"All the same,” she answered, "I’m not going to give up hope. And, what’s more, I believe Professor Hooker will be able to do something. I’d like to see the inside of that Ring, too. Rhoda says she can arrange it. Will you go with me?” "Y-e-e-s,” admitted Mr. Tassifer.
II
While it was quite true that the "big fellows” at the Cosmos Club and elsewhere took little stock in Hooker, and the public at large were openly incredulous, it was nevertheless the fact that the announcement of his proposed attempt to destroy the asteroid created an extraordinary amount of interest. For professor Hooker’s plan had at last received the approval and cooperation of the government, and he was now almost ready to undertake his flight. His crew was to consist of Atterbury and Burke, who had been in daily consultation with him for weeks, and little remained to be done except to verify some of their more important calculations and install a new dynamo and their uranium turbine.
Among the privileged few to whom he had offered to exhibit his sidereal war-ship were Mr. and Mrs. Tassifer and, of course, Rhoda.
It was a beautiful spring afternoon about two weeks after the conversation just recounted between the solicitor and his lady, and their chauffeur found great difficulty in threading his way among the crowds of people who had come out, as usual, to struggle for a glimpse of the famous machine that was going to essay a trip through space, not merely for the banal purposes of scientific discovery but actually to attack and alter the course of a
celestial body. Finally having gained the gate without committing manslaughter, they found themselves on a flat parade-ground, in the center of which rested a gigantic, shining, circular tube, seventy-five feet in diameter and fifteen feet thick, built of aluminum places, and surmounted by the superstructure which had been visible from outside, and which, as Bennie told them, bore the tractor that lifted the car.
"It’s the thing at the top shaped like an inverted thimble,” he explained. "There’s a big cylinder of metallic uranium inside, and we play our disintegrating rays on the under surface of this cylinder from those oblique tubes below. When the rays hit the uranium in the cylinder, the atoms explode, and the decomposition products are shot off downward at almost the velocity of light. A back pressure is thus produced which lifts the Ring exactly like a rocket.”
"How long does one of your cylinders last?” inquired Rhoda.
"Atterbury - Pax’s engineer, who came back with us - says that a cylinder is good for about a ten-hour run.”
"But you can’t get very far out into space in ten hours, can you?” she queried. "What will you do when the cylinder is exhausted?”
"I’ve figured out that we can get up a velocity of over fifteen miles a second with a one-hour run of the tractor,” he answered. "If we then shut off the power, our momentum alone will carry us over fifty thousand miles during the next hour. So, you see, we can coast most of the way.”
One of the khaki-uniformed guards now detached and lowered a steel ladder and then climbed up and opened a round door in a sort of vestibule on the side of the Ring.
"Now, Mrs. Tassifer,” remarked Bennie, "that is the air-lock. It has double doors. When the car is in a vacuum, or beyond the earth’s atmosphere, the contained air would all rush out into space if there were any direct communication with the outside. You enter the air-lock from the inside, close and bolt the inner door behind you, open the other door and step out, just as the divers leave and enter a submarine on the bottom of the ocean.”
Bennie ran up the rungs, gave Mrs. Tassifer a hand, and then both of them assisted Rhoda, who gingerly ascended to the vestibule. Thence they passed into the large, well lighted chart-room of the Ring, which, except for the glass observation-windows in the floor, looked exactly like a comfortable cabin on board a yacht. This resemblance was heightened by the fact that
in the center of the room a number of easy chairs were drawn up around a table, where a teakettle was purring in homelike fashion. Burke, the aviator who had rescued Hooker from the wilds of Ungava, a jolly-looking man of about thirty-five, now made his appearance from the remote interior and was presented to the guests.
"But how could one breathe on the moon?” continued Rhoda, after the introduction, following up an idea suggested by the
presence of the air lock.
"Until we found the Ring, I didn’t suppose one could," answered the air-man. "But Pax has worked that all out for us beforehand. In that next room, over there, we found three suits of heavy rubber with helmets and oxygen-tanks, or, rather, small, double-walled cylinders designed to carry liquid air. The slow evaporation of this supplies fresh air to the interior of the rubber suits, the excess escaping through a valve."
The two ladies having expressed some interest in these new "outing suits," Burke obligingly put one of them on and walked up and down the chart-room for their edification. It was a simple-enough device, weighing but little, and resembled a modified suit of diving-armor, although much less cumbersome.
Then Mrs. Tassifer busied herself at the tea-table, and Rhoda strolled over and looked through one of the circular deadlights in the outer wall of the Ring. What she saw was a skeleton framework of steel rods, reaching out like the arm of a derrick and carrying at its extremity a cylinder composed of a yellowish white metal, the open end of which was closed by a plate of some transparent substance. This cylinder, from which the disintegrating ray was discharged, pointed downward, and was held in such a manner that it could be swung or aimed in any direction by means of an electric motor operated from inside the chart-room.
Rhoda eagerly examined all the appliances as Bennie described them in turn, and then followed her host into the adjacent control-room of the Ring, which contained a tangle of complicated machinery and where hung the famous twin gyroscopes, the axes of their thirty-inch disks at right angles.
"These give us our automatic stability," explained the master of the Ring. "They control the slant of the tractor. You see, we rise just like a rocket, vertically at first, the blast shooting straight down through the center of the machine, but when we wish to fly in a horizontal direction at a fixed height, we tilt the tractor, and the blast drives off in an oblique direction. The vertical component of the recoil keeps us up, and the horizontal drives us forward. The gyroscopes act on the rods controlling the slant of the tractor and keep this balance automatically. You see, if we didn’t have some device of this sort, our equilibrium would be destroyed every time anybody moved about in the Ring. But we have no idea how the machine is going to behave when we get out into space away from the earth’s attraction. She may act like a kite without a tail."
He smiled confidently at his companion, however, as if he had no fears upon that score.
Bentham Tassifer was tremendously impressed by what he saw, for, like most lawyers, he had no knowledge of mechanics or physics, and the sight of a perfectly contrived machine, the equanimity of which could not possibly be upset by either cross-examination or any sort of bullyragging, filled him with vast respect. He had been especially taken with the gyroscopes and their automatic adjustment - was, in fact, almost converted to the idea that the Ring might actually get somewhere. And now, as he looked around the cozy chart-room, with its crimson-cushioned armchairs and its walls hung with maps of the world on Mercator’s projection, on which dotted red lines in great curved loops showed the previous flights of the Ring, he began to feel as if he were an honored guest at the admiral’s table on a flag-ship, rather pleased than otherwise with the whole thing and his own vicarious part in it, through being the uncle of the research professor.