"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 out direct course," he called down over his shoulder, at the same time navigating himself into position under the telescope. Hold-ing the eyepiece lightly between his fingers, he reclined easily in a horizontal position in an attitude of rakish nonchalance in mid-air.