Half blinded by the glare, he rushed to the equatorial-room. Already the intense brilliancy had died away, but through the yawning gap in the roof he caught a glimpse of a fast-fading streak of yellow light. Toward this streak, he turned the telescope—but it was no longer there! Upward again—and then, at last, he caught it in the finder—a glowing dot—and brought the cross-wire upon it—only to lose it, so rapid was its flight. Once more, and a third rime, he caught it on the cross-thread, but it passed out of the field of the larger instrument before he could shift the position. A fear that he would never succeed in bringing the giant lenses to bear upon it seized him. He knew that if he could not pick it up within the first few minutes, it would be hopeless to find it.
Then, unexpectedly, there it was—slowly descending into the field of the telescope, its yellow beam pointing directly upward. For a moment, he almost forgot that the astronomical telescope inverts the object. Once more he fixed his eye at the finder. He could see distinctly the under surface of the Ring, illuminated by
the light of the glowing gas which streamed beneath it, while the blinding glow of the helium jet, seen nearly end - on, looked like a great ball of fire in its center. It reminded him forcibly of the planet Saturn. Was it possible that his old friend Bennie Hooker, with two companions, was inside of that minute, flaming pellet?
Momentarily it grew smaller. The minutes passed; the hour came and went, and still Thornton stuck at his post. At nine-fifty, all that he could see was a faint wisp of pale-yellow light, like an almost invisible comet. He estimated that it would remain visible for perhaps fifteen minutes more, and then—good-by!
Suddenly, to his utter amazement, it commenced to fade, and in eight or ten seconds more it vanished. He wiped his glasses and anxiously looked again. There was no sign of the Ring whatever. He glanced up at the sky over the telescope, but it bore no trace of cloud. The Ring had been completely swallowed up in the abyss of space!
"Good God,” he thought, "something has gone wrong, and they are falling back!"
He did not know that the Ring was at that moment flying out into space with a velocity of over twenty miles a second, and that Hooker had stopped his driving machinery and was depending upon the momentum of his machine to carry him over the remainder of his journey—in other words, that he was coasting out to his encounter with the asteroid Medusa.
PART III 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-Iever. 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.