II
The reader may recall that, at the moment of the departure of the Ring upon the preceding evening from the aerodrome at Georgetown, Bentham T. Tassifer had ensconced himself on the roof of the limousine containing his wife and the professional members of their party, and that, the Ring having vanished upward into the air, Mrs. Tassifer suddenly recalled the absence of her niece Rhoda, and, thrusting her head out of the window, had anxiously inquired of the world in general and of Bentham in particular what could have become of her.
"How should I know?" snapped back her husband, whose attention had thus, much against his will, been directed back to earth again. "How should I know? She went back to that machine, and I suppose she can’t get through the crowd."
"Well, I wish I knew!" retorted his wife. "Some people don't have the slightest sense of responsibility."
"Bah!" said Bentham to himself. Somehow, he felt infinitely superior to his better half, roosting thus safely over her head, and fully protected, not only by the distance separating them but by the fact that the presence of the distinguished scientific gentlemen inside would naturally have a restraining influence upon her tongue. "Bah - snorty old woman!" he repeated, and felt in his pocket for a cigar.
It was at this moment that the crowd suddenly gave expression to its pent-up feelings in a roar of wonder and excitement. For several minutes, twenty-odd thousand people had held their breaths in amazement, as if fearful lest, should one of them speak, that flying squirt of light would stop and fall—the magic spell broken! But now that it was out of sight—vanished into the dark-blue zenith—and had not dropped back, they vented their astonishment and admiration in a mighty yell heard for miles. And then every man turned to his neighbor to assure him that he had believed in Professor Hooker and his Flying Ring right along, and that you could stake your bottom dollar on everything coming
out all right. On every hand could be heard such fractional expressions of self-laudation as:
"I tole my wife only las’ night—I says—"
"Sure you kin bet on him every time! I allus sed he had Teckla and Thomas A. Edison beat a mile."
"What'd I tell yer, old top? Was I right now, or wasn’t I—eh?" etc., etc*
Tassifer, having no companion upon the roof beside him, was compelled to content himself with a sotto-voce reiteration of his earlier remarks of "By Gosh!" "Gee whiz!" and "Hookey!" Well, the little feller had made good!
Bentham began to feel, somehow, as if he had had considerable to do with the expedition—stood, in a sort of way, in loco parentis. He remembered how he had been the first person to sight the Ring on the golf-grounds of Chevy Chase and had protested about its landing there. Also, he was the uncle—by marriage—of Miss Gibbs, who had assisted in the necessary calculations in planning for the flight. He had actually been in the Ring itself and bade its crew good-by only a few moments ago. Why, he was one of the very few! He might even—if he had been willing to be persuaded—have gone along.
Thus, arrogating to himself even more than his usual importance, Tassifer viewed the crowd surging about the car with supreme complacency. They were all making for the road now, as the throng makes for the exits at a big football game, and the field was much less congested than at the moment of the start of the machine. In fact, the chauffeur began to indulge in preparatory noises around the front of the car. There were practically no people left between the motor and the barbed-wire entanglement in which the entrance to the field was located. And yet there was no sign of Rhoda!
He scratched his nose thoughtfully. She couldn’t possibly have got out of the enclosure without seeing the car—it would have been a physical impossibility. Then, where had she disappeared? Inside the aerodrome, a half-dozen guards and workmen were piling up the collapsed timbers of the staging. But he couldn’t see a skirt anywhere. He wondered if she could have been struck or injured by the falling debris? No; her body would, in that event, be quite visible. He grew more and more puzzled. She was either inside or outside the enclosure, he reasoned closely—and she wasn’t inside. She couldn’t have got outside without seeing him or being seen.
"I'm really worried about her," came Mrs. Tassifer’s voice plaintively from within the vehicle.
And then Bentham suddenly slapped his leg and uttered a whoop of surprise, consternation, and baffled rage. With his right fist raised in imprecation toward the Milky Way, the assistant solicitor of the Department of Justice descended with astonishing agility to the ground and thrust his head into the open window of the car.
"She's done it!" he yelled retributively.
"Done what?" demanded Mrs. Tassifer.
"Gone along with 'em! Up there!" He pointed vaguely in the
direction taken by the Ring.
"Oh," protested his wife, in a shocked tone, "she hasn't! She wouldn't have! Why, it wouldn't be proper—she, an unmarried woman, alone with three strange men! I'd never be able to look any of my friends in the face again. You must be mistaken, Bentham."
"Well, she has, all right!" he replied vindictively, "That's just exactly what she's done. I always said she wasn't all there —rooms to let—bats in her belfry—balmy on the crumpet. And now she's proved it! I'm glad she isn't my niece! All right, driver; you may start along."
III
Two hundred and forty thousand miles away, Rhoda, descending to the lunar plain, strode rapidly in the direction of the ridge behind which the summit had now disappeared, and, in the course of about twenty minutes, found herself at the foot of a wall of impassable rock which curved unexpectedly and fell away into a vast basin. Turning to retrace her path, she discovered that the peak which she had climbed was no longer visible and that she had lost all sense of direction. To the north, to be sure, her passage was barred, but there was nothing to indicate whether the Ring lay in any one of three directions. Puzzled by the disappearance of the peak, she sprang blindly across the plain, running back on what she fancied was the right course. But the Ring was nowhere to be seen! It had vanished absolutely. And then she recalled the fact that Bennie had told her that the supply of liquid air carried in the cylinders of their vacuum armor would last not much over an hour. Her wrist-watch told her that she had been wandering forty-five minutes. She had only fifteen minutes more in which to find and return to the Ring—a bare quarter of an hour in which she could support life in this hostile environment. A horrible, suffocating death awaited her— was clamped about her head!
The sweat started out upon her forehead. Above her head, the escape-valve fluttered feebly, she imagined. What a death! Such a death as Poe might have conceived! Already, she believed that she had some difficulty in breathing. The sunlight seemed dimmer, somehow. Were her ears singing? No; it was only the recurrence of the escape-valve's twitter. She groaned, and the reverberation echoed in the helmet like the roar of a lunar beast.