bentham was a ridiculous person.
"Shut up!" he retorted, in his most aggressive manner, and somehow suggesting a fugitive cat on a fence. "Mind your own business!"
"Hooray!" cheered the crowd unanimously. "Speech!"
Tassifer glowered at them mutely. There was nothing to throw.
"Don’t mind them, Bentham," came plaintively from within the car.
He might have jumped on their heads—committed any degree of manslaughter— had not a sudden murmur directed his attention toward the Ring.
A dull purring sound filled the air.
Then Tassifer grabbed at his tall hat.
A rush of wind spread out from the center of the field, carrying caps, newspapers, and other light objects over the heads of the onlookers. The purring sound increased in volume, and presently a faint glow appeared at the top of the tripod, and a yellow beam of light shot down through the center of the Ring, throwing the cross-beams of the wooden scaffolding into bright relief. The wind increased to a gale, and dust filled the air. The ground shook under the impact of the yellow blast of helium which drove down from the tractor with a roar like that of a Niagara. Through the whirling clouds of dust, Tassifer caught a glimpse of what appeared to be the sudden explosion of the scaffolding—great timbers and joists flying through the air, followed by the collapse of the entire structure, which fell with a crash and was promptly torn to pieces, blown apart, and scattered over the ground by the typhoon which whirled in every direction from the middle of the aerodrome. The Ring, though deprived of all support, did not fall, however—it remained suspended, as it were, in the air—nay, it was rising, slowly and majestically at first, like a balloon, and then faster, with the rush and roar of a rocket. Ten seconds, and it had risen a hundred feet. A minute, and it had soared two-thirds of a mile above the field. And then it darted up, up and almost out of sight, leaving a fading streak behind it like that of a shooting star.
"Gee whiz!” gasped Tassifer. "Hookey!”
Even his associate solicitors in the Department of Justice, had they heard, would have forgiven him. It was an echo of his first infantile vision of an elephant.
A white mass of faces followed the upward lift and rush of the Ring, which now, with its trail of yellow light, was vanishing toward the moon, its roar but faintly audible amid the extraordinary silence of the multitude. Then, nothing could be heard. The Ring, now at a height of eighteen miles, was in an atmosphere so rarified as to transmit no sound.
Suddenly Mrs. Tassifer’s face appeared in the aperture below.
"What do you suppose has become of Rhoda?” she inquired.
VI
Less than a mile away, Professor Thornton stood at his window in the observatory watching for the burst of light which, if it came, would indicate to him that the Ring had started upon its flight into space. He had already been to the equatorial-room and revolved its dome until the mouth of the great telescope pointed in the general direction which the Ring would presumably take. Medusa was almost at the zenith, her pale-green light somewhat dimmed by the light of the full moon, which blazed in the sky a few degrees to the east of the asteroid. He glanced at the clock. It was already quarter to nine. Perhaps Hooker might not start on time, after all. Something might go wrong with the complicated anatomy of the machine; some unexpected delay might occur—in which event he, Thornton, would not be notified and would wait at the telescope vainly searching the heavens while, perhaps, the Ring would suddenly start on its flight—the direction slightly altered from that as originally planned—and he would miss it altogether. So he returned to his office to observe with the naked eye the departure of the Ring, note its general direction, and make sure of getting it in the finder of the telescope.
For Thornton had never doubted that the Ring would start. He had known Hooker, boy and man, for nearly thirty years, knew that he was a practical as well as a brilliant scientist, and, when Pax had threatened to knock the earth topsyturvy, had himself been the one to rout the professor out of his scholastic seclusion on the Appian Way in Cambridge, and stimulate him to those investigations which shortly resulted in the discovery of the valley of the Ring in Ungava and the navigation of the air-craft back to the United States.
Thornton did not question the ability of Hooker and his comrades to navigate space in the great machine, or the power of the lavender ray to destroy Medusa or any other heavenly body. What he feared was the unknown factor of chance, always arising when an experiment is hazarded under new conditions. What did they know of space? Would their liquid-air tanks accomplish their purpose? What would be the effect of the complex and opposing forces of attraction to which, once outside the sphere of the earth’s gravitation, this new man-made meteor would be exposed? Could the Ring be "turned” so as properly to alight? Would it turn? Would the human organs function under these extraordinary artificial conditions? Would, in fact, the brain work properly or logically when no natural premises were left from which to reason? Well, they would see! But the Ring would start! Oh, yes, it would start—and its departure would be caught on the film of the automatic moving-picture astronomical camera attached to the big telescope—provided, of course, that he succeeded in following its meteoric flight.
The observatory stood on the top of a small hill, and, from his window, Thornton could see across a sea of tumultuous housetops, colorless in the moonlight, to a dark strip where lay the aerodrome.
He raised his eyes and gazed up through the heavens, that looked almost like a field of pale-blue corn-flowers sprinkled with a myriad of daisies, into the deeper blue of the infinity behind and beyond the Milky Way, just as he had looked through his big telescope now for nearly thirty years. That vast, blue-black arch had always looked the same—save for the slight changes in the celestial bodies themselves which were his life-study. Blue, deep blue—flash! Suddenly the heavens were no longer blue but dazzling white. The silence of night was shattered by a roar from the sky above the aerodrome. The Ring! It was off!