"We’re a degree or two off, but it will do for the present", he said. "Now, here I go again!" And, thrusting lightly against the telescope, he sailed over their heads on his back with his arms at his side.
"Heavens!" cried Rhoda, half rising from her chair.
To her consternation, she also floated upward and, still in a graceful sitting posture, sailed slowly up to the ceiling to Bennie’s side.
Burke shook with laughter.
"Human Zeppelins, by thunder! How are you ever going to get down again?"
Rhoda wrapped her skirts tightly around her ankles with one hand and waved to Burke with the other.
"Why don’t you come up and join us? It’s fine!"
Professor Hooker assumed an expression of great solemnity.
"Action and reaction—to use the words of one I. Newton—are equal and opposite in their effects," he declaimed, giving Rhoda a slight push to one side, which caused them to drift apart until they bumped lightly against the opposite wails of the room. "Isn’t this great? If we’d only brought along some balls and cues, we could play billiards in three dimensions."
Burke had thrust his face close to the deadlight and was peering down into the abyss of space that yawned below.
"By George," he cried, "you’re missing something! Better come down here and take a look."
"But how shall I get down?" gasped Rhoda, in great embarrassment. "What on earth shall I do!"
"Not what you do on earth," grinned Bennie. "Grab a lifeline and pull yourself down. We’re in the center of the universe— so to speak."
Together they slowly drew themselves back to the chart-table by means of the clothes-lines and then to the deadlight.
The glare from the tractor had now entirely disappeared, and
the Ring swam in the Stygian darkness of space. Their first impression was that the earth had vanished. In its place was a vast black firmament crowded with millions of blazing worlds. Though the great orb of the moon was full, and shone like a sun through the pure ether above their heads, the lunar light, undiluted and undimmed by the earth’s atmosphere, diminished in no way the brilliancy of the stars. It was a new and marvelous ef-fect—the black-velvet robe of night studded with incandescent and apparently motionless orbs, which gleamed like resplendent meteors in countless myriads on every side, but with a calm and absolutely steady light.
Then, as they looked, they saw, just below them, what appeared to be a vast black hole in the darkness, covering perhaps one-tenth of the sky, within which not a single star could be seen.
"Put out the lights,” directed Bennie, rubbing off with his handkerchief the condensation, due to the incense cold of interplanetary space, which had formed on the inside of the deadlight.
And now, as their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, they saw that the great circle in the galaxy of stars was not quite black but shone with a pale-gray, ashen phosphorescence, through which they could eventually discern the outlines of the continents of North and South America. This huge circular disk, which blotted out so much of the night below them, was naught but the dark side of the earth illumined by the light of the moon alone.
For many minutes, they gazed in silent wonder at the distant globe. No sound, no movement suggested the fact that they were flying through space at the rate of twenty miles a second. The only indication of their flight was the gradual, almost imperceptible shrinking that went on in the size of the earth beneath their feet.
"Atterbury ought to see this!” exclaimed Burke suddenly, and, acting upon his own suggestion, he moved himself, hand over hand, to the tube and called to the engineer, who, after a few moments’ delay, made his appearance. He had hardly joined the others around the deadlight when a silvery light manifested itself in the form of faint streamers stretching out from one side of the dark circle of the earth below. Each moment these streamers increased in length and brilliancy.
"What is going on down there?” cried Burke, in excitement. "Is the old globe on fire?”
"That must be the sun’s corona,” answered Beanie. "We’ve been watching an eclipse of the sun by the earth. It was night when we left Washington, so, of course, the sun was behind the earth. I hadn’t thought of it before. Now we are getting near the edge of the earth’s conical shadow, and before long shall be out in full sunlight.”
"How wonderful!” gasped Rhoda. "That alone makes the crip worth the taking!”
"Look!” cried Bennie. "The sun is coming—watch!”
A half-ring of luminous violet light now encircled the great
disk of the earth. Gradually it increased in brilliancy, changed to white, and finally to orange-red. Then, as the Ring shot out of the cone of the shadow, the rim of the earth kindled with a blinding glare as the blazing orb of the sun emerged like a golden furnace.
Immediately the air turned warm, and the frost disappeared from the glass of the window. Yet, in spite of the fact that the universe was filled with light, the sky remained as black as midnight and was still filled with undimmed stars. There being no atmosphere, no light came from the sky, and the sun, burning out of a profundity of darkness, produced no illumination inside the car except to project through the glass window a circular spot of light upon the ceiling, which shone there like an arc-lamp in an opal globe. Thus, the interior of the car, in spite of the fact that they were in full sunlight, was illuminated only by the light which radiated from the glowing spot over their heads. And now the unimpeded rays of the sun, playing directly upon the sides of the aluminum car, began to raise the temperature inside it to a degree almost insupportable.
"Phew!" gasped Burke. "If we don't take care, we shall melt."
Bennie turned on a switch beneath the table, to the side of which was attached a spirit thermometer. It indicated eighty-nine degrees.
"It will only take a few seconds to fix this," he assured Rhoda. "You see those jacketed coils there—running around the room just above the floor? That is our cooling apparatus. I have just turned it on. Watch the thermometer.
The men had taken off their coats, and Rhoda was fanning herself violently. But, even as they watched it, the thermometer began to fall until the instrument registered less than seventy
degrees.
"Really," exclaimed Rhoda, in admiration, "what a perfect housekeeper you are! You don't happen to have a soda-fountain under that table, do you?"
Bennie laughed.
"No; that was something I forgot. But I can give you a glass of ice-water if you like."
"If you please," she acquiesced.
Bennie pulled himself over to the water-cooler, where he held a pitcher under the spigot and opened the cock. But nothing happened.
"What's the trouble?" inquired Rhoda.
Bennie grinned,
"Of course," he answered, "the water won't run out, for there isn't any gravity to make it,"
He lifted the lid off the cooler and filled the pitcher by scooping up the water. Then he floated back to Rhoda with the remark,
"I'll show you an experiment which no one has ever seen before."
Holding the pitcher upside down, he lifted it quickly away from the water inside, which remained suspended in the air as a pulsating, transparent mass of irregular form. Gradually the mass ceased its pulsations and, as it did so, collected itself into a perfect sphere resembling a crystal ball.
"See what surface-tension will do!” he exclaimed admiringly. "Did you ever see a soap-bubble as beautiful as that?”