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Title: The Moon Maker

Author: Arthur Cheney Train
        Robert Williams Wood

Illustrator: Jr. Frank D. McSherry

Release date: May 24, 2021 [eBook #65438]

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOON MAKER ***




                            The MOON MAKER

                             ARTHUR TRAIN
                                  and
                            ROBERT W. WOOD

                 Illustrated by Frank D. McSherry, Jr.

                                 1958

                                KRUEGER
                           HAMBURG, NEW YORK

                            THE MOON MAKER
                 Copyright 1958 by Kenneth J. Krueger.
                         All Rights Reserved.

      [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
  evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

                    Edition Limited to 500 Copies.

                           A DAWN PRESS BOOK




                               Contents


                    PART I: THE WANDERING ASTEROID

                    PART II: THE FLYING RING

                    PART III: THE FLIGHT OF THE RING

                    PART IV: ON THE MOON

                    PART V: THE ATTACK ON THE ASTEROID




                            THE MOON MAKER


When the world-war was at its height, wireless messages signed
with the name "Pax" had been received at the Naval Observatory at
Washington, in which the sender declared himself capable of controlling
the forces of nature. These mysterious messages were followed by
the occurrence of extraordinary natural phenomena such as violent
seismic shocks and an unprecedented display of the aurora borealis.
Coincidently, there appeared in the heavens a terrible air-craft, the
Flying Ring, which, by means of a powerful lavender ray, disrupted
the mountains in northern Africa and flooded the Desert of Sahara.
The warring nations were informed that if they did not conclude a
permanent peace, Pax would shift the axis of the earth and compel the
termination of hostilities by turning central Europe into an arctic
waste. The nations, convinced at last that, unless they acceded to his
demands, human life upon the globe would come to an end, entered into
negotiations for peace. At about the same time, Professor Benjamin
Hooker, attached to the Department of Applied Physics at Harvard
University, determined, by independent research, that the mysterious
force had its origin in the wilds of Labrador, and resolved to go there
himself to see what he could find out about Pax and his schemes. After
much hardship, he discovered the location of the Ring, arriving there
at the moment when Pax was about to carry out his threat to deflect
the axis of the globe; but, owing to an accident to the machinery
generating the lavender ray, an explosion occurred in which Pax and his
associates were destroyed. The Flying Ring, however, remained intact,
and Hooker, with his friend, the famous aviator Burke, succeeded in
mastering its mechanism and starting in it for the United States.




                                PART I

                        THE WANDERING ASTEROID


                                   I

"Now," said Bentham T. Tassifer, with an air of defiance, "we'll see!"
He was a bandy-legged little man, whose abdominal structure suggested a
concealed melon.

Red-faced and perspiring, he arose from where he had been teeing up
his ball for the fifth hole, flourished his driver aggressively,
and, adjusting his knobby calves at a carefully calculated angle,
went through a variety of extraordinary contortions with his wrists
and forearms. Outwardly, he was the personification of pugnacious
assurance. He had every appearance of being absolutely certain of his
ability to swat that small white sphere to a distance of not less than
three hundred yards and plumb onto the next green. Inwardly, however,
Bentham had no confidence in himself at all. He knew that the chances
were just nineteen out of twenty that he would slice into the bushes
at about sixty yards and lose a brand new "baby bramble." But, as
befitted a deputy assistant solicitor at the Department of Justice,
he allowed no hint of nervousness to betray itself, looked sternly at
Judson, his lank opponent, and remarked again, "Now we'll see!"

Nobody but Mrs. Tassifer knew what a sucking dove Bentham really was in
his inmost soul. The world at large regarded him as a rather terrible
squatty person who had a chip on each shoulder, for he made almost
as much noise insisting on his rights as a native Briton. In point
of fact, he thought he looked like Stephen A. Douglas or, in lieu
of that, like Robert G. Ingersoll possibly. But that was all on the
exterior. And now, as he addressed the ball, he kept inwardly repeating
to himself: "Eye on the ball--head steady--follow through. Eye on the
ball--head steady--follow through." Then, summoning all his resources,
he swung his driver over his shoulder and was about to bring it down
with the impetus of a Travis, when he thought he saw a black gnat
dancing in front of his eyes.

"Tush!" he exclaimed, waving with his left hand. "These flies!"

"Aren't any flies," retorted his friend Judson, from the Department of
Agriculture, "in October."

"Well, I thought there was," said Bentham, dressing at the ball once
more. "There it is again!" he added, suddenly striking at something.
Then he fastened his eyes on the horizon. "You're right! It isn't
here--it's there! See it?" And he pointed out into the blue of space
with his driver.

"Flying machine," announced Judson. "Watch it go!"

The black speck was coming swiftly toward them and growing larger every
instant.

"It's like a doughnut--round with a hole in the middle!" cried Bentham.
"I believe that fellow intends to land here. What impudence!"

By this time, both of them could see plainly the details of the machine
which, constructed apparently of polished steel, flashed dizzily in
the sunlight as it shot over the golf-course. It was evidently a
hollow cylinder shaped like an anchor-ring or life-preserver, about
seventy-five feet in diameter, with a tripod superstructure carrying,
at its apex, a thimble-shaped device, the open mouth of which pointed
downward through the middle of the machine. A faint yellow glare--a
sort of luminous vapor--hovered below this gigantic car, which sailed
through the air with a deep humming sound.

"It's coming down!" shouted Bentham indignantly. "We'd better beat it!
This is an outrage!"

From overhead came a series of crackling vibrations, accompanied by a
muffled roar like escaping steam. The car had ceased to move forward
and was slowly descending. Strange creakings and snappings echoed like
rifle-shots all about them, and a Niagara of what looked like hot steam
shot through with a pale-yellow, phosphorescent light, drove down
through the center of the ring and tore away the surface of the fair
green, filling the air with a geyser of earth and grass. The two men,
almost blinded by the rain of mud, sand, and small stones, ran like
rabbits to the shelter of the nearest bunker.

"Outrageous! Inexcusable!" sputtered Mr. Tassifer, as he cowered on the
other side of it. "Fellow must be simply mad! Private property!"

Then, after a couple of minutes, hearing no further sounds and the
sand-storm having subsided, they raised their heads and peeked over
the top of the bunker. Between the fourth and fifth holes, the turf
on the fair green had been torn up in a circular patch of about a
hundred feet in diameter, and in the shallow crater thus excavated, and
surrounded by an irregular ring of divots, sand, and debris, rested a
gigantic flying machine surmounted by a superstructure not unlike the
fighting-mast of a battle-ship. The whole affair, embedded thus in the
golf-course, had an air of permanency that irritated Mr. Tassifer, and,
even as he gazed at the trespasser, a circular manhole opened in the
side, a jointed steel ladder was lowered to the ground, and a short man
in a strange kind of helmet climbed out and began to descend.

Then it was that Mr. Tassifer rose to the occasion.

"Here, you," he shouted, hurrying threateningly toward the newcomer;
"this is private property! You can't land here! Take yourself off!"

The man from the machine leaped to earth and turned a circular glass
face, like a small aquarium, to the enraged golfer. From outside,
his countenance had a horrible grotesque appearance, like that of a
man-eating shark. Lowering his head, he charged like an infuriated bull
at Mr. Tassifer, who ignominiously took to his heels and did not look
round until he had gained the shelter of the clubhouse piazza. Mr.
Judson had arrived there before him.

"I'm going to telephone this minute and get a warrant for that
fellow--trespass and assault--we'll see!" The little man was shaking
with baffled rage and humiliated dignity. "Right in the middle of the
fair green, too! How can we play that fifth hole, I'd like to know?"

"I say, play it as 'ground under repair,'" panted Mr. Judson, who was
just getting his breath.

"'Ground under repair!'" echoed Mr. Tassifer scornfully. "There isn't
any ground under repair. It's got to be played as 'a rub of the
green!'" He glared furiously at Judson.

"_Ground_ under repair!" repeated the other stubbornly.

"Rub of the green!" shouted Mr. Tassifer.

A sound of heavy footfalls came from behind them, and they turned to
see the man from the flying machine coming up the steps. He had taken
off his helmet and looked very pale and tired and quite tame.

"Excuse me," he said huskily. "Can I telephone to the observatory
from here? My name's Hooker and we've just come down from Ungava--five
hours. Simply _had_ to land on your course--nowhere else! You couldn't
let me have a cigarette, could you?"


                                  II

The morning after the successful descent of the Flying Ring among the
bunkers and hazards of the golf-course of the Chevy Chase Club, at
Washington, Professor Benjamin Hooker awoke to find himself not only
famous but, beyond peradventure, the most interesting human being
upon the terrestrial globe. Equipped with a marvelous engine capable
of navigating space and of discharging a lavender ray which could
annihilate anything from a fleet of battle-ships to a mountain-range,
he was justly acclaimed "The First Citizen of the World." He, or the
nation to which he should give his allegiance, could, it was properly
assumed, control the destinies of mankind.

It had been universally known that the nations involved in the
world-war had concluded a treaty of peace only under the threat of the
mysterious being known as "Pax" to shift the axis of the globe and turn
Europe into an arctic waste. It was now, therefore, generally believed
that Hooker was himself none other than Pax, and that, having brought
about the end of the war, he had returned with his aerial monster to
pursue further scientific investigations under the auspices of the
national government.

At any rate, Professor Benjamin Hooker, hitherto the most modest of all
the retiring inhabitants of Cambridge, Massachusetts, now found himself
in the spotlight of publicity, and hailed not only as the arbiter
of world-politics but as the dictator of human destiny. True to his
instincts, however, Professor Hooker paid no attention to this surfeit
of adulation. The day after his arrival, having reported himself at
the office of the Secretary of State, he retired to the Congressional
Library to prepare his statement for the Smithsonian Institution, and,
having rented a hall bedroom in a quiet lodging-house on H Street,
resumed the unpretentious existence of a scientific investigator.

By arrangement with the government, the Flying Ring was moved to a
large aerodrome beyond the city, where its mysteries were protected
from public curiosity by a steel fence, thirty feet high, outside
which, both by day and night, armed guards were constantly on patrol.
For, in the Flying Ring and in Professor Hooker, the government of the
United States realized that it possessed not only the key to permanent
peace but to the safety and prosperity of mankind as a whole. It may be
said quite confidently that the head on anybody other than Professor
Hooker would have been completely turned. Daily there arrived at
his boarding-house various ambassadorial representatives of foreign
nations, who conferred upon him, in the name of their governments
or monarchs, the highest decorations in their gift. But, as became
a true American, he thought little of these decorations, and simply
threw their crosses and other insignia into an empty and not very
clean bureau drawer. All this fuss and feathers took, in his opinion,
a confounded lot of time and interfered with the serious business of
life. Yet his very modesty operated to increase his notoriety. Here was
a shabby little man, with tousled brown hair, double-lensed spectacles,
and a protruding Adam's apple--the most famous man in the world; nay,
the most celebrated man since the creation--who, for simplicity and
diffidence, surpassed both U. S. Grant and Admiral Dewey, who was
content to go on wearing the same very baggy eighteen-dollar suit of
clothes for years, and to live in a three-dollar-a-week hall bedroom,
when his picture hung in every kitchen from the Atlantic seaboard to
the Pacific coast.

But, to speak accurately, Bennie Hooker was not so much disregardful of
these things as he was oblivious of them, for when he was not working
in the Congressional Library or the Smithsonian Institution, he was
wandering around Washington with his eyes on the ground or in the air,
engrossed in working out some spatial problem and totally unaware
that he was being pointed out at every corner as: "That's him! That's
Hooker!"

Thus, pondering on the mysteries of space and time, of infinity,
eternity, and the riddle of the universe--or, to be exact, upon an
equation which he was figuring out on the seventeenth leaf of his
note-book--Professor Benjamin Hooker wandered into Dupont Circle and
absent-mindedly seated himself on the southeast end of a green park
bench upon the northwest corner of which reclined a young lady dressed
in a tan tailor-made suit. Professor Hooker did not know that he was in
Dupont Circle; he did not even know that he was on a green park bench,
and, if he had, he would not have known upon which end of it he was.
Needless to say, he was entirely ignorant of the presence of the young
lady in the tan tailor-made suit. The equation was a very annoying one,
and, for some reason or other, he found it impossible to integrate it.
With his note-book on his knee, Professor Hooker chewed viciously the
rubber tip of his lead-pencil and cursed the devil that was in the
figures. And, as he was thus engaged, a clear, well-modulated young
voice, which appeared to emanate from a point directly over his right
shoulder, remarked,

"Why don't you write _x_ in its exponential form, Professor Hooker?"

So far as its arousing Professor Hooker to a consciousness of his
physical existence was concerned, the voice might have been the murmur
of the night breeze. To him, it was less than the voice of conscience.

"That's so," mused Professor Hooker. "Of course. Why didn't I think of
that before?"

And this, as he thought, he proceeded to do. But still the solution
would not come.

"But you didn't think of it at all, and you haven't even done what I
suggested!" declared the voice.

Then, for the first time, he looked up over his shoulder.

The girl in the tailor-made suit had moved along the bench and was
now sitting next him in the closest proximity possible without actual
contact. As she sat there, she was slightly taller than Professor
Hooker, who, unfortunately, was too preoccupied to be conscious of the
trim slenderness of her athletic figure, her alluring cheeks and chin,
the long black lashes of her large gray eyes, her low, wide forehead,
of the whimsical smile that played about her softly curving lips.

He saw none of these things, but he, somehow, received an impression
of vigor, poise, certainty, and comprehension. In other words, his
reaction was entirely intellectual and not in the slightest degree
physical, which made it very much easier for Professor Hooker to sit as
he did on that green park bench and say:

"Plague take the thing! Got any idea what's the matter with it?"

"Let me have your note-book," ordered the young lady, and, without
waiting for a reply, removed it genially from his reluctant fingers and
annexed the pencil. "There!" she said. "Now, it's simple enough--don't
you see? X has the significance of the real part of the complex."

"Well," declared Bennie, with obvious admiration, "you're certainly a
shark at mathematics!"

The young lady took out her watch.

"You had better be thankful that I'm not the man-eating variety--it's
nearly lunch-time!"

If Professor Hooker's eyes had been as sensitive to delicate shades
of the complexion as they were to the varied hues shown in his
spectrophotometer, he would have noticed that a pink flush--very nearly
wave-length 6250, he would have said--spread over her face as she
caught his eye; but this incident wholly escaped his notice.

At the same moment, the bellow of a factory whistle somewhere over
Alexandria way caused Professor Hooker to arouse himself out of his
state of semilethargy.

"By thunder, it's one o'clock!" he exclaimed, and, without further
ado, he arose, bolted across the Circle, and made a flying leap for
a street-car which was just swinging into Connecticut Avenue. The
tailor-made girl followed him with an amused gaze.

"I really believe I know more mathematics than he does," she remarked
complacently to herself. "But isn't he just a dear?" And with that, she
too, arose and walked briskly away, as if she knew exactly where she
was going--which she did.


                                  III

He was fifteen minutes late to lunch, and the other boarders had
made way with everything on the table except a single chop and a few
scrapings of macaroni which Mrs. Mullins, the landlady, had carefully
rescued and preserved for him. But Professor Hooker, who ate merely
as a matter of form, did not notice the absence of the other courses
and, automatically obeying the law of compensation, evened up on
the sago pudding, of which there was an inevitable abundance. Then
he went up to his room, lit his pipe, seated himself, cross-legged,
sideways on his bed, and got to work at his note-book again. The
equation, however, in spite of the young lady's clever suggestions,
still refused to be solved. For an hour, he chewed his pencil, arising
occasionally and walking up and down, three steps each way, in front
of the marble-topped walnut bureau, until the middle-aged spinster who
occupied the room below was ready to scream with nerves. As however,
she was waiting for a man to come and take her out walking, she was
obliged to possess her soul and feet in patience.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I ought to have let that young woman finish up this calculation for
me." Hooker at last conceded to the face in the glass. "I can't handle
the thing myself, and now I'll have to go out to Georgetown and bother
Thornton with it."

Thornton was the senior astronomer at the new Naval Observatory, and,
with his junior associate, Evarts, had been the first scientist to
observe the mysterious phenomena incident to the manifestations of
Pax's power. But as Professor Hooker, at this point, remembered that he
had left one of his other note-books at the Smithsonian, and as this
note-book, when found, in turn suggested another unsolved problem,
it was almost dark before he boarded the Georgetown car and quite
naturally took his seat among the places reserved for smokers.

The evening paper, however, offered very little of interest. In fact,
Professor Hooker rarely found anything upon its front pages that he
cared to read. The antics of political parties and their bosses, the
matrimonial eccentricities of social leaders, "what the man will wear,"
even the vivid accounts of battle, murder, and sudden death with which
its columns were replete meant nothing to him. Disgustedly he folded
over the newspaper and ran his eye down the miscellaneous foreign-news
items. An obscure paragraph caught his eye.

                             THE NEW COMET

    Geneva, Switzerland--The officials of the observatory here have
    just published the corrected elements of the orbit of the new
    comet reported by Battelli last month. They predict that this new
    intruder into the solar system will be of unusual brilliancy,
    probably surpassing that of the Great Comet of 1811.

Here was something worth while--something directly pertaining to
Professor Hooker's bailiwick. Comets were his specialty. He had a
familiar acquaintance with them and their families--knew them all by
their first names, so to speak. Now, the Great Comet of 1811 had been
the most sensational sidereal exhibition on record. It had caused a
confident belief throughout the nations that the end of the world
was surely at hand. If the new comet were going to be anything like
that--holy smoke!

The full moon was climbing over the ghostly white domes of the
observatory as Professor Hooker, still pondering on the comet, trudged
up the long hill to where his friend gave his life to the unselfish
service of mankind. At the farther end of the building, a light glowed
in a single window, and, having been admitted by a sleepy porter, he
walked down the long corridor and knocked at Thornton's door. Receiving
no response, he waited for a moment, knocked again, and then opened the
door himself. Thornton was sitting at his desk, completely absorbed in
his calculations.

The grave profile of the astronomer showed through the dim light from
the shrouded electric lamp like the head of an ancient statue of some
Greek philosopher. Before him lay a litter of white papers covered
with figures and an open book of logarithms. Immured in the interior
of the great dome, with its monumental walls like those of an ancient
Egyptian pyramid, they could hear no sound save the slow tick of the
sidereal clock and the faint whir of the complicated machinery that
drove the telescope in its infallible following of the movements of the
solar system. For upward of two minutes, Thornton remained unconscious
of Hooker's presence. Then, with a sigh, he laid down his pencil and,
looking up, observed his friend for the first time.

"Hello, Bennie," he exclaimed, with a suggestion of excitement in his
ordinarily calm voice; "pull your chair up here! We've got something
big--the biggest thing, in fact, that has ever happened in astronomy!
We got the elements of Battelli's comet yesterday. Unless I've made
some mistake in my figures, there's going to be a smash-up in the
universe!"

From Thornton, the conservative, such a declaration had immeasurable
significance.

"You mean it's going to hit the earth?" asked Hooker, with interest.

"No," answered Thornton; "but it looks as if it would strike one of the
smaller asteroids in a head-on collision--and if it does--"

"Something will drop," finished Hooker. "Which asteroid?"

"Medusa--one I've been following in its orbit for more than two
years--a small planet, largely composed of pitchblende."

Hooker pursed his lips into a whistle.

"What do you really suppose will happen?" he inquired.

"No one can tell," replied, the astronomer. "The collision might check
Medusa in its orbit and cause it to fall into the sun. In falling, it
might cross the earth's path and strike us--it might mean the end of
the world!"

"Gee whiz!" ejaculated Professor Hooker. "When is this interesting
event going to take place?"

"I calculate that the comet and the asteroid will come into collision
at three o'clock on the morning of the eighteenth of next month. You
can come over and see it if you like."

"I'll be here," Bennie assured him, jotting down the date. "And now,"
he added, pulling his note-book from his pocket, "be a good fellow and
solve this equation for me, will you?"

"Good Lord!" protested Thornton. "Really, don't you think it's almost
bedtime? I'm no good outside my own line, anyway."

"This _is_ your line," retorted Bennie. "Look here, Thornton; don't go
back on me. All this fooling-around of mine with radium and that sort
of stuff has weakened my mathematics. I've simply got to solve this
equation. I almost solved it this morning," he added, with a shamefaced
recollection of the girl in the tan suit.

"There's no use your calling on me," answered Thornton definitely. "It
would take a week for me to catch up with you, anyhow."

Hooker's face clearly showed his disappointment.

"But, Thornton," he protested, "who else is there but you? You're the
most expert mathematician in America!"

The astronomer laughed.

"I wish I were," he replied. "But the fact of the matter is my
mathematics is by no means my strong point. Anyhow, I haven't the time.
It's simply out of the question."

"Well, who _is_ there?" persisted Bennie.

Thornton leaned back meditatively.

"I suggest your trying the research professor of applied mathematics at
the new National Institute."

"Thanks," answered his friend, slipping his note-book back into his
pocket and putting on his hat. "By the way, what's the gent's name?"

Thornton's eye twinkled.

"His name," he said, "is Miss Rhoda Gibbs."


                                  IV

Professor Bennie Hooker arose next morning and got on line in company
with Mrs. Mullins' other boarders for his bath in the tin tub just as
usual. But something was different. Breakfast, while no stodgier than
usual, did not taste quite the same, and he answered Miss Parkinson,
the spinster who roomed beneath him, quite sharply that he wasn't
responsible for the milk or for the maple sirup either, although, in
his absent-mindedness, he had appropriated considerably more than his
share of both. The fact of the matter was that Thornton had told him to
go to a woman for assistance--a woman!

It was now upward of thirty years since there had been a woman in
Bennie's life--leaving out, of course, Miss Beebe, his landlady in
Cambridge, and Bridget McGee, the biddy who cleaned his room in the
house on the Appian Way, where Miss Beebe resided. He had never liked
women, anyway--not since they had insisted on swathing him as a child
in flannel soaked in various kinds of healing oils, and his experience
with Miss Beebe and the McGee had not increased his regard. They were
fools--or just scrawny fakers, aping intelligence like Miss Beebe,
who filled him with disgust. Yet, had he known it, that withered
virgin adored the ground upon which Bennie's carpet slippers trod,
and she had not raised the rent on him for eighteen years. Such are
life's tragedies. And now to be sent to one of the despised sex to
crave succor, to beg for aid, humbly to be shown how to solve a not
extraordinarily difficult problem in astronomical mathematics--it
simply made him sick. He wouldn't go to her--he simply wouldn't!

As he sat on his bed, smoking defiantly an after-breakfast pipe, he
could see her in his mind's eye,--a lean, flat-chested, bony person,
with a sharp nose and chin, thin gray hair--and a mole, perhaps.
"Snippy"--that is what she would be like--in the Beebe order! She would
listen to him with a supercilious sniff and condescend patronizingly to
put him in the wrong. Yet, he was very anxious to solve his problem,
for ever since he had navigated the Flying Ring back from Ungava, he
had been meditating on the possibilities afforded by this machine,
which could negative the force of gravity. No; he must suppress
his natural feelings in the matter and seek out this horny old
maid--the research professor of applied mathematics at the National
Institute--and get it over with. But he wouldn't change his collar for
her--no, sir!

Still recalcitrant, he took the car over to Georgetown and inquired of
the porter at the observatory for the research professor. The nearer
he got to her the more averse he was to calling upon any woman for
assistance; but once having appealed to the porter, it was too late to
draw back, particularly when the latter conducted him to the door of a
small room overlooking the garden, knocked, and left him there.

"Come in!"

The words had a certain musical quality as if half sung, although
spoken, and while he did not recognize the voice, its cheerfulness
communicated itself to the dejected spirits of the professor. With his
pipe still in his mouth, to show his superiority, Hooker turned the
knob and pushed open the door.

There, between two high French windows, sat the tan tailor-made girl!
She had evidently been dictating, for a weazened, stenographic-looking
male with a tonsure was bending over a note-book with elevated pencil.
As Professor Hooker entered, the stenographer arose stiffly, and the
tan young lady lifted her face toward the door and said,

"Good morning!" Then turning to the stenographer: "You may go,
Stebbens. I want seven copies of that condensation of Hiroshito's
'Theory of Thermic Induction.'"

Bennie stared at her, choking with embarrassment.

"Are _you_ the research professor of applied mathematics?" he
exclaimed, as the stenographer slid by him.

"That's me," she laughed.

"I ought to have guessed it," responded Bennie humbly.

"How did you get on with your problem?"

"I didn't," he replied. "The truth is, I got side-tracked on something
else."

Then, suddenly becoming conscious of his pipe, he thrust it hurriedly
into his trousers pocket.

"For heaven's sake go on smoking!" said the girl. "I don't believe you
could think at all without your pipe."

"That's true, too," said Bennie, replacing it where it belonged, with
gratitude. "Do you mind taking a look at these equations? I'm after
something different this time--not as hard as the other one--but I'm
not sure of the solution." He laid his note-book down before her.

The girl glanced at it thoughtfully for a moment, and, drawing toward
her a pad of yellow paper, she swiftly integrated the equation before
Bennie's embarrassed but admiring eyes.

"I suppose one gets groggy occasionally," she said. "Of course I can
see that you're on some gravitational problem."

"Yes," he replied; "I'm trying to calculate the rate at which the
velocity of the Flying Ring--Pax's antigravity machine that I found up
in Labrador, you know--would increase as it left the earth if I took
it out into space. The attraction of gravitation, at a distance, say,
of twelve thousand miles above the earth would amount to comparatively
little, and our velocity would increase at a simply terrific rate. I
must get an absolute solution of the problem. Skooting round in space
would have to be done by a sort of dead reckoning, I suppose, anyhow,
but a knowledge of our velocity would be essential, wouldn't it?"

"By 'our velocity' do you mean that you are planning to take me with
you?" inquired the young lady pleasantly.

At this highly indelicate suggestion, Professor Hooker stared at his
fair companion blankly.

"You--I--thunder--no!" he stammered, suddenly turning pink and
experiencing a sensation of warm stickiness around his collar.
"Wouldn't do at all, you know! No idea of such a thing! Hope you didn't
think--"

She leaned back again in her chair and rested her head against the
wall, looking dreamily over Bennie's head to a great astronomical chart
hanging upon the opposite side of the room.

"You know," she responded, and there was almost a suggestion of awe in
her voice. "I have sometimes thought of the unlimited possibilities
which the Flying Ring would afford to a person who had the courage to
avail himself--or herself--of them. There is nothing, so far as I can
see, to prevent your navigating the Ring anywhere in space. Provided
you arranged for a sufficient supply of oxygen, a flight to the moon
would hardly present any difficulties at all."

"Very little," answered Bennie. "It is perfectly plain that Pax had
anticipated just such a flight, for the Ring is fully equipped with
oxygen-tanks and all sorts of similar appliances. It may be that he
actually did visit the moon! So long as I can get uranium cylinders
for my tractor, I could take the Ring anywhere. But there are other
considerations, certain chances that a chap oughtn't to take--unless
he hopes to accomplish something worth while. The navigation of
interplanetary space is an entirely new game, and the chances are that,
no matter how much care I took, I shouldn't learn all the rules the
first time. Then, if anything went wrong--"

"If anything went wrong, and your engine ran down, or something
happened to your machinery, you might find yourself caught between the
gravitation of the moon and of the earth and whirling round and round
forever through the universe."

Bennie took a long pull on his pipe.

"That would be a new kind of immortality, wouldn't it?" he remarked
whimsically.


                                   V

There was soon no doubt regarding Thornton's prediction. Careful
observation, supplemented by independent calculations, demonstrated
beyond peradventure that the asteroid Medusa would certainly pass
through the head of the comet, which now blazed nightly in the sky like
the beam of a huge search-light. Never had such a meteor been known
before, for it surpassed in brilliancy and size the famous comet of
1811. All night long the streets of every American city were filled
with crowds of people watching the huge fire-ball, the diameter of
which appeared to the terrestrial observer to be nearly half that of
the moon itself. From the dawn of time these dragons of the sky have
caused consternation in the hearts, not only of the ignorant savage but
in those of the half-civilized as well, and even among the educated
classes there still lingers some echo of that fear, inherited through
millions of generations of men, who, from the birth of the race,
have sought to read upon the scroll of the heavens the tracings of
the hand of Fate. And so the boulevards of the capital swarmed with
thousands of people, who gazed in silence at this monster of the sky.
Unlike the Chinese, who endeavor to scare away such celestial demons
by exploding firecrackers and making all the noise humanly possible,
these Occidental multitudes viewed the comet in solemn if not religious
awe, realizing poignantly, for the first time, that our universe is
not protected from attack by wandering celestial bodies. Had a hostile
Zeppelin appeared upon the horizon, a fleet of aeroplanes would have
instantly arisen to meet and destroy it. But no known human agency
existed which could go forth to challenge and possibly vanquish a
fire-monster appearing thus malevolently out of the infinity of space.
The man in the street walked with his nose pointing to the midnight
zenith, and next morning complained at breakfast of having a most
unaccountable "crick" in his neck; but the crowd was still save for the
new boys, who ran hither and thither shouting shrilly: "Extree! Extree!
All about the comic!"

Consumptive old men, gray-bearded and withered survivors of antebellum
days, wastrels of the vicissitudes of fortune came crawling out of
garrets to set up small, battered brass telescopes on weather-beaten
mahogany tripods. And about these collected knots of people, who
eagerly paid small sums to get a nearer view of this astonishing
phenomenon which portended no one knew what. In the "black-and-tan"
quarters of the city, the impassioned tones of the exhorters,
mingled with the groans and wailings of converts and the chant of
salvation-hymns, filled the air, for there, at least, the conviction
prevailed that the day of Judgment was at hand, and that the sheep were
at last to be definitely separated from the goats.

       *       *       *       *       *

Four days after the meeting of comet and asteroid, which was duly
reported by observing astronomers, newsboys were again crying, "Extra!"
in the streets of Washington. An evening paper had been made the
recipient of the following, the result of calculation on the part of
Thornton:

                       EARTH TO BE ANNIHILATED!

             ASTEROID "MEDUSA" WILL TORPEDO OUR PLANET ON
              APRIL 22. CATACLYSM NOW ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN

    It is announced positively by the officials of the National
    Observatory that the asteroid Medusa, having been arrested in its
    orbit by its collision with the comet, is now plunging toward the
    sun with an increasing hourly acceleration and will undoubtedly hit
    the earth in less than five months from to-day. Calculations have
    shown that the point of impact will be in Mexico on the line of
    latitude passing through Tampico, though it is possible that the
    body may fall in the Pacific if the time of arrival is a little
    later than that predicted, or in the gulf of Mexico, if earlier.
    The opinions held by the leading scientific men of the country as
    to the immediate effects of the collision differ in the extreme.
    Some consider that, aside from earthquakes, tidal waves and
    considerable atmospheric disturbances, the destructive effects will
    be confined to an area of not more than three or four hundred miles
    radius. Others believe, however, that the concussion will destroy
    all life over the greater part of two Americas, and that the
    "splash" of the asteroid will bury the United States under a layer
    of fused rock, broken stones, dust, and mud to a depth varying from
    several miles in Texas to several feet in Maine and Oregon. All
    agree, however, in the belief that every building in the United
    States will be razed to the ground by the shock, and that the
    atmospheric disturbances will be such as to render the loss of life
    enormous over the entire continent.

    The most extreme view is that taken by Professor Katz, of Columbia,
    who asserts that the impact will reduce our globe to powder. His
    colleague, Professor Smithers, claims that that part of the earth's
    surface subjected to the blow will be entirely fused and vaporized,
    while other scientists believe that the concurrent earthquake shock
    will travel completely around the earth and destroy all life upon
    both hemispheres. All agree that, if nothing worse occurs, the vast
    bulk of the asteroid will penetrate the film of the earth's surface
    for several hundred miles, the globe's diurnal rotation will be
    affected, the shape will be changed, and its orbit around the sun
    will be altered. Ultimate consequences cannot be predicted but
    THE END OF THE WORLD IS AT HAND!

The civilized world received the astounding news of the pending
annihilation of the earth, first, with the amused silence of
incredulity, and then with a gasp of horror that swept over the entire
surface of the globe. The immediate reaction of the human brain to
this inconceivable catastrophe was that of sublime disbelief in its
possibility. The finite mind, incapable, as it is, of grasping the
infinities, resolutely declined to accept any proposition outside the
history of man's experience. Since that moment when the human race in
the course of evolution, had appeared upon the face of our planet, the
latter's orbit through space had never been attacked or even affected
by any other celestial body, and since the earth had spun for countless
millions of years in its regular course about the center of the solar
system, and summer had inevitably followed winter, and men had been
born, made love, fought, and died, no one was ready at first to accept
the simple scientific truth that, if a meteorite weighing perhaps
only a single ton could fall flaming earthward to bury itself in some
farmer's plowed field, there was no reason, in the nature of things,
why a meteorite a million times larger should not do the same thing,
or why another planet several times larger than the earth should not
shatter it to atoms.

Kings, emperors, presidents, sultans, and rajahs, with their courts,
Cabinets, and wise men, treated the preliminary announcement of the
observatories of Washington, Moscow, and Greenwich much as they had in
the past treated the prophecies of clairvoyants and others that the
day of Judgment was positively going to occur on certain specified
dates. The newspapers carefully refrained from any editorial comment.
Somebody, evidently, had made a big mistake which would presently
be discovered, and then everybody would breathe easily again. But,
unfortunately, the supposed mistake obstinately continued to remain
undetected, and further observations merely served to corroborate those
already made and to substantiate, not only the probability but the
absolute certainty of what Thornton had prophesied.

Then, with a shriek of astonishment and despair the newspapers of all
the nations gave themselves over to this, the greatest sensation in
the history of the planet, and the combined energies of astronomers
throughout the entire globe were concentrated upon determining, so far
as possible, the size and weight of the falling asteroid, and the point
upon the surface of the earth which would receive its momentous impact.

It was soon authoritatively announced that its diameter was not less
than ninety or more than one hundred and sixty miles, and that,
unless it was deflected from its course by the attraction of the moon
or of some planet, it would strike the earth in the neighborhood of
Galveston, Texas, with a velocity of nearly nineteen miles a second.
What the precise result of this terrific concussion would be upon the
earth and its movement, it was, of course, impossible for anybody to
predict accurately or even imagine.

Would the earth be shattered, or would it resist the titanic blow
of this monster from out of space? Would both bodies retain their
integrity so that, one embedded in the other in a strange and horrible
association, they would gyrate through eternity? What would the effect
be upon the earth's orbit, its climatic conditions, and its life? What
might happen at the worst, the mind of man refused to conjecture. But
it was admitted that, beyond peradventure, the best that could be hoped
for would be that the asteroid itself might suffer annihilation--in
which event, its shattered carcass would lie smothering a thousand
miles of the earth's surface, changing the latter's axis and sending
it staggering along a new orbit under conditions which might render
human life upon the globe impossible. And the blow itself! Could life
continue after such a shock, which would be greater by ten thousand
times than that of the most violent earthquake known in the history of
man?

And in the midst of all this rumpus, Professor Benjamin Hooker suddenly
stated that he purposed going out in the Flying Ring to meet the
asteroid in its fall through space, attack it with the famous lavender
ray that had disrupted the Atlas mountains, and either deflect it from
its course so that it should not strike the earth at all or blow Medusa
into smithereens! Yet his announcement that he intended to sally forth
and slay the celestial monster--like a little scientific David--did not
tend to assuage the universal terror in the slightest.




                                PART II

                            THE FLYING RING


                                   I

Bentham T. Tassifer had had a very hard day indeed. He had discovered,
to his disgust, that fear is a great leveler, and that the professional
dignity of a deputy assistant solicitor at the Department of Justice
counted for very little when the world was on the point of extinction.
Like forty or fifty million other citizens of the United States, he had
attempted to participate in the scramble to "get onto the lee side of
the earth," but his efforts had been totally unavailing.

There wasn't a chance even for him--Bentham T. Tassifer--to get
further from Washington than he could be taken in a taxi. To New
York, perhaps! But New York had gone mad. Its harbor was blocked with
liners, cruisers, tugs, and ferry-boats away out beyond Sandy Hook,
so that there was no means of departure for those already loaded with
their terrified human freight. Tassifer had expostulated, insisted,
ordered, roared that it was imperative that he, if anybody, should at
once secure passage for Europe. But berths on the liners sailing from
Newfoundland were selling for twenty-five thousand dollars each. And he
hadn't the money. He had thought of asking for a war-ship to take him
away--like a recalled foreign ambassador--but he had been informed that
they were all otherwise engaged. His feelings were deeply hurt. Also,
he was--although he did not admit it--agonized with fear. He was only
fifty-three. And he didn't want to die young.

He found his wife already at the supper-table and rather snippy; so he
resolved to put on a brave front and laugh the matter off.

"Well," she inquired severely, as he removed his napkin from its ring
decorated with an enameled design of the Clan McIntosh plaid, "did you
get anything?"

Delicately detaching a fish-ball from its comrades, he made as if he
didn't fully understand.

"Get--anything?" he repeated vaguely. "Oh, you mean passage? No--that
is, I didn't take your suggestion seriously. Did you really mean that
you wanted to run away?"

Mrs. Tassifer fixed him with a pair of fiery, if watery, gray eyes, and
her lips drew down into a thin line.

"Bentham," she almost hissed, "don't trifle with _me_! You _know_ you
are just as anxious to get away from this God-forsaken country as I
am--as everybody is! Do you suppose I am going to wait here calmly for
a planet to fall on my head?"

Mr. Tassifer was frightened, but he preserved his outward placidity and
sampled a piece of fish-ball.

"I don't believe a word of it," he answered, avoiding her glance. "Who
ever heard of such a thing? Asteroid-rot!"

"Nobody else thinks it's _rot_, as you call it!" she snapped. "Rhoda
certainly knows about such things, and she says it's absolutely sure."

"Rhoda!" snorted Bentham. His wife's niece was a constant thorn in the
side of his pride. He resented her cleverness, conscious that, if women
got the vote, he could never manage to keep his job--some college girl
would get it probably.

"Well, she's a real professor, isn't she?" demanded Mrs. Tassifer, who
admired her brother's daughter in spite of her intellectual superiority.

"S'pose so," mumbled Bentham, removing a small bone from his mouth.

"Rhoda says," continued his wife, "that Professor Hooker is going to
start out in his flying machine and drive that asteroid off, so it
won't hit the earth at all!"

"Ha--ha--ha!" laughed Mr. Tassifer, but without mirth.

"Ha--ha--ha!" she mocked him. "You are very irritating at times,
Bentham!"

When she spoke that way, he took warning; that quiet evenness was not
to be misinterpreted.

"That crazy lunatic that landed on our golf-course? Bosh!"

"They say he is a very wonderful man," she commented.

Bentham turned round and faced her, for he was now on safer ground.

"Look here," he said impressively: "Take it from me, there's nothing in
it--even if Rhoda says so! I saw Seabury at the Cosmos Club last night,
and he said none of the big fellows took any stock in this Hooker at
all. Stands to reason, it's just--buncombe! Flying Ring! Oh, my!"

"You know Rhoda is awful thick with that fellow just the same,"
suggested his wife, a little nervously. "I wouldn't be a bit surprised
if she tried to get him to take her along."

"What!" exploded Bentham, scattering molecules of fish-ball over the
table-cloth in front of him. "Rhoda go with him? Who ever heard of such
a thing! An unmarried woman! What would everybody say?"

"She hasn't admitted it in so many words," his wife answered, "but I
can tell by the way she acts. She thinks he's the most extraordinary
man that ever lived. Talks about the 'wonderful opportunity' of flying
about in space--and all that!"

"Flying fiddlesticks!" he retorted. "If she goes off with that fellow,
I'll never have her in the house again--never!"

"Maybe there won't be any house," commented Mrs. Tassifer grimly.

"Don't say that!" he expostulated. "Don't!"

"I _knew_ you were afraid," she thrust at him.

"I'm not," he answered defiantly. "I don't believe a word of it. As
for getting passage for Europe, it's impossible--I asked at the War
Department this morning. I couldn't even get standing-room on one of
those open scow-tows the cruisers are taking over. The millionaires
have bought up every berth on the liners and tugs. Twenty-five thousand
dollars apiece they're asking! What chance has a poor man got, anyway,
in this world?" Tears stood in his eyes.

"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 plates, 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.

He felt very drowsy after the mental exertion of following Bennie's
explanations, and the air was indubitably a trifle close in there. Mrs.
Tassifer also was having hard work to keep awake. Rhoda, beckoning to
Professor Hooker, tiptoed into the control-room.

"Those two old dears will be sound asleep in three minutes," she
whispered. "I want to talk to you. Where is the kitchen--galley, or
whatever you call it?"

Bennie led her through the condenser-room into a white-tiled apartment
furnished with both gas and electric stoves. There were chairs there
and a table, and Rhoda took possession of one and pointed to the other.

"Yes," she repeated; "I want to talk to you--seriously."

The ordinarily unobservant Bennie noticed that she was dressed in the
same trim tan suit she had worn when he first met her, and that her
cheeks were quite pink. She looked very nice there, in that white-tiled
room--very nice indeed! This was the second time he had been struck by
that salient fact. If all girls were like _her_! But most of them were,
unfortunately, more like Miss Beebe. He sat down opposite her and lit
his pipe. Somehow, he never felt the slightest awkwardness when in her
company--always at his best! She had a brain like--well, even better
than Seabury's, for instance, and a figure--His eye followed the line
of the tailor-made suit, and his heart pumped noticeably. Too much
tobacco, he thought.

"Look here," she said, with determination: "Don't start this fool
adventure. There is still the possibility that the moon may turn the
asteroid aside." He looked at her, astounded. "Oh, I mean it!" she
insisted, wrinkling her brows. "This machine is all very well--in
theory. It will _go_. But we all know that it won't come back!"

"Of course it will come back," he retorted, "unless it busts!"

"It's a thousand-to-one-shot!"

"Supposing it is--isn't it _up_ to me to go?" he replied simply. "It's
the only chance to save the earth from destruction. I'd be the worst
sort of a coward if I didn't. You wouldn't want me to show the white
feather--now!"

He stopped short at the look in her eyes--such a queer look. Her cheeks
had become quite pale.

"No," she answered, in a low voice, but still with a question in it.
"Then you are resolved to go?"

"Absolutely!" He gripped his pipe-stem hard between his teeth.

She looked down, and the red came back into her face, stealing
gradually from the collar of her almost military jacket to her eyes.

"Then take me, too!" she said.

"You! I _will_ not!" he answered brusquely.

"Please! Don't you think you almost owe it to me? It was my idea--and I
worked out your equations for you. I ought to have some of the fun."

"Don't be foolish," he urged, although he hated to deny her
anything. "You've got your life to live. You're young and clever
and--and pretty"--his own features had become unaccountably
warm--"and--and--what's the sense of it? Of course, it's a very
uncertain project--this space-navigation. I wouldn't let you risk your
life in this blooming car for--for anything! No--by thunder!"

"My life is my own--isn't it?--if I want to sacrifice it to science, as
you purpose doing with yours?"

"One of--us--is enough," he announced with conviction.

Somehow, the word "us" sounded curiously personal. She raised her
eyes to his, and there were tears in them. The flush had spread over
her whole face and to the very roots of her dark-yellow hair. He had
never seen her so before. She had always been so capable, so crisp, so
cool--and now she was so--young, and pathetic almost. He had a strange
inclination to reach over and put his arm along the back of her chair.
And then she gave him a funny, teary little smile.

"That's--just--it. _One_ of us--isn't _enough_--for _me_!"

Something blurred Professor Hooker's sight. There was a roaring in his
ears like that of a thousand pine trees in a gale.

"How do you mean?" he heard himself asking, in a weirdly conventional
tone, although he knew what she meant all the time, and the knowledge
seemed to be swelling him up like a balloon. Indeed, he felt as if he
was just coming out of a dose of laughing-gas--inflated and very much
excited and irresponsible.

The next instant, he was kneeling on the tiles in front of her; those
tailor-made arms were around his neck, and his face was pressed up
against the tan jacket, and her hair was tickling his ears.

"You funny little man!" she was saying, in a trembly voice. "You funny,
silly little man! I won't _let_ you go without me."

And Bennie answered--he could feel her heart beating through the tan
military jacket:

"Silly little thing yourself! Do you think I'd let you take a chance
like that _now_--dear?"

"You must!"

"I won't!"

He raised his head and drew down her face to his.

"I simply--simply--w-won't!"

"Rhoda! Where are you?"

Mrs. Tassifer's acrid voice echoed through the Ring from the
control-room. Bennie scrambled to his feet and hastily lit his pipe.

"Yes, auntie!" she called back sweetly, with a whimsical glance at
Bennie. "I'm in here looking at the electric stove--such a funny little
thing!"


                                  III

As the date set for the departure of the Flying Ring on its amazing
venture drew near, a furious controversy arose in the newspapers as
to the feasibility of Professor Hooker's project. Leading scientists
wrote technical letters demonstrating not only that the Ring could not
possibly be controlled in space when beyond the earth's attraction,
but that it was manifestly absurd to suppose that it could even get
away from the earth's attraction at all. One distinguished pedagog was
particularly insistent upon the point that the gravitational force
of the earth was a _sina qua non_ for steering the Ring in a given
direction. He demonstrated conclusively--to himself, at any rate--that,
once in the pure ether, the Ring would be like a rudderless ship, quite
unmanageable and unable to meet and oppose any external influence. But
another, equally celebrated, immediately countered on him with great
effect by showing that, once in space, there would be no external
influence to alter the direction of the flying machine. Going his
opponent one better, he gave it as his own opinion that the Flying Ring
would never even start--couldn't get off the ground!

Bennie, Atterbury, and Burke read all these letters, articles, and
editorials with considerable amusement, spending all their waking-hours
in the Ring, overseeing the installation of the new apparatus and
making plans to meet all possible emergencies. The longer they
waited--and the collision between the earth and the asteroid was due to
occur on April twenty-second--the less distance it would be necessary
for the Ring to traverse to meet its enemy. They had, therefore,
arranged to leave the earth on April twentieth.

But while all these preparations were being made, a great
migration--like nothing in the history of mankind save possibly the
western movement of the Huns and Ostrogoths--was taking place from
Lower California and the Southwestern states, northward along the
Pacific coast, across the deserts of Arizona and Nevada, and eastward
across the Gulf of Mexico by tug, barge, and steamer, as hundreds of
thousands of Mexicans, miners, cowboys, and their families sought to
escape their impending doom. The migration, however, was not confined
to the Southwest. A large proportion of the total population of the
Northwestern states also streamed across the boundary into Canada and
British Columbia. The rivers were choked with flotillas of boats; flat
cars and coal-cars brought fabulous prices and took the place of
Pullmans; while a millionaire who could commandeer, beg, borrow, steal,
or purchase a cattle-van was regarded as fortunate indeed.

In the East, where there was, perhaps, less actual hysteria, millions
of men, women, and children clamored with but a single voice for
passage to Europe or to any port upon the other side of the world.
At Boston, New York, and Baltimore, the congestion from incoming and
outgoing ships was so great that passengers could speak from vessel to
vessel until they were well out to sea. The same situation prevailed at
San Francisco. For every mere thousand who escaped through the Golden
Gate, there were millions more who either could secure no passage or
who had not the means of paying for it.

To be sure, the daily papers were still published, and a pretense was
made at keeping office-hours. But most people were actively engaged
in excavating subcellars in their houses, to which they might take
refuge from the prophesied deluge of rock and slag. The minds of many,
of course, refused to grasp the situation. This was particularly the
case with the very old, who remembered having been fooled before by
these scientists. Hadn't the papers, only ten years before, stated that
the earth was going to pass through the tail of Halley's Comet? And
hadn't everybody sat up for three whole nights without even _seeing_
a comet? And, after it was all over, the scientists had said that the
event had really occurred, only nobody had known about it. They nodded
their heads, averring that it would be the same way with this asteroid
business that everybody was shouting about. Anyhow, there was no use
worrying yet a while. But, in spite of these octogenarian wiseacres,
by the first of April, the population of Canada had increased, at the
expense of the United States, by twenty million people, and, as the
weeks passed and the new green star burned brighter every night, people
began to ask why something was not done--why the Ring did not start
upon its journey.

Unmindful of the conflicting emotions which he inspired, Bennie Hooker
quietly and calmly went about his work, with no thought of posing as a
modern Perseus about to attack and slay a fiery Medusa.


                                  IV

At last, the great day--the greatest day in the scientific history of
mankind--dawned clear and still. Not a cloud broke the calm continuity
of the blue. It seemed almost as if one could see into the distant
infinity of space--whither the newspapers all said it was Professor
Hooker's genuine intention to go. These papers also announced that
it was the purpose of the space-flyer ("aviator" being an obviously
inaccurate _descriptio personae_) to wait until the earth's revolution
upon its axis should bring the asteroid directly above the Ring, thus
avoiding the necessity, once he had started, of altering the direction
of flight. This would not occur until about midnight.

Bennie had packed his valise and, accompanied by Atterbury and Burke,
had reached the field at an early hour. The machinery had been given
its final test, and fresh provisions taken on board. All was in
readiness for the flight. But would the machine fly? That was the
question. It had flown once, to be sure, but would it fly again? No one
could tell.

The Ring had been raised on a rough trestle of timbers to facilitate
the start by furnishing a path for the escape of the air vortex carried
down by the blast from the tractor. The steel fence which had been
built around the machine had been removed, and a barbed-wire enclosure,
over a quarter-mile in diameter, had been thrown around the Ring,
this being the danger-zone, as calculated from observations of the
destruction wrought at the golf-links when the Ring landed. By three
o'clock, there was closely packed outside of this barrier a dense mass
of humanity, estimated at not less than two hundred and fifty thousand
persons.

These remained, patiently waiting for that sight which no more than
half a dozen pairs of eyes had ever seen before. At eight o'clock,
a heavy limousine pushed its way through the crowd, was admitted
by the guards, and rumbled its way across the field to the foot of
the landing-ladder below the great cylinder, and from it emerged
President Thomas, of the National Institute; Professor Evarts, of
the Observatory, Mr. and Mrs. Bentham T. Tassifer, and their niece,
Miss Rhoda Gibbs, over whose shoulder was slung a small camera. At
the honk of the horn, Bennie appeared at the air-lock, turned on an
electric light at the head of the wooden stairway which led up the
side of the scaffolding, and welcomed his guests, one by one, as they
made the unaccustomed ascent to bid farewell to the "Columbus of the
Universe," as Professor Hooker was now half sarcastically called by the
newspapers. Inside, the chart-room was warm and brilliantly lighted.
The last extras containing "full accounts" of the preparations for the
trip into space lay upon the center-table--preparations of which the
world, except the three men themselves, knew nothing. In fact, these
three had so fully tested each piece of apparatus, so carefully made
all their preparations down to the minutest detail, that they had
only to fasten the air-lock, throw over the switch connected with the
dynamo, and their journey would be begun without more ado. Indeed, the
visitors felt that, after their struggles with the crowd outside the
gate, it was almost an anticlimax to find the three so calmly facing
the prospect of a flight into eternity, and, after a few moments'
conversation, shook hands and prepared to depart. The clock pointed
to nineteen minutes to nine. The start was to take place precisely at
eight-fifty. At the bottom, they all stopped and looked up. Bennie
waved his hand to them.

"Good luck!" shouted Tassifer. "Don't stay way too long!"

Then they turned to the waiting motor and began to climb in. Hooker,
somewhat unnerved, in spite of himself, at seeing the last, as he
feared, of Rhoda, withdrew quickly through the air-lock into the
chart-room. It was now eight-forty-seven--only three minutes more!
Atterbury had gone into the condenser-room. Burke was at his post in
the control-room.

"Are you both ready?" called Bennie.

"Ready!" answered Atterbury.

"Ready!" came the cheery voice of Burke.

Down below, the party had all squeezed into the motor except Rhoda--who
stopped with her foot on the steps.

"Oh dear, I forgot to leave the films!" she exclaimed. "Don't wait.
I'll just run up the ladder and then hustle after you to the gate."

The chauffeur started the motor. Above her towered the gleaming
cylinder of aluminum. What if the air-lock had been finally closed? No;
the ladder had yet to be replaced. Hurriedly she climbed up and entered
the lock. The door into the chart-room was ajar, and she could see
Bennie as he walked to the door of the control-room to ask if all was
ready. Swinging it wide enough to slip through, she threw herself on
the floor in the shadow of one of the long wicker easy chairs. Bennie
turned, glanced at his watch, and, stepping to the lock, hauled up
the ladder and closed and clamped both doors. For a moment, he stood
under the big lamp, its white light shading the big hollows beneath
his eyes, the tense lines about his mouth. No wonder that his face was
drawn! He was about to speak the word that would sever--perhaps for all
eternity--their connection with the earth.

"Rhoda!" he murmured, unconscious of her presence.

An impulse almost overcame her to cry out to him, to beseech him not to
set forth upon this crazy if marvelous adventure. But before she could
speak, Burke appeared in the doorway.

"Well," he said, "everything's ready. What are you waiting for?"

Bennie pulled himself together with a jerk, walked over to the window,
and looked out and up into the sky.

"It looks all-fired dark and cold up there," he muttered.

Then, turning, he caught Burke's eye, and the latter smiled.

"Well, that's where we're goin', ain't it?" inquired the aviator.

Bennie set his teeth and walked over to the speaking-tube which
communicated with the condenser-room.

"All right, Atterbury!" he called sharply. "Turn her loose!"


                                   V

The gate of the entanglement opened just enough to permit the exit of
the motor bearing the irate Tassifers, and was instantly closed behind
it. But once outside, it was impossible to proceed further, for the
crowd had now swelled to such proportions that it absolutely blocked
all movement.

"We're stuck--and that's all there is about it. They might just as
well have let us stay inside," scolded Mrs. Tassifer. "We might as well
make up our minds to stop right here and see whatever is to be seen.
Don't let those men climb on the roof of the car, Bentham. Just look at
them!"

Tassifer had caught out of the corner of his eye the dangling ends of
a pair of trousers supplemented by a heavy pair of mud-covered shoes
swaying outside the window of the limousine.

"Here you! Come down out of that!" he roared, grabbing at the legs
and loosening the owner from his perch. "If anybody's going to sit up
there, _I'm_ going to! I paid for this car."

The man landed heavily amid the jeers of the onlookers, and Bentham,
opening the door, climbed on the driver's seat and swung himself up
to the roof. Here, at a height of nine feet above the crowd, he had a
magnificent view on all sides.

The great bulk of the Ring loomed dark in the moonlight. High in the
heavens, a little east of the meridian and not far from the red-flushed
planet Mars, Medusa shone with a pale, greenish light. It was easy for
a trained eye to pick it out, though it was not a conspicuous object,
even at its present distance of less than two million miles.

"Speech! Speech!" yelled the spectators, instinctively recognizing that
Bentham was a ridiculous person.

"Shut up!" he retorted, in his most aggressive manner, and somehow
suggesting a fugitive cat on a fence. "Mind your own business!"

"Hooray!" cheered the crowd unanimously. "Speech!"

Tassifer glowered at them mutely. There was nothing to throw.

"Don't mind them, Bentham," came plaintively from within the car.

He might have jumped on their heads--committed any degree of
manslaughter--had not a sudden murmur directed his attention toward the
Ring.

A dull purring sound filled the air.

Then Tassifer grabbed at his tall hat.

A rush of wind spread out from the center of the field, carrying caps,
newspapers, and other light objects over the heads of the onlookers.
The purring sound increased in volume, and presently a faint glow
appeared at the top of the tripod, and a yellow beam of light shot down
through the center of the Ring, throwing the cross-beams of the wooden
scaffolding into bright relief. The wind increased to a gale, and dust
filled the air. The ground shook under the impact of the yellow blast
of helium which drove down from the tractor with a roar like that of a
Niagara. Through the whirling clouds of dust, Tassifer caught a glimpse
of what appeared to be the sudden explosion of the scaffolding--great
timbers and joists flying through the air, followed by the collapse of
the entire structure, which fell with a crash and was promptly torn to
pieces, blown apart, and scattered over the ground by the typhoon which
whirled in every direction from the middle of the aerodrome. The Ring,
though deprived of all support, did not fall, however--it remained
suspended, as it were, in the air--nay, it was rising, slowly and
majestically at first, like a balloon, and then faster, with the rush
and roar of a rocket. Ten seconds, and it had risen a hundred feet. A
minute, and it had soared two-thirds of a mile above the field. And
then it darted up, up and almost out of sight, leaving a fading streak
behind it like that of a shooting star.

"Gee whiz!" gasped Tassifer. "Hookey!"

Even his associate solicitors in the Department of Justice, had they
heard, would have forgiven him. It was an echo of his first infantile
vision of an elephant.

A white mass of faces followed the upward lift and rush of the Ring,
which now, with its trail of yellow light, was vanishing toward the
moon, its roar but faintly audible amid the extraordinary silence of
the multitude. Then, nothing could be heard. The Ring, now at a height
of eighteen miles, was in an atmosphere so rarified as to transmit no
sound.

Suddenly Mrs. Tassifer's face appeared in the aperture below.

"What do you suppose has become of Rhoda?" she inquired.


                                  VI

Less than a mile away, Professor Thornton stood at his window in the
observatory watching for the burst of light which, if it came, would
indicate to him that the Ring had started upon its flight into space.
He had already been to the equatorial-room and revolved its dome until
the mouth of the great telescope pointed in the general direction which
the Ring would presumably take. Medusa was almost at the zenith, her
pale-green light somewhat dimmed by the light of the full moon, which
blazed in the sky a few degrees to the east of the asteroid. He glanced
at the clock. It was already quarter to nine. Perhaps Hooker might not
start on time, after all. Something might go wrong with the complicated
anatomy of the machine; some unexpected delay might occur--in which
event he, Thornton, would not be notified and would wait at the
telescope vainly searching the heavens while, perhaps, the Ring would
suddenly start on its flight--the direction slightly altered from that
as originally planned--and he would miss it altogether. So he returned
to his office to observe with the naked eye the departure of the Ring,
note its general direction, and make sure of getting it in the finder
of the telescope.

For Thornton had never doubted that the Ring would start. He had
known Hooker, boy and man, for nearly thirty years, knew that he
was a practical as well as a brilliant scientist, and, when Pax had
threatened to knock the earth topsyturvy, had himself been the one to
rout the professor out of his scholastic seclusion on the Appian Way
in Cambridge, and stimulate him to those investigations which shortly
resulted in the discovery of the valley of the Ring in Ungava and the
navigation of the air-craft back to the United States.

Thornton did not question the ability of Hooker and his comrades to
navigate space in the great machine, or the power of the lavender
ray to destroy Medusa or any other heavenly body. What he feared was
the unknown factor of chance, always arising when an experiment is
hazarded under new conditions. What did they know of space? Would
their liquid-air tanks accomplish their purpose? What would be the
effect of the complex and opposing forces of attraction to which,
once outside the sphere of the earth's gravitation, this new man-made
meteor would be exposed? Could the Ring be "turned" so as properly to
alight? Would it turn? Would the human organs function under these
extraordinary artificial conditions? Would, in fact, the brain work
properly or logically when no natural premises were left from which
to reason? Well, they would see! But the Ring would start! Oh, yes,
it would start--and its departure would be caught on the film of the
automatic moving-picture astronomical camera attached to the big
telescope--provided, of course, that he succeeded in following its
meteoric flight.

The observatory stood on the top of a small hill, and, from his window,
Thornton could see across a sea of tumultuous housetops, colorless in
the moonlight, to a dark strip where lay the aerodrome.

He raised his eyes and gazed up through the heavens, that looked almost
like a field of pale-blue corn-flowers sprinkled with a myriad of
daisies, into the deeper blue of the infinity behind and beyond the
Milky Way, just as he had looked through his big telescope now for
nearly thirty years. That vast, blue-black arch had always looked the
same--save for the slight changes in the celestial bodies themselves
which were his life-study. Blue, deep blue--flash! Suddenly the heavens
were no longer blue but dazzling white. The silence of night was
shattered by a roar from the sky above the aerodrome. The Ring! It was
off!

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 time, 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-lever. 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.

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

"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 walls 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 life-line 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 effect--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 intense 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 Bennie. "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 trip 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?"

"How extraordinary!" murmured Rhoda. "Anyhow, it's just what I wanted."
And, leaning forward, she applied her lips to the floating sphere and
sucked in a deep draft of the icy fluid.

"The latest thing in hygienic drinking-fountains," she remarked, as she
settled herself back in her armchair. "I really don't need this chair
for repose, but without it I feel like a picture without a frame," she
added.

"This is crazy-house, all right!" nodded Atterbury. "Gee, but we've got
to be awful careful or we'll break every bone in our bodies!"

"If we can only manage to sit still for an hour," answered Bennie,
"we shall have our tractor running again. Just now, I feel like a toy
balloon!"

At this point, Burke elevated his legs and gave himself a shove with
his hands.

"So long!" he remarked, as he shot forward, and, floating horizontally
through the door of the control-room, disappeared.

"Easy way to go to work!" chuckled Atterbury. "Lie on your back and
kick yourself down-town. Watch _me_!"

He lifted himself with his forearms until he was poised like an athlete
above a pair of parallel bars. Then, extending his arms in front of
him, he gave a jerk with his legs and swam through the doorway after
Burke. Rhoda and Bennie looked at each other in amusement.

"Have you thought what is going to happen when we begin to get within
the sphere of Medusa's attraction?" she inquired.

"You mean that, since that is the direction of our flight, gravitation
will lift us _up_ instead of _down_?"

"Exactly. We shall have to walk on the ceiling with our heads toward
the floor."

"That won't be very convenient, will it?" he replied. "You know, I
never thought of that at all. All our fixtures will be in just the
wrong places. This table, for instance, will be way down below us and
upside down at that. No--I mean it will be upside down above us on the
ceiling. No--what _do_ I mean?"

"I don't know," she retorted. "If we are right side up, it will be
upside down, but if we are wrong side up, it will be right side down,
for if the up side becomes the down side then the wrong side will be
the right side, and the up side and the down side--"

"Stop--stop--For heaven's sake, stop!" shrieked Bennie. "You're talking
nonsense, anyway. We're going to turn the Ring over before we slow
down."

It is problematical in what result the complexities of the situation
would have involved them had not Bennie suddenly noticed that the
spot of sunlight upon the ceiling had shifted slightly to one side.
Calling Rhoda's attention to this unexpected phenomenon, they returned
to the deadlight, to find that the sun was no longer below them but
considerably to one side, and, shielding their eyes with their hands,
they were able to observe, where the vast black circle had been beneath
the car, a shining crescent, light-bluish white in color and fifteen or
twenty times the diameter of the moon. Neither Rhoda nor Bennie could
repress a gasp of awe as they saw, for the first time, the enormous
silvery arch of the earth pinned, as it were, against the utter
blackness of space, with all its seas and continents plotted like a map.

"The crescent earth!" she breathed, in wonder.

"The crescent earth!" echoed Bennie. "How marvelous--like the new moon!
I suppose we should call it 'the _new_ earth.' See, there is the whole
Atlantic coast line from Cape Horn to Hudson Bay--Florida and the Gulf
of Mexico, Greenland and the Arctic ice-cap! Look at the cloud-banks
over the Atlantic Ocean and along the west coast of South America.
Quick--get your camera and put in a telephoto lens!"

The camera was still hanging by its strap from Rhoda's shoulder, and
it took but a moment to exchange the lenses. Then she threw a puzzled
glance at her comrade.

"How shall I do it? I don't understand," she hesitated.

"You will have to take the picture through the deadlight," he answered.

"But how long an exposure shall I make?" she inquired.

"Oh--a tenth of a second," he suggested, "or a fifth, perhaps."

Rhoda was having a hard time to preserve her equilibrium and handle the
camera.

"Oh dear," she complained; "I can't keep still. This weighing nothing
is very awkward--you slip around so."

With Bennie's assistance, however, she managed to hold the lens firmly
against the deadlight.

"Push it down hard and squeeze the bulb," he directed.

While Rhoda was engaged in making different exposures, Bennie floated
up to the observation-stage to ascertain their direction. To his
astonishment, he discovered that Medusa was no longer in the field.

"There's something wrong!" he shouted to Burke. "We're way off our
course!"

"What's happened?" yelled Atterbury, shooting, in his favorite posture,
feet foremost, out of the condenser-room. "We're running all cock-eyed!
Look where the sun is--the earth!"

"They ought to be nearly in line," replied Burke, in a confused way.
"There's some new influence at work here."

"But I've lost Medusa entirely!" Hooker called down to them. "I can't
imagine what's up. Of course, we left the earth with its axial and
orbital velocities as well as our own. I thought I'd worked it out all
right, but I must have overlooked something. Anyhow, the first thing
to do is to get back on our course. Atterbury, start up your engines
half-speed; I'll call to you when I want your whole force. Burke, you
must slant the tractor over and turn the Ring until we are pointing
toward Medusa. I don't know just how she'll act, but I think we can
tip her almost any way we please. When we're pointed in the right
direction, we'll straighten out the tractor and give her full-speed
ahead. Are you ready?"

Atterbury darted back toward the condenser-room, and almost immediately
the hum of the dynamo began again. With its resumption, their weight
returned, but hardly enough to enable them to walk in comfort.

"Ah," exclaimed Burke, "It sure feels good to be on foot again! I was
getting darn tired of this spook business."

Under Hooker's directions, he moved the control-lever until Medusa swam
again into the field of the telescope. Then, as the green star neared
the center of the lens, Bennie ordered him to straighten the course and
directed Atterbury to turn on full-speed. The noise of the machinery
increased, and with it came a further increase in their weight. The
whole force of the tractor was again pressing them on toward their
distant goal. Bennie once more descended from the observation-cage and
took his place beside Rhoda at the deadlight on the floor of the car.

Hypnotized by the wonder and beauty of the crescent earth beneath them,
they hardly noticed that it was gradually shifting its place. Suddenly,
it slipped entirely out of sight.

"Hang it!" shouted Bennie, in despair. "We've lost control of the Ring!"

Where, before, the earth had been, there now appeared the stupendous
disk of the full moon.

At the same moment, Burke uttered an exclamation of fear.

"We're all out of kilter!" he cried. "I was looking down through the
observation-window at the earth, and--all of a sudden it wasn't there!"

"The Ring is evidently slowly turning over," stammered Bennie. "If our
tractor were not running, it wouldn't matter, but our direction must
now be changing from moment to moment. We may have been captured or
pulled out of our course by the moon! It's pretty near us, and you know
how Jupiter changes the orbits of the comets that pass near it."

At that moment, Atterbury appeared in the doorway.

"Shall I keep the engines running?" he asked. "Our uranium is getting
low, I'm afraid. The gage indicates that over seventy per cent has been
used."

"Troubles never come singly!" exclaimed the master of the Ring. "Here
we are, going we don't know where, gravitating around the moon,
perhaps, and our fuel giving out! We've got to get a fresh cylinder
into the tractor to get back, and it will be bad business making the
change in space. We ought to land and make repairs and get a fresh
start with new bearings."

"Land?" gasped Rhoda, in astonishment. "Where?"

"On the moon, of course. It's only ten thousand miles away, and we're
headed straight for her, apparently. Turn her over again, Burke, and
we'll slow down. It's going to be ticklish business, but I don't see
what else we can do. We may go to smash and we may not. It all depends
on whether we have time to overcome our velocity before we get there.
We could slue off and run by, of course, but our uranium might give
out, and then what should we do? Anyhow, there's no time to be lost."

Yet, accustomed as Rhoda now was to supernormal situations and
surroundings, Bennie's practical suggestion of landing on the moon,
which, after all, was the one celestial body with which they were at
all familiar, seemed utterly inconceivable of execution.

"The moon!" she repeated vaguely. "The moon!"

She had seen the moon off and on with the greatest regularity for
nearly thirty years--had photographed it, drawn pictures of it,
made calculations about it, and read all sorts of fanciful yarns
concerning it and its imaginary inhabitants. She really knew a good
deal about it and could call some of its mountains and dried-up seas
by name--Copernicus, for instance, and Tycho--but she had never taken
it seriously--had regarded it rather as a sort of stage-setting for
the earth. Thus, when Bennie proposed, almost casually, to set foot on
what had hitherto been nothing more than an abstraction or figure of
speech, it left her uncomprehending. She had always associated the moon
with harvest-fields, straw-rides, weddings, and green cheese. There was
a "man in the moon," a "lady in the moon" and "two children carrying
a pail" up there--in it. That was the moon of her childhood and when
she was "off duty"--the real moon. The other one--the imaginary moon,
far less real in every respect--was the one she knew in her work--a
dead world of pitted craters, dry oceans, marked with strange, shining
furrows and concentric circles, just so many thousand miles from the
earth and having regular habits that could be absolutely relied upon.
That was not the real moon at all. The genuine moon, as far as she was
concerned, was the old-fashioned one--that cast its yellow light over
pumpkin-sprinkled fields and down leafy lanes, or rose like a huge red
lantern out of a sparkling blue-black ocean. The real moon signified
coon-hunting, fried chicken, banjos, and "Merrily We Roll Along." The
imaginary moon meant the "Mappa Selenographica," by Beer and Madler.

"The moon!" she murmured again.

"Yes," remarked Bennie curtly; "the moon--that moon right up there"--he
glanced up and wrinkled his forehead--"that _ought_ to be there, I
mean! Say, there's something queer about all this! Hard alee, Burke!
Steer for the moon!"

The aviator pressed his control-lever, and once more the moon floated
overhead into their field of vision. But what a moon! Twenty-four times
her usual diameter--her circular craters plainly visible to the naked
eye, her physical configuration seemingly becoming more and more
distinct each moment.

"But can we land?" protested the girl, reawakening to the perils of
their position. "Suppose we can find no suitable spot--particularly
with our machinery out of control? There will be no landing-stage--"

"We must land!" he interrupted fiercely. "What's more, we've got to
turn the Ring upside down so as to land right side up. It's going to be
ticklish business, because we must bring our machine to rest within a
hundred miles or so of the lunar surface, and we're traveling more than
ten miles a second at the present moment."

"But _how_ can you turn the Ring upside down away out here in space?"
she expostulated.

"By slanting the tractor at its maximum angle," he answered. "Since
there is little gravitational force acting on us now, the Ring will
then rotate around its center of inertia and bring the moon below us.
We can then straighten out the tractor and use its full force to slow
down our velocity. As soon as we get within striking-distance of the
moon, we will reduce our power and come down by gravitational force."

"Have you ever--tried this--turning-maneuver?" she asked hesitatingly.

"No; we never have. But we ought to be able to do it--we must do it!
Atterbury, throw on your full power; and get ready, Burke, to put her
over! Hang on to the ropes, Rhoda, or you may get dizzy! As soon as
the tractor starts, we'll get back our weight and have a firm footing
again."

Rhoda took one last look at the moon blazing out of the darkness of the
sky overhead, grasped two of the clothes-lines, and closed her eyes.
Again the Ring vibrated to the whir of its propelling engines. Burke
threw over the control-lever as far as it would go; the helium ray
slanted off until it almost grazed the inner surface of the Ring, and
slowly the great machine turned over in space. Bennie, with his face
glued to the deadlight in the floor, watched the moon glide gradually
into his field of view, and when it was directly beneath them, he
shouted to Burke to straighten the tractor. Again the ray swung into
the center of the Ring, and they felt the pressure of the floor against
their feet.

Crowded about the deadlight, the passengers watched intently the
enormous yellow globe beneath them steadily increasing in diameter. In
twenty minutes, it filled half their field of vision; ten more, and its
rim was lost to them. They were settling down upon the moon!

Directly below lay the huge circular crater of Copernicus, frosty in
the sun's light, brilliant streaks radiating from its cone. Inside
the circumference of the extinct volcano, and parallel to it, was a
smaller crater, at the bottom of which glowed several dazzling points,
which Rhoda knew must be other cones. To the south stretched away vast
grayish-yellow, lava-strewn plains. Elsewhere, over the visible surface
of the moon, were distributed continents of highly irregular formation,
with strangely indented coastlines, rivaling in their conformation
those of Norway and Sweden. Concentric circles of great mountains
marked both the northern and southern hemispheres, most of them
craters of extinct volcanoes, and each glowing with its own individual
color or radiation. Here rose a sparkling white point of light, Mount
Eratosthenes; there, Mount Gay-Lussac; beyond, Mount Philolaus, and, to
the south, Doerfel, Leibnitz, and that most splendid of lunar glories,
Tycho, plainly visible in its dazzling beauty to the naked eyes of the
inhabitants of the earth.

The predominating color both of these craters and of the dead seas, or
plains, surrounding them seemed to be gray mixed with green or brown,
but, here and there, certain of them shone with a bluish tint, while
others glowed with a well-defined red or green. The great crater of
Copernicus steadily increased in size until Bennie estimated that they
were less than two thousand miles above it. The lunar surface was still
coming up toward them at an appalling velocity, and Bennie began to
have misgivings about their ability to stop in time.

"If we can't stop her, we're done for," he said. "We ought to have
reversed sooner. I thought we were going to run _by_ the moon, but we
were evidently pointed directly toward it."

"You forgot the moon's orbital motion, I think," put in Rhoda. "It got
in our way, that's all."

"It's too late to do anything now," said Bennie. "We're too near to
swerve off and run by." He looked at his watch. "If the tractor is
delivering its full power and runs for five minutes more, we ought to
be all right, but it's going to be a narrow squeak."

He hurried to the engine-room.

"Atterbury, give her more power!" he shouted.

The engineer threw a frightened glance at him.

"I'm at the last notch now. Look at the tractor! The inductor-tubes are
white-hot!"

With a feeling of utter helplessness, Bennie returned to Rhoda, who was
lying on the floor with her face pressed against the glass, and threw
himself at her side; and she clung to him, like a terrified child, as
together they looked down fearfully through the deadlight. The yellow
surface of the moon, gleaming like a mass of jewels, was rushing up at
them with sickening velocity. A few seconds more, and--He turned away
from the window.

"It's all up," he choked. "Good-by, Burke!"

Burke, standing rigid at the control, made no reply.

"We're slowing up; we're slowing up," whispered Rhoda suddenly. "Look,
Bennie! That crater below us! It's not getting any larger!"

Bennie arose and framed the great circle of the crater in the rim of
the deadlight.

"You're right!" he yelled exultantly. "We're hovering! We can land!
Burke, shut down the power quick, and stand by to pick up your
moorings!"

"I'm all ready," answered Burke, throwing over the rheostat that
controlled the current.

The Ring was hanging over a vast rocky plain, pockmarked with small
craters, furrowed with crevasses, and bristling with jagged ridges and
grotesque turrets and pinnacles. In the glare of the sun, it shone
dazzlingly white--like snow--so that it hurt their eyes, and Rhoda was
forced to turn hers away.

"How high up are we?" inquired Bennie.

"The manometer doesn't register," answered Burke. "There can't be any
atmosphere. We won't be able to use it for landing--more's the pity!
Just have to judge by appearances. I think we're hovering now--no--by
George, we're _rising_ a little!" He advanced the lever of the rheostat
another point. "_Now_ we're descending. This is about right, I reckon."

Slowly the Ring dropped toward the surface of the plain. Immediately
below them was a small forest of pinnacles.

"For heaven's sake, keep away from that!" shouted Bennie. "If you land
there, you'll spike the Ring on one of those things, just as if you
were playing ringtoss. There's a good place--that round, level spot
about three hundred yards to the left."

"Trust me for a bull's-eye!" laughed Burke, slanting the tractor, and
the ground slid slowly off to one side until they were clear of danger
and over the smooth patch, which looked as if it had been made to order
for their purposes.

Up--up--nearer and nearer--came the lunar plain. The helium ray was
now playing directly upon its surface, and throwing up great clouds
of white dust, which, as the Ring sank closer to the ground, rose and
completely enveloped it. Sight was no longer possible. They could not
be more than two hundred feet above the surface. Beneath and above
them, they could see only whirling clouds of white powder.

"Here goes for luck!" announced Burke, pulling back the lever.

They grasped the ropes tightly, standing on tiptoe for what seemed
ages. Suddenly, the Ring struck with a noise like that of a giant
sledge-hammer upon a boiler. The accompanying jar, however, was
comparatively slight. Burke touched his forelock.

"We have arrove!" he remarked, with a grin. "All out for the moon!"




                                PART IV

                              ON THE MOON


                                   I

"We have arrove! All out for the moon!" repeated Burke, the would-be
humorist. "Get ready for the quarantine officer!"

They all looked at one another incredulously. Save for the jar and the
thunder of the blow when the Ring struck the moon's surface, there was
nothing to suggest or indicate that they were not still moving through
space, except the minor facts that the port-holes were curtained
by a sitting cloud of white dust and that the deadlight was totally
obscured. There was no motion now, but there had been no motion before.
Their journey had been very much like that entertaining side-show
at Coney Island, where the passengers on an imitation ship gain a
vivid impression of _mal de mer_ by sitting perfectly still while the
shore, sea, and sky revolve topsyturvy about them. Yet, to quote the
never-failing Burke, there they were!

But were they _there_? Wasn't it all a mad sort of dream? Too much
liquid air or something? Had they really ever moved an inch? Weren't
they still just roosting on the staging in the aerodrome at Washington,
and stirring up a big dust with their old propeller? Rhoda was actually
convinced, for the moment, that they had never started at all, and her
illusion might have persisted had not Bennie called her attention to
the fact that the dust cloud had suddenly subsided, dropping like a
stone, owing to the complete absence of any supporting atmosphere, and
leaving the sky clear and dark as on a winter's night.

Through the now transparent window, the surface of the moon, blazing
under the blinding rays of the sun, became instantly visible, like
a desert at high noon. But what a desert! The Ring was lying in the
center of a small, circular plain, rimmed by a coruscated rocky
wall--a "craterlet" such as Rhoda and Bennie had studied through the
great telescope at Georgetown. For some distance about the Ring's
circumference, the soft, porous rock composing the surface had been
deeply eroded by the blast from the tractor and grooves and furrows of
large size radiated from the point where they had come to rest. Far
from being level, the plain around the crater bristled with pinnacles
and peaks of every size and shape, suggesting stalagmites on the
floor of a cave--strange and grotesque creations of the erosion of
prehistoric winds.

Here and there, curious mounds and hillocks, presenting weird
profiles, gave the place the appearance of being a gathering-spot or
"council-rock" for selenite creatures turned by some unearthly spell to
stone; while everywhere lay, in tumultuous confusion, huge slabs and
blocks with ridges, walls, and hummocks, suggesting to Rhoda's fanciful
imagination vast lunar building-operations suddenly interrupted by a
cataclysm of nature. At a distance of something over three hundred
yards, an isolated pinnacle rose to a great height, one side dazzling
in the sun's untempered light, the other shrouded in absolute darkness.
Everywhere the plain was strewn with loose and scattered rocks and
covered with a soft, white detritus.

It was a ghostly spectacle--this lunar crust--like a crowded cemetery
in white moonlight, thrusting ghastly fingers toward the sky, populous
yet silent. Rhoda shivered. Had men lived there, she wondered? Had
strange beasts ever roamed and wallowed among the selenite undergrowth
where now these stark forms raised themselves? Had the sweet air of
life ever eddied among these deathly rocks? Had birds once sung there,
and insects buzzed and crawled? Would they, perhaps, find the imprint
of some giant foot impressed upon the motionless dust? Her meditations
were unceremoniously interrupted by Burke.

"We've no time to lose," he announced briskly. "That uranium cylinder
in the tractor must be nearly exhausted. It had never been operated
before at its maximum power, and we overestimated its life--a serious
error. There is an automatic signal that shows you when ninety per
cent. of it is gone. See? Only _two_ per cent. left! I didn't like the
idea of going outside to replace it, though, while we were driving
through space. Hope our liquid-air suits will work. We'll be in a
beastly fix if they won't. We ought to have tested them in a vacuum,
but there were too many things to do."

He crossed the chart-room, and, unlocking a cupboard at the farther
end, dragged forth the three suits of vacuum armor. They were of simple
design, made of heavy rubber cloth and surmounted by copper helmets
resembling those worn by divers. Each wearer carried a cylindrical
tank, supported upon the shoulders, for his supply of liquid air.

"The first thing," continued Burke, "is to load up our knapsacks."

Bennie and Atterbury assisted him in unclamping the cover of one of the
large retainers that supplied the Ring with fresh air. In appearance,
it was not unlike a gigantic milk-can, and caused Burke to remark,

"I pity anyone who tried to steal _that_ milk!"

Atterbury produced a metal ladle from the closet, while Bennie
unfastened the tops of the cylinders, and Rhoda held her breath as she
peered into the big retainer as the engineer thrust the ladle into its
mysterious contents, which gave out dense clouds of white smoke.

"Hot stuff!" he grinned. "Look out!"

"Hot nothing!" replied Bennie. "It's over three hundred degrees below
Fahrenheit!"

Bennie held the cylinder for Atterbury, while the latter attempted to
pour it in through a funnel, but, in spite of all his care, some of the
liquid fell upon the floor with a hiss like that of water dropping upon
a red-hot stove.

"What makes it smoke like that?" asked Rhoda. "Of course, I know it
isn't _hot_!"

"Condensed moisture," explained Bennie. "We never could have made this
trip without it!"

With the greatest caution, they finally succeeded in filling all the
cylinders, and Burke and Atterbury started to don their vacuum armor.
Bennie was about to do the same, when he noticed an expression of
disappointment on Rhoda's face.

"_You_ go!" he said. "I've got to fix up something inside. Go out along
with the others and look around. I'll take my turn when you come back.
You won't want to stay long, I guess!"

"Oh, thanks!" she cried. "I _do_ want to see what the moon is like!"

The men had by this time got into their strange costumes, but Rhoda
found the arrangement of her skirts more or less complicated and was
forced to retire to the galley, where she finally adjusted her attire
to lunar requirements. Then, all four of them rolled the huge cylinder
of uranium into the air-lock, and Atterbury closed and fastened the
inner air-tight door behind them. They stood crowded together for a
moment in that confined space, like divers in a divingbell, unable
to speak to each other, and fully mindful of the fact that they were
about to essay an experiment in physics never before attempted or even
conceived of--the entry of a human being into a perfect vacuum.

Atterbury made a gesture of inquiry, and the others nodded their
helmets. He raised one hand in warning and placed the other upon a
valve in the outer door and pressed it quickly down. With a shriek,
the air in the lock rushed through the valve into space, and their
suits swelled perceptibly from the pressure of the contained air, as if
pulled outward from their bodies by some invisible force. They stood
motionless for several minutes to accustom themselves to their strange
environment, making futile grimaces at one another through the glass
of their helmets. Then Rhoda was startled by a curious fluttering
or palpitation just above the top of her head--a sort of metallic
twitter like that which might be expected to emanate from a mechanical
bird--and she turned a startled face toward Burke, who only grinned in
response and pointed to the escape-valve upon his own helmet. Then she
remembered that he had previously explained to her how the vitiated air
inside the helmets must needs escape in order to give place to the new
fresh air liberated by the supply-tanks. But, in spite of her knowledge
that this fluttering was due simply to a necessary device, she never
heard it without a momentary tremor of fear--a sudden conviction that
her soul was unexpectedly starting upon the Great Adventure.

The air-lock having emptied itself of its contents, Atterbury
now released and opened the outer door and lowered a small metal
landing-stage, from which hung the steel ladder. Then, with some
difficulty, owing to the clumsiness of their new garments, the two
men climbed down upon the tufa-like surface of the moon, while Rhoda
remained watching them curiously from above. Apart from the puffing-out
of the rubber suit, she experienced no new sensations, for she breathed
with perfect ease, and the sunlight, falling full upon her body, warmed
her through and through.

Down below, Atterbury and Burke at first amused themselves by
experimenting with the force of lunar gravitation, so much less than
that of the earth, and jumped hither and yon--distances of fifteen and
twenty feet at a single bound, like mountain-goats leaping from crag
to crag. Once having accustomed themselves to their surroundings and
their loss of gravity, they climbed up the great tripod and commenced
to rig the block and tackle with which they planned to hoist the fresh
uranium cylinder to the top of the skeleton tripod and replace their
now exhausted supply of fuel.

It was clear to Rhoda that this process could conceivably, and in
fact probably, have been performed while the Ring was in flight, but
she shuddered at the thought of her two friends climbing about on the
outside of their machine while in transit at a velocity of twenty
miles per second, however imperceptible that velocity might have been.
Suppose one of them had fallen? Like the shadow of a lost soul, he
would have followed the Ring in its journey among the stars--since,
moving at the same speed as the machine through space at the moment
of his fall, there would have been nothing to alter his relation to
it, and, like a satellite--a true satellite, indeed--he would have
flown along beside, or after it, until the tractor was started again
and he had been left behind alone in the abyss of space! But here they
could quite safely conduct their operations--in fact, as easily as
safely--for the uranium cylinder now weighed but one-sixth of what it
had weighed upon the earth, and the block and tackle could be handled
without difficulty.

Leaving the men thus engaged, Rhoda descended the ladder and started
off on a walk, feeling her way gingerly along until she could
accommodate her muscles to her reduced weight. All about her lay what
might have been the ruins of a Selenite civilization metamorphosed by
the magic of erosion. Giant monoliths, like pillars, lay tumbled here
and there in suggestive juxtaposition with giant blocks of porous stone
which might have served as bases for such pillars, as the steps of a
lunar temple, or even as an altar to some unknown god.

The great solitary pinnacle which she had noticed through the
chart-room window especially excited her curiosity, and, as it
seemed but a short distance away, she first photographed it and then
decided to study it at closer range--to determine the cause of such
a stalagmite formation under the open sky. The possibility of having
any trouble in finding her way back to the Ring did not occur to her,
since every object in the moonscape was defined with a truly unearthly
brilliancy, snow-white on the light side and almost jet-black upon the
other.

Out of the inky curtain of the sky, the sun glared through a circular
rent, like a beam through a hole in the roof of some dark garret. Where
it fell, everything was dazzling bright, but in the shadow was the
darkness of the Styx. It was like walking across a lava field by full
moonlight. Thus, it seemed easy enough to mark the high lights of the
vicinity and to find one's way around.

Clearing from four to eight feet at a stride, Rhoda quickly crossed
the plain to where the pinnacle stood like a lofty minaret, found that
it could be easily climbed by a gently sloping ridge, and, without
apparent exertion, gained the top and sat down on the very crest.
Below her lay the Ring, its windows gleaming yellow in the startlingly
white light, inclining slightly on its side in almost the center of
the plain. Having photographed it, she turned her eyes in the other
direction. Everywhere, as far as she could see, the lunar surface was
spotted with craterlets, large and small, surrounded by circular ridges
of jagged rock, and bristled with spires and pinnacles. It reminded her
vividly of the white, dried shell of a sea-urchin with a few lingering
bristles still adhering to it, such as are found so plentifully on
the seashore. To what, owing to the sun's position, ought to be the
north, her view was cut off by a towering range, beyond which she could
glimpse the white peak of a high mountain--Copernicus, probably--and
believing this range to be not more than a few miles away, she resolved
to utilize the time while the men were at work in trying to get a
photograph of the moon's most superb natural feature.


                                  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.

Sick with terror, she turned and scrambled on hands and knees up the
rocky sides of the crater until she stood upon the summit of the ridge.
There was no sign of the Ring anywhere--only the scarred, spiked plain,
with its white sepulchers of rock. Tears of self-pity burned in her
eyes; but she could not wipe them away, and they drained down her
cheeks and lips into her mouth. They would be looking for her--waiting
for her! What agonies would her lover now be suffering, searching that
dead, empty plain with his field-glasses for the shadow of the moving
thing which meant so much to him!

She found herself panting, and tried to control her bosom in the
belief that, by so doing, she could economize the breath of life.
Fifty minutes had now been consumed since she had left the Ring.
Perhaps it was only a short distance away--just there, or there--its
beckoning tripod hidden from her feverish gaze by the moon's curvature.
Only ten minutes left of life! How should she spend them? In vain
rushes for escape, like a dying bull? That would be fruitless. Better
to remain where her friends might perchance see her through their
glasses. The valve chirruped almost inaudibly. Only a few minutes
more--eight--seven! She must signal, wave something--her handkerchief!
Mechanically she felt for her pocket! Only the hard surface of the
vacuum armor. She stood upon the block of burnt porphyritic rock and
waved her arms wildly. These leprous cliffs, these whitened ridges were
like a charnel-house of white bones--her graveyard! The pinnacles were
waving back at her. She was dying! Was she already dead, perhaps? Had
her soul escaped through the valve, and was it now hovering over that
grotesquely clad thing that had been she? The woman who died on the
moon! The lady in the moon! Where had the lady come from? In a flying
machine.

The valve gave a last flutter, and her vision
clouded--brightened--glowed--until it almost blinded her. With a
stifled cry, she found herself on her feet, staring at a dazzling trail
of fire shooting into the black background of the sky. The Ring! It
rose like a rocket just in front of her--its sides gleaming like molten
metal toward and into the zenith--hesitated, hovered for a moment above
her head, and dropped swiftly downward toward her. Hardly conscious
of the action, she thrust the camera toward it and pressed the
bulb--obtaining the only photograph showing the Ring in actual flight.

She had no recollection of taking the picture, and sometimes she is
almost induced to believe that it was the result of some unearthly
agency--a Selenite "control"--sending through her a natural
demonstration and message to the inhabitants of the earth of conditions
on the moon with proof, otherwise unobtainable, that the Ring had been
there. For who shall say in what form the ultimate evolution of man
shall appear? And is it not at least conceivable that the superman or
supermind may dwell, a pure spirit, upon the moon--that there hovers
among those colossal ruins of what was once a planet teeming with life
a soul?

The camera dropped from her outstretched hands, and Rhoda staggered
toward where the Ring would land. Slowly it descended to the
ground--settling like a fiery bird to its nest--a lunar roc in Sinbad's
Valley of Bones--reducing the velocity of its fall by means of the
counter-force of the ray which, driving down upon the porous plain,
threw up great clouds and geysers of lava dust. These hurled high in
air, dropped almost immediately again to the surface--a dead weight in
a vacuum. But there was no sound--no wind. It might, for the absence
of physical phenomena, have been an optical delusion. Yet, as Rhoda
staggered, half fainting, toward that cloud of tumultuous matter, she
knew that there alone could she support life, receive into her lungs
once more that essential of all human existence--oxygen.

Would she arrive in time? Already, there was a dreadful pressure upon
her lungs, and she breathed, like an exhausted animal, in multitudinous
little gasps. Fierce pains shot through her head, and there was a
strange ringing in her ears and a contraction of the muscles in her
throat. The frozen carbonic acid in the dregs of the liquid air was
beginning to evaporate. The lunar landscape swam before her eyes like
the rush of a moonlit river--then suddenly faded. She had entered
the dust cloud raised by the Ring as it reached the surface. She
reeled--the yellow detritus enveloping her like a sand-storm. She was
like a fish swimming through a stratum of muddy water. Suddenly, the
sabulous drift sank at her feet, and she found herself lying prone
beside the Ring, with the steel ladder dangling from the landing-stage
and an armored figure preparing to descend. She waved her arms feebly
and shouted, and the figure waved in response to her gesture. A moment
more, and Burke had leaped down beside her and placed his helmet
against hers.

"Put your arms around my neck quick!" came vibrating through the
telephonic metal and glass. "Where have you been?"

She heard, but could not answer. Burke put his arm around her and
lifted her from the ground. How light she was! It gave him a shock.
Could it be that a human being was inside, or was he holding the empty
shell of the armor? Then, suddenly he felt her hand clutch his arm,
and, remembering the diminished gravity on the moon, scrambled up the
ladder with her clinging to his shoulders. It was not a moment too
soon. For, as they closed the outer door of the air-lock, everything
turned black and she lost consciousness. She came to, a few seconds
later, as Bennie, having unscrewed her helmet, yanked it from her
shoulders and dragged her inside the chart-room--pale, but still alive.

"I watched you from the top of the tripod," explained Atterbury, as she
handed back to him the whiskey-glass which she had emptied. "Saw you
climb up on that peak. No harm in that! But then you disappeared, and
I began to get nervous. So, as soon as we had finished our repairs, we
decided to follow you. Lucky we did!"

"You were just in time. Another five minutes would have been too late,"
she answered weakly. "But I had a great trip."

"You see," added Bennie, "we were afraid you might run out of air and
get lost, so we thought if we made a short flight in the same general
direction we should be nearer in case of accidents, and the Ring would
guide you back to us. Anyhow, our tractor is running strong again,
and we're all ready to start for Medusa--as soon as we have had our
breakfast."

"Or dinner," corrected Burke.

"Or supper," added Atterbury.

Rhoda smiled faintly.

"Will someone please tell me what time it is up here?" she asked
plaintively.

Bennie shrugged his shoulders.

"The days and nights on the moon are each three hundred and fifty-four
hours long--almost fifteen of our terrestrial days."

"My!" whistled Atterbury. "What do you suppose a day's pay amounts to?
I'd hate to be a labor-leader on the moon working for shorter hours!"

"Yes--trying to get a two-hundred-and-ninety-nine-hour day!" added
Burke.

"I suppose the Selenites had lunch at half after one hundred and
seventy-seven," commented Rhoda, carrying on the joke.

"That would be midday," assented Bennie. "But probably they had tea
along about two hundred and forty-five and a late supper around three
hundred and nineteen."

"Makes me hungry to think of it!" said Rhoda. "What's the matter with
tea now? I'm ravenous!"

She looked at her wrist-watch.

"Heavens--it's nearly nine hours since we left Washington!"

"And we've only come about two hundred and fifty thousand miles!"
groaned Burke.

"And with Medusa scorching toward the earth at ninety miles a second,
we ought to get busy!" ejaculated Bennie.

"But we surely can wait long enough for a cup of tea," urged Rhoda.
"Please, Mr. Atterbury, do hustle out the tea-things!"

While the kettle was getting ready to boil, Rhoda and Bennie stood by
the window and took a last look at the surface of the moon. But no
longer did she regard its tumbled monoliths, its spires, crests, and
craters either with interest or pleasure. On the contrary, her hand
sought Bennie's, and she shuddered as she gazed across that barren
plain where no human thing of itself could live.

"Thank God!" she murmured. "I should have hated to die out there, in
that vast cemetery--that Valley of Death."

He pressed her hand--now so warm, yet so cold only a few minutes before.

"Yes," he answered. "Yet, isn't it beautiful, with its blazing
lights and black-velvet shadows? We shall never see anything like it
again--unless we make another trip to the moon."

"The sun doesn't seem to move at all," she hazarded.

"It's because the days are so long," he replied. "The sun's motion
would be hardly perceptible on the earth if our days were ten times
longer than they are."

"But what nights!" she ejaculated.

"No longer--not so long as those near the terrestrial poles," continued
Bennie. "The earth stays always in the same spot in the sky, just
where we see it now as a huge crescent near the sun. As the sun sinks
toward the horizon, the earth waxes like the moon seen from the earth,
reaching its half-stage at sunset. Then, through the long lunar night
it grows, until, at seven of our days after sundown, it becomes full.
Then it wanes again, reaching the half at sunrise a week later. If we
had landed on the other side of the moon, the earth would have remained
invisible. If there were people living on the other side, they would
never see the earth--their moon--at all--"

"Unless they came over to this side for an excursion," interpolated
Rhoda.

"The earth would be worth their seeing, all right!" chuckled Burke.
"And think of the wonderful lunar light! I wish we could stay until
sunset and see the moon by earth-light."

"Tea is served!" called Atterbury, and they all gathered hungrily
around the chart-table.

"I bet we're the first folks that ever had tea on the moon," remarked
Burke.

"That's your one best bet!" retorted Atterbury. "Or ham sandwiches,
either!"




                                PART V

                      THE ATTACK ON THE ASTEROID


                                   I

"It's time we were off," announced Bennie presently, glancing at his
watch. "We've been here over two hours, and Medusa is coming on fast."

Rhoda went to the glass port-hole and looked out.

"By the way, where is she now?" she asked.

"Below us," answered Bennie. "We're on the earth-side of the moon. The
asteroid is away off in space on the other side."

"Then we shall see the other side of the moon," exclaimed Rhoda, "the
side we never see from the earth!"

"Not much of it, I'm afraid," said Bennie. "It's nearly full-moon now,
and the other side will be in darkness. Start up the dynamo, Atterbury,
and run slow at first. We've got to rise from the surface without a
starting-stage, and there may be trouble."

Burke took his place at the control-lever, and presently the Ring
pulsated again with the throb of the machinery. A dense cloud of dust
arose around them, and loosened fragments of rock beat a thunderous
tattoo against the under surface of the machine. The din and uproar
increased second by second, the giant ray, as it bored down upon the
moon's surface, making a sort of hole, into which the Ring, at first,
seemed inclined to settle. Then the glare grew brighter, and the
machine suddenly lifted itself out of the turmoil into full sunlight
again. Once more they were pressed heavily toward the floor, and knew
that the full acceleration of the tractor had been developed. They were
off--off into space again, bound for the tilting sward of the celestial
tournament, ready for the fiery joust, with their burning lance at rest!

Below them, the surface of the moon shone like a desolate ruin in
the midst of a sandy desert. Rhoda could see the entire plain which
had been the scene of her adventure, and her heart beat strangely
as she picked out the pinnacle and the ridge where she had given
herself up for lost. Thirty or forty miles to the north, Copernicus
raised its glistening cone. Again the hollows of its surrounding
craters, the crevasses, the valleys glowed with weird, phosphorescent
colors--reddish, sapphire, and green.

The moon began to lose its metallic hardness and to gain a mellow
luster that was almost friendly. Each moment, new beauties revealed
themselves--vast concentric mountain chains gleaming like jewels;
strange gulfs, dried-up seas, former islands, and archipelagoes;
odd, luminous streaks or furrows, shining as if with snow; patches
of grayish yellow, like autumn forests; great peaks, twenty thousand
feet in height, their circumferences geometrically perfect, concentric
circles with a dazzling world of soft, ineffable beauty--our moon! And
how swiftly it was dropping away!

"We're high enough up now, I think," said Bennie. "Navigate her around
to the other side, where we can get our bearings."

Burke slanted the tractor gradually, while Bennie watched the surface
below them with a field-glass. This maneuver had to be executed with
some care, for the atmospheric valve, which controlled the angle of the
helium blast and insured the horizontal flight of the Ring at a fixed
elevation over the surface of the earth, could not be used over the
moon, devoid as it was of atmosphere. Everything had to be controlled
by hand, as in the case of the first aeroplanes.

"Better keep her rising a little all the time," directed Bennie,
watching a crater intently. "We can't judge our elevation when we get
over the dark part, and it would be bad if we had to descend without
knowing what it was. That's about right. Hold her there! Now give her a
touch more of the vertical force. There! The crater is getting a little
smaller."

The glowing surface of the moon was now sliding rapidly along below
them as they circled around it. Over the Mare Tranquillitatis they
passed, its gray lava-beds glistening in the sunlight like black
glass or obsidian. So rapid was the play of light on its uneven crust
that the surface itself seemed in motion--like water rippling in the
moonlight. Then came a rough region of jumbled rocks, and beyond, in
the distance, the great, gray basin of the Mare Crisium opened before
them.

They were now nearing the line along the lunar surface at which the sun
was setting, as they could tell from the long shadows of the volcanic
cones beneath them, and presently there appeared on the distant horizon
a wall of blackness, where the illuminated surface ended abruptly
on the inky background of the sky. Nearer and nearer came the dark
curtain, studded along the edge with countless brilliant spots and
points of light.

"The terminator!" cried Rhoda. "Just see the light of the setting sun
on the tops of those mountain peaks! Did you ever see anything so
beautiful?"

The vast, luminous plain below slowly drew away and shrank into a great
crescent of light which, with the sun blazing close to its edge, ran
half-way around the distant horizon. They were now over the dark side
of the moon--the side that is turned always from the earth, the side
which no human eye had ever gazed upon before. The room was flooded
with sunlight, which came in through the side deadlight.

"Bother it all!" cried Bennie. "One can't see anything in this glare."
He pressed his face against the glass in the floor and shielded his
eyes with his hands. "One might be able to see something of the surface
by starlight."

"Wait a minute!" said Rhoda. "I'll get a black cloth to throw over your
head."

But, even as she spoke, a change came. The light faded away as when
a thunder-cloud crosses the sun, and in a second or two they were in
complete darkness. Burke groped about for the switch that turned on the
lights.

"What's happened?" gasped Rhoda. "Are we falling?" And she reached out
in the dark and clutched Bennie's hand. "Has anything gone wrong?"

"No," he reassured her; "we've merely entered the moon's shadow--that's
all. Give her some more lift, Burke. We mustn't take any chance of
dropping back. Don't turn on the light. We're all right, and I want to
have a look at the moon."

Again they felt the upward push of the floor and knew that they were
rising. Bennie, flat on his face, gazed into the blackness beneath
them. Nothing was visible, however, and he called for the lights.

"Now for our bearings," he remarked, climbing to his perch under the
telescope. Looking up through the window above, he saw the greenish
globe of the asteroid nearly overhead. "Hello," he commented, as he
focused his telescope; "it's been coming on fast while we were camping
on the moon! All the surface markings are perfectly visible through the
glass. And every minute they're growing more distinct."

"What does it look like?" asked Rhoda.

"Looks more like an English walnut than anything else," he mumbled.
"There's a funny big spot--perfectly smooth--right in the center of the
disk, and hundreds of queer ridges and furrows running from it in every
direction."

Rhoda bade farewell to the moon and, throwing herself on her back on
a wicker lounge, gazed up through the window overhead, watching the
asteroid grow steadily larger. In something over an hour it had nearly
doubled in size--a venomous-looking creature glowing with a sulphurous
luminosity that filled her with a certain vague apprehension. The
crescent earth was now close to the fast-subsiding horizon of the
moon, and hung a silvery target for the projectile, which, if not
interrupted in its flight, would inevitably annihilate it. Her
pulses stirred at the realization that they could avert--if all went
well--this catastrophe. Theirs was surely the greatest "still hunt"
ever undertaken--if they only could bag their celestial game--bring
down their quarry, like a quail!

"It's time to get ready," announced Bennie, from the observation-stage.
"Burke, stand by to turn over!"

"Aye! Aye!" replied Burke, his fingers on the lever.

"Start the dynamo, Atterbury!" ordered the master of the Ring.

Outside, the glare of the helium ray once more poured down through the
center of the machine.

"Hard alee!" called Bennie.

Burke threw over the control-lever, and the great car slowly inverted
itself. Then the engines stopped, and silence reigned again. Bennie
joined Rhoda at the deadlight. Medusa was now about the size of the
full moon as seen from the earth, while the real moon had shrunk away
until it was apparently about the size of the earth itself. Through the
windows they could see sun, moon, and earth, all at once, surrounded
by millions of constellated stars against a background of darkness.
Beneath them hung Medusa--the sidereal battle-ship which they hoped to
torpedo--not more than twelve hundred miles away!

"At what range are you going to fire?" asked Rhoda. "I suppose the
longer you wait and the nearer we get, the greater will be the effect
of the ray?"

"On the contrary," he replied. "The distance from which the ray is
discharged is immaterial, so long as the rays are concentrated upon the
object to be destroyed."

"How far are we away from Medusa now?" she asked.

"Judging by the observed diameter of the asteroid, I should say about a
thousand miles. Of course, the nearer we are the better target Medusa
will make, but we shall have to attack at a sufficiently great distance
to avoid danger from the radioactive discharge from its surface which
the ray will produce."

"Particularly as Medusa is a 'uranium planet,'" she agreed. "Of course,
I don't suppose you quite know what will happen when the ray strikes?"

"No," he answered; "everything depends on the nature of the material.
If it is a pure ore of uranium, there will be no explosion but only a
radioactive discharge from the surface, which will drive the asteroid
out of its present path. If there are other materials present, things
will fly. Medusa is about one hundred and fifty miles in diameter. It
is scarcely conceivable that our ray could actually break it up. But
I'm not going to take any chances. Medusa may be within range now. I
think we had better try her at this distance."

Through their glasses, they could easily see that on one side the
surface of the asteroid was pitted with holes and craters similar to
those upon the moon, while the other, which had been subjected to the
fierce erosion of the dense gases of the comet, was worn almost smooth
and plowed into furrows. The Ring was now moving on a course parallel
to that of Medusa, which floated apparently motionless in space at a
distance which Bennie estimated to be less than five hundred miles.
Both, drawn by the combined attraction of the sun and earth, were in
reality rushing on toward the latter. The three men were busy with
their preparations for the projection of the great ray, and Rhoda
drew herself over to the side deadlight, through which streamed the
pale-yellow beams from the runaway planet. Now that they were running
alongside, but one-half of the illuminated hemisphere was visible, and
Medusa appeared like the moon at the half-phase, but fifty times as big.

Monstrous and sinister it looked to her, and she shuddered
involuntarily as she thought of its distant target, peopled with
millions of helpless human beings, doomed to be wiped out of existence
in a blinding flash of fire. Could they do aught to prevent it--four
insects in a flying pellet of metal, aspiring to stop a runaway
world? Had not perhaps the thing been put in motion by some Supreme
Intelligence which controlled the universe, and might not the
destruction of the world be a part of the Great Plan, a cog in the
great wheel of destiny? If so, what could they hope to do to alter
the plan? And then she thought of the taming of the thunderbolt by
the lightning-rod, and drew a long breath and clenched her hands. Man
had, from the beginning, devised ways and means of averting impending
disasters due to the forces of nature. The present case differed in
no respect from the others except in magnitude. The evolution of
defense against nature had been steady and progressive, from the stone
age, when prehistoric man sought shelter in caves from the pelting
hailstones, to the present one in which they were about to whip out of
its course a planet that was running wild through the solar system.

There in front of her, just outside the deadlight through which she was
gazing, and silhouetted against the shining disk of the asteroid, was
that terrible weapon, the generator of the disintegrating ray. In a few
minutes, it would be hurling its mysterious beam across the void of
space. She would be present, and would see what happened. Already, the
Ring was reverberating with the noise of the machinery for generating
the electric current that fed the coils of the inductor. Both dynamos
were running at full-speed, and the scream of the radio-turbines filled
the air. Through the din, she heard Bennie's voice--"Clear for action!"
Burke brushed past her and took his post at the switchboard beside
the deadlight, from which the motors that swung the inductor on its
trunnions were operated. She clutched the rail in front of her, with
her eyes fixed on the black cylinder of metal that hung, pivoted on its
skeleton supporting-frame, not five yards from her face. Womanlike, she
wanted to put her fingers in her ears, but she was afraid to let go of
the rail.

"All ready!" called Bennie. "Get your aim, Burke!"

Burke immediately closed the switch that started the elevating
motor, and slowly the huge cylinder turned on its trunnions like a
siege-mortar. In the control-room, Atterbury stood at the great copper
switch, the closing of which would throw the full force of the current
into the coils and liberate the ray.

The moment had at last arrived for the electrocution of Medusa--the
crucial moment of their journey! In spite of their seeming nonchalance,
there was not one of the four but felt his pulses quicken at the
realization that on the result of the movement of Atterbury's right
hand depended the continuance of human life upon the earth. They looked
at one another mutely. Then Bennie smiled a curious, hesitating smile,
and turned from the window through which he was watching the asteroid.

"You may fire when ready, Gridley!" he shouted.

Framed in the doorway of the control-room, Rhoda saw Atterbury throw
over the switch, and heard the hum of the alternating current in the
coils of the inductor.

For a minute--two minutes--nothing happened; then the outer shell of
the inductor turned a dull red, glowed brighter, and rose to white
heat. They observed no ray; yet even then the ray was traveling
out into the abyss of space. They had seen but the "smoke of the
discharge." A sudden flash of light burst like a bomb a little to one
side of the asteroid.

"Low and to the left!" yelled Bennie. "But we caught a meteorite! It
passed through the ray and exploded."

"Gives me the direction," nodded Burke. "R-3."

He pressed a small button, closed a second switch, and the cylinder
outside swung slowly on its vertical axis. Almost instantly, a misty
splash of yellow fire appeared upon the dark side of the asteroid and
shot off into space.

"Hit!" cried Bennie. "Hold it, Burke; hold it! Rhoda, don't miss that!"

Gradually, the luminous discharge from Medusa increased in brilliancy
until the planet became a ball of fire. Giant sheets of yellow light,
like aurora streamers, drove off from its surface as the deadly ray
bored against it until the asteroid resembled a vast volcanic eruption.
Under the fierce blast from the Ring, its surface was melting away,
and driving out into space a glowing mass of incandescent gas. Burning
thus, out in the blackness of space, it resembled a conflagration--the
burning-up of a powder factory--seen at a safe distance through the
night.

A safe distance? Unexpectedly, out of the darkness, a shower of moving
points of light appeared in the ether, around the asteroid, darting
hither and yon, growing larger momentarily as, shining in the light
of the sun, they traced luminous lines across the sky. Medusa was
returning the attack! The explosions upon the planet's surface were
hurling great fragments of rock and stone in every direction, filling
space with flaming missiles, contact with the smallest of which meant
death to the daring voyagers in the Ring. Several of these molten
fragments hurtled by the windows, blazing fiercely but making no sound,
while some, encountering others in their flight, exploded silently,
like distant rockets breaking in the zenith.

Everywhere the heavens were a mass of shooting-stars of every
conceivable color--green, purple, blue, orange, yellow, red, and
lilac--a kaleidoscopic display of surpassing beauty, of fearful
wonderment. It was as if some demigod had emptied a furnace into the
heavens, scattering its glowing contents throughout the sky, or as if
a million bombs at pointblank range were bursting on every side and
discharging showers of fireworks about the Ring. But already Medusa
had commenced her retreat, already her disk appeared smaller, and to
prolong the bombardment meant only unnecessary danger to the occupants
of the car.

"I guess we've given her 'what for,'" commented Burke. "She's running
away from us. Shall we let up?"

Bennie signaled to Atterbury to throw off the current, and the
conflagration on the asteroid ceased as suddenly as it had started. The
volcanic bombs continued to fly by them at occasional intervals, but
presently the last one passed, and they breathed freely again. They had
escaped. Their work was done. The earth was saved. They could return.


                                  II

"They could return." How easy to say the words--as easy as it had been
to fly off by means of their radioactive power from the surface of
the earth! But, now that the necessity of returning whence they had
come presented itself, they suddenly realized difficulties which had
hitherto not suggested themselves. While they had paralleled the course
of Medusa, they had been headed straight for the earth, which hung in
the sky above them, a gigantic crescent of a dazzling bluish white,
its oceans and continents barely discernible through the haze of its
atmosphere.

Even as they watched it, they could observe its rotation as one can
detect the movement of the minute-hand of a clock. The moon had
presented no such problem. It was dead, almost without axial motion.
But the earth was very much alive, whirling on its axis with a speed
at the equator of a thousand miles an hour--nearly that of a shell
from a rifled cannon. How could they land upon it? Theirs seemed to be
the superhuman task of the clown who tries to climb upon the revolving
table at the circus--an impossibility. When they had left the earth,
they had assimilated this axial motion, and, in steering their course
through the ether, they had allowed for it, as the navigator allows for
the tide or the set of the current. But now, on their arrival at the
globe's surrounding atmosphere, they would be attempting to land upon
a ball revolving with a velocity of ten or fifteen times that of the
fastest express-train.

"We could land at either of the poles," suggested the research
professor. "Of course there wouldn't be any motion _there_!"

"Yes; we might do that," agreed Bennie; "or"--and he scratched his
head--"we can navigate the Ring toward the earth in a spiral orbit.
Anyhow, the Ring has got to follow the earth in her orbit around the
sun."

"There's something funny about it," interrupted Burke. "Suppose you
started at the poles and drove the Ring toward the equator, how would
you keep up with the increasing surface-velocity of the earth?"

"Why," answered the master of the Ring, "it's the--the--let me see--it
must be the atmosphere that would drive you eastward all the time."

"Of course!" exclaimed Rhoda. "What a lot of sillies we are! It's
perfectly simple. You don't need any spiral orbits or anything
else. All you've got to do is to bring the Ring down into the upper
atmosphere and hover at a fixed elevation until we are swept along at
the full speed of the earth."

Burke, who was lighting his pipe, paused and pursed his lips.

"Wouldn't we be coming down into a terrific wind?" he inquired.
"Fourteen hundred feet a second! My word! Some blow!"

"Depends on the latitude, of course," answered Bennie. "We've got
to run around the earth as we descend, or else we'll be on the dark
side--that is, the _night_ side--when we land. Believe me, I want light
for that!"

"Quite right!" agreed Atterbury, who had joined the group. "Just look
at the earth now, will you?"

They all craned their necks to follow his gesture. Through the
observation-window, the shining crescent of the globe seemed to
fill the whole sky. Burke pressed the control-lever, and they swung
leftward, boring through space toward the invisible black wall where
the earth's shadow reached out among the stars. Nearer and nearer it
drew, then--darkness. Steering by the steady gleam of the friendly
planets, as a coasting steamer steers by the distant bead of light that
marks the headland, the Ring soared on, bursting at length into full
sunlight again.

They were now comparatively close above the earth and, in going
around it, had gained the incidental advantage of having acquired
the velocity of the planet in its journey around the sun. Only the
problem of descent remained. But it was the most serious of all their
problems--how to lower themselves in safety into that swirling, boiling
mass of vapor that was shooting by so fast as to seem little more than
a hideous blur, and left them sick and dizzy at the sight of it.

And now, as they sank lower, the blur disintegrated into flying banks
of cloud, shot through and through with flashing lights and darting
shadows. Poised there, as they were, in space, it was a terrifying
thing to watch this fearful rush of the earth's surface from west to
east. Could they ever manage to break safely into the circumambient
atmosphere and go whirling along with it? How--how, without having
their delicate machine wrenched and torn in pieces?

"We must break our descent with the tractor, come down gradually," said
Bennie, "and trust to luck."

Burke inverted the Ring, and they gathered about the deadlight, the
cloud-banks sweeping by below them with a thousand times the velocity
with which a toy globe can be spun by a playful child. Nearer and
nearer rose the clouds toward them. A faint, humming sound filled
the car--the wind! They had entered the earth's outer atmosphere.
The hum rose gradually to a whine and then to a roar. The car shook,
and the steel covering thundered. The noise increased to the crash
of a hurricane, and they could scarcely hear one another's voices.
Cautiously they descended, increasing the lift of the tractor when the
movement of the clouds seemed too fast, and slacking off a bit when
their speed held constant, until the Ring, gradually acquiring the
velocity of the gale, was carried swiftly along by the atmosphere, and
the cloud-banks below them began to move more slowly and at length not
at all. They had pierced the envelope of the earth and were once more
in the life-giving element of the air.

Slowly, they dropped through the masses of cumulo-cirrus which,
suddenly opening beneath them, revealed the rollers of a sunlit ocean.
The breaking crests seemed perilously near after limitless distances of
the firmament through which they had been voyaging, and they gave the
Ring more lift and rose to a safer distance above the waves. Far to the
west, close to the horizon, they could see a distant mountain peak, and
for it they steered their craft.

They were flying now with a speed a hundred times greater than that
of the swiftest gull, the ray churning the sea into a boiling vortex
that followed them like a white foam-monster, spurting great geysers of
froth and steam fifty feet into the air. The mountain reared its head
higher and higher, and soon the shore of a green island, sprinkled with
white houses, rose toward them.

"Fayal!" shouted Atterbury, from the control-room. "I've been there!"

"Bear away and look out for boats!" directed Bennie, and they took a
wide sweep and left the islands far to the south. Ahead of them, Rhoda
saw a small black dot from which arose a dark smudge.

"That must be one of the Cunard steamers!" she cried. "Oh, _do_ let's
go down where we can watch the people! I should so like to see a human
being again!"

Burke laughed, and the Ring dipped like a swallow and skimmed along
only half a mile above the surface of the Atlantic. Soon the liner was
just in front of them, and they veered to avoid striking her with the
ray. Her decks swarmed black with people, and, through the glasses,
sailors could be seen working at the life-boats.

"I wonder what they think we are!" exclaimed Rhoda, looking for Burke,
who had left his post.

"He's going to wireless them not to be afraid. They're precious near a
panic down there," explained Bennie.

By the time the aviator reappeared, the steamer was four or five miles
behind them.

"That's the Saxonia," he told them. "Captain says they recognized us,
and only got the boats ready for fear the ray might make trouble. What
course, Professor? Shall we run across to Florida and up the coast, or
follow the lanes to Nova Scotia and work down?"

"The shortest," urged Rhoda, and Burke laid their course by compass and
called Atterbury to the lever while they snatched some breakfast, for
the sunlight and sight of the sea combined to make them all ravenously
hungry.

They had lifted to a height of about three miles. The white crests of
the rollers had melted into the vast expanse of blue, and only the
smoke patches showed where steamers lay everywhere about them.

"How crowded the ocean is!" remarked the girl. Picking their way with
care, lest the ray should do some unintentional damage, they continued
westward until a dark line on the horizon suddenly appeared and began
to creep toward them. Then they swung to the south to avoid the Bay
of Fundy and found themselves, owing to the rapid falling-away of the
coast-line, out in the bosom of the vast Atlantic again. Once more
turning west, they came down to less than a mile and soon picked up a
barrier of sand-dunes edged by a white rim of surf. There were ships
everywhere about them--the coastwise trade of the New England seaboard.

"This won't do!" declared Burke. "If we don't get over land, we'll be
bound to do damage."

They slanted and soared shoreward. A lighthouse broke the line of
dunes and beach, rising out of a group of small white buildings and
surrounded by the wire enclosure of a chicken-yard.

A woman in a calico bonnet was feeding the chickens, and, at sight of
the Ring, to the ecstasy of the fowls, she dropped the contents of her
apron and rushed to the door of the lighthouse. In a moment, a man in
his shirt-sleeves and smoking a corn-cob pipe appeared on the upper
parapet. He looked at the Ring lazily, and then waved his hand. They
lifted again, following the shoreline, and flew over a dreary waste of
scrub-oak, cranberry-bog, and sandy beaches until they saw a light-ship
tugging at her chains a mile offshore. Then the coast turned, and they
recognized Martha's Vineyard and, farther off, Nantucket. Once they
had got their bearings, they rose higher and flew at an elevation of
several miles over Nantucket Sound, Gardiner's Bay, and Long Island to
Westchester, and thence over the Hudson to Jersey City, whence they
followed the line of the railway toward Philadelphia.

They were all in the highest spirits and, as Burke noted, there had
not been a single case of sickness on the voyage. The brown fields and
green woodlands crept slowly along below them. The air was sweet. There
was still an hour to sunset. Overhead, the sky was a soft, impenetrable
blue. The world was full of light. Tiny trains hurried along like
little harmless snakes. Lilliputian men, horses, cows, and dogs crawled
about the fields and roads.

"Isn't it nice?" whispered Rhoda, seeking Bennie's hand.

"You bet it is!" he answered heartily.

"Lots better than the stars!" she murmured.

He pressed her fingers.

"I didn't let on," he confessed; "but I was scared to death."

"And so was I," she acknowledged. "I never want to leave the earth
again!"

They stood there silent for several minutes.

"But it _is_ jolly!" she said unexpectedly, in a tiny voice. "You
know--I _might_ take just a _little_ trip again--if you asked me!"

They passed high over Philadelphia and Baltimore and, just as the sun
sank blazing among the tumbled cloud castles in the west, caught sight
of the Washington Monument--a flashing spire--and then the Capitol, its
dome burning golden in the afterglow. The silver Potomac wound toward
the city, as it rose toward them. The avenues and boulevards gleamed
amid the soft verdure of trees and shrubbery.

And, as they settled earthward, from a parade-ground came faintly
upward the call of a bugle--like a jewel in the dusk.

Rhoda waved her hand toward the smiling earth below.

"Do you remember 'Marpassa'?" she whispered.

And when he shook his head, she quoted from Stephen Phillips'
masterpiece the wonderful declaration of Apollo in answer to the wish
of his earth-love when she said,

      ... "Fain would I know
    Yon heavenly wafting through the heaven wide,
    And the large view of the subjected seas,
    And famous cities, and the various toil of men."

    ..........

    "And I will carry thee above the world,
    To share my ecstasy of flinging beams,
    And scattering without intermission joy.
    And thou shall know the first leap of the sea
    Toward me; the grateful upward look of earth,
    Emerging roseate from her bath of dew--
    We two in heaven dancing. Babylon
    Shall flash and murmur, and cry from under us.
    And Nineveh catch fire, and at our feet
    Be hurled with her inhabitants, and all
    Adoring Asia kindle and hugely bloom--
    We two in heaven running--continents
    Shall lighten, ocean unto ocean flash,
    And rapidly laugh till all this world is warm."

Bennie listened, as Rhoda spoke the lines, spellbound at the poet's
imagination.

"By golly," he cried, in admiration, "that's more wonderful than--than
actually _doing it_!"


                                  III

Bentham T. Tassifer had paused, as usual, at the Metropolitan Club,
on his way home from the Department of Justice, and, as a natural
consequence, was exuding his regular post-meridian benignity. In his
own little official occupation of the day--the joker in the contract
for the new post-office at Pocalla, Texas--he had entirely forgotten
the disappearance of his niece, as well as the anticipated collision
between the wandering asteroid and the earth which he so honored by
living upon it. He had followed his ordinary custom of going directly
to the bar and consuming a sherry and bitters with an audible, guzzling
satisfaction, something between the gurgles of a dying bathtub and the
intake of a hippopotamus. Then his lordly little eye fell upon the lank
form of his golfing friend Judson, of the Department of Agriculture,
leaning in contemplation before a tumbler from which o'erlapped a sprig
of mint.

"'Lo!" he remarked, with an intonation signifying 'Behold, minion; King
John, your king and England's, doth approach!'

"'Lo yuhself!" returned Judson. "Djuh see somethin' happened to that
comet?"

"Eh?" demanded the solicitor. "Comet? You mean the asteroid, I suppose?
What's happened to it?"

Judson took a sip from the tumbler and turned savagely upon Tassifer.

"_Ass-eroid!_" he shouted.

"Don't get excited, Judson," commented Bentham patronizingly.

"You make me tired!" retorted his agricultural friend. "What difference
does it make _what_ it is, if it's been put out of business?"

"What do you mean?" cried Bentham. "Has anything unusual occurred?"

"Haven't you seen the papers?" inquired Judson. "Huh! If you're so
blamed slow, lemme--I mean, let me--read it to you."

"Sure!" nodded Bentham. "Another sherry and bitters--and another mint
julep," he added to the bartender, after a moment's reflection.

"Listen here," began Judson, elevating a newspaper which had been lying
flat on the bar: "'Extry'! Collision between ass--ass--what d'you call
it?"

Tassifer grabbed the paper quickly out of his hand.

"As-ter-oid," he articulated snappishly. "Let me see it. I can read."

He read:

                      EXTRA--Four O'Clock--EXTRA!

             COLLISION BETWEEN ASTEROID AND EARTH AVERTED!

                PROBABLE SUCCESS OF HOOKER EXPEDITION!

                       MEDUSA NOW OUR SATELLITE!

    There is every reason to believe that Professor Benjamin Hooker
    and his daring companions have achieved their stupendous object of
    diverting the falling asteroid from its course toward the earth,
    and have thus saved the human race from destruction. Professor
    Thornton, of the National Observatory, announced the receipt,
    early this morning, of a cable-despatch from an amateur astronomer
    at Honolulu, stating that, about ten hours after the time set for
    the departure of the Hooker Expedition in the Flying Ring, he
    suddenly observed a yellow glow surrounding the asteroid Medusa.
    This glow increased in volume and intensity for perhaps five
    minutes, and then as suddenly ceased, drawing away from the planet
    like a puff of smoke. No trace of the phenomenon was observed
    either at the Lick Observatory or in the great one-hundred-inch
    telescope at Mount Wilson, near Pasadena, the unfavorable position
    of the asteroid, low down in the western sky, probably accounting
    for this. All other observatories of note were on the daylight side
    of the earth at the time.

    Professor Thornton further announces, however, that the
    observations upon Medusa's position which were made last night at
    the various European observatories show conclusively that the path
    of the asteroid has been changed and its flight toward the sun
    checked. It is now moving in an elliptical orbit around the earth,
    with a period of approximately four months and twelve days. The
    astronomer states that, at the time of the asteroid's nearest
    approach to us, it will be a conspicuous object--its apparent
    diameter being nearly one-half that of the moon. Professor Hooker
    and his associates have thus not only averted the impending
    catastrophe but have presented the earth with a new moon as a
    lasting monument to the boldest enterprise ever conceived by the
    human brain.

There were several columns more, but Bentham did not proceed further.

"Gee whiz!" he exploded. "He's really done it!"

"Tush!" returned Judson. "You don't _believe_ that, do you? No matter
how big a fool you are, you don't honestly suppose anyone can go
sailin' around in the air blowin' comets--I mean ass-eroids--out of
their orbits, like Buffalo Bill shootin' glass balls?"

"Look here, Judson," shrieked Tassifer: "You keep a civil tongue in
your head! I know all about that flying machine; I've been in it, and,
what's more, my niece Rhoda--" He stopped unexpectedly.

"What about your niece?" inquired Judson.

"Nothing! Why, _you_ saw the machine that day on the golf-course--don't
you remember? That was Hooker."

"Sure, I saw it!" assented the agriculturalist. "But that thing could
only fly round in the _air_! The most it could do would be to go up
five or six miles. You see, when you go higher up than that, there
ain't any more air--and you'd _die_! Besides, the machine wouldn't
_float_ unless there was air--any more'n a ship without water. That's
why all this is just bunk."

Tassifer glared disgustedly at Judson.

Really, the fellow was too insignificant--too big a nincompoop to
bother with!

"Darn it, Judson," he said, with slow emphasis; "I don't want to
quarrel with you, but what you don't know about flying machines would
fill the Congressional Library. I've got to go home in a minute, but
I've known you long enough not to want you to go around making an ass
of yourself."

"Don' say!" sneered Judson.

"Now," continued Tassifer, "this flying machine hasn't anything to do
with _air_ at all. It goes up, air or no air. It goes up through the
air and through the nothingness above the air, and it can go up easier
without air than with air, because then there isn't any resistance."

"But what makes it go up?" inquired Judson.

"What makes a rocket go up?" retorted Tassifer.

"But it ain't a rocket!"

"I didn't say it was. It's _like_ a rocket."

"But a rocket has _gunpowder_."

"Well, this has something or other--I forget what--to make it go--"
concluded Tassifer lamely. "Anyhow--"

"Rats!" snorted Judson. "You know a lot about it--_you_ do! You--"

They might have landed under the bar in the tightly locked embrace of
those defending their honor had not an unusual clamor from the avenue
interrupted them. What seemed like the confused shoutings of a mob came
through the closed windows.

"What's that?" gasped Bentham.

They paused, intent. Evidently, something had happened--an accident,
maybe. They could hear a subdued, distant roar, in which were mingled
the tooting of motors, the clanging of bells, the bellowing of
whistles, and the cries and yells of excited humanity. A multitude
of black shadows rushed by. The bartender threw open the window. The
avenue was filled with a hurrying crowd--all gazing skyward.

"Hooray!" yelled the crowd. "Hooray! Hooker's back! Hooray!"

Tassifer and Judson looked at one another mutely. Suddenly, the
bartender leaped out the window and joined the mob. The whole city was
in the streets.

"Come on, Judson!" cried Bentham. "If there's anything doing, let's
be on the wagon!" And he climbed upon the sill and leaped after the
bartender.

Judson hesitated, emptied his glass, and followed. Over in the west,
across the park, a great cloud of smoke and dust was rising against the
crimson sky.

"What's happened?" asked the now thoroughly sober Judson of a man who
was hurrying by.

"Don't know," panted the other. "People say comet's struck us!"

"Comet Nothin'!" shouted a policeman. "It's Hooker's flying machine!"

Judson grabbed Tassifer by the arm, and they hastened cheerfully along
with the crowd.


                                  IV

At the moment her husband thus undignifiedly surrendered to mob
psychology, Mrs. Bentham T. Tassifer was taking her Saturday-afternoon
bath--thus leaving the tub free for Bentham before going to bed.
She had closed the windows, which fact, coupled with the noise of
her puffings and splashings, had prevented her from hearing the
demonstration going on in the street below. She was just reaching for
her towel when she heard the door-bell ring and hurried footsteps upon
the stairs.

"Is that you, Bentham?" she shrilled.

"No; it's me--Rhoda!" came back the voice of her niece.

"Where on earth have you been?" cried her aunt. "You scared us almost
to death!"

"Oh, flying around!" answered Rhoda. "I want my tooth-powder and
nail-brush."

"What are you going to do now?" shouted Mrs. Tassifer, through the door.

"I'm going to get married," replied Rhoda. "Please hand me my things."

       *       *       *       *       *

There were but two passengers to come down the gangplank when the
Washington boat docked the next morning at Old Point Comfort. Trade had
been, in fact, very light for several weeks, and the hotels had been
practically closed owing to the defection of the colored help, who in
a frenzy of religious fervor, had abandoned their jobs to prepare, by
prayer and chanting, for the day of Judgment.

Carrying their grips, Bennie and Rhoda walked along the wooden pier and
entered a hotel. A decrepit clerk assigned them rooms and handed Bennie
a pen freshly dipped in ink. With his hand poised above the blank page
of the register, our hero hesitated. They had come there to avoid
the pestering crowds, the adulation, the publicity, the reporters.
Should he sign as was befitting--"Professor and Mrs. Benjamin
Hooker, Washington, D.C."? In that case, even that old dormouse of a
hotel-clerk would recognize his identity and the hotel would swarm with
interviewers. Yet--did he dare? He had only been married a few hours.
He glanced apprehensively at Rhoda, who was examining some needlework
in a showcase. Then he resolutely gripped the pen and scrawled, B.
Hooker and wife, Camb. Mass.

All that day, the two star-voyagers wandered over the white beach,
drinking in the odoriferous breath of the coming spring and talking
over their experiences of the past seventy-two hours.

And, in the evening, they sat on the sand and watched the sea darken
and caught the first glint of the moon's edge as it pushed up over the
horizon. They neither saw the throng of reporters who poured off the
afternoon train nor suspected that they were the marked-down quarry of
a pack of ravenous wolves.

In ignorance of what was in store for them, Bennie and Rhoda strolled
further and further up the beach, away from the hotel. The moon came
up round and full, smiling like an old and familiar friend. The breeze
had died away, and the silver-edged waves lapped the soft sand gently
at their feet as they threw themselves at full-length under some stray
pines and gazed up through the branches at the blue arch with its
thousands of twinkling lights.

"I like them so much better that way!" she murmured. "If they don't
wink at you, it seems so unfriendly!"

"It _was_ awful up there!" he assented.

The moon swam higher and higher, turning the beach into a white
snow-drift, along which, save for that of the pines under which they
lay, no shadow could be seen for miles. Toward this single possible
hiding-place moved Diggs, a newspaper reporter from New York. The
crunch of his steps made them sit up hurriedly.

"Sh! Somebody's coming!" he whispered.

They were motionless--two hunted creatures--scarcely breathing, in a
black island surrounded by a deluge of moonlight.

But Diggs had spied them. Fifty feet away, he paused and lit a warning
cigarette. Then he walked down to the water's edge, gazed pensively at
the moon and remarked,

"I say, Professor Hooker?"

"It's no use," growled Bennie; "he's got us! Hello!" he answered.

The reporter coughed and came slowly toward the patch of shadow.

"Excuse me," he remarked briskly; "but you understand there's a whale
of a story in all this, and it's up to me to get it? You can't blow up
a meteor and knock the solar system topsyturvy and get away without
even being interviewed, you know. Sorry--but it isn't done. What do you
suppose they would do to me? And then there's Mrs. Hooker, you see! If
it hadn't been for Mrs. Tassifer--"

Rhoda suddenly spoke up.

"What has she said?" she demanded.

"Oh, she gave us the romance stuff," he answered. "Look here, now: It's
ten o'clock, and I've got to 'phone this to New York in time for the
early edition. Do you mind my asking just a few questions?"

"But I haven't anything to say," expostulated Professor Hooker.

"Just listen to the man!" groaned Diggs. "Let me ask you: Is this
story about landing on the moon perfectly straight?"

Rhoda pointed up through the trees to the great yellow circle of the
lunar orb.

"Do you see that bright spot with the shadow on the left-hand side of
it?"

"Sure," answered Diggs.

"Well," she continued, "I was standing right there less than thirty-six
hours ago."

"Great stuff!" Diggs exclaimed. "But how could you prove it? What
_evidence_ have you got?"

"I've got plenty of photographs," she answered. "Dozens of them--of the
moon, of the crescent earth--"

"Beg pardon! Of the--what?"

"The crescent earth," she explained, "at about the first quarter. I
suppose the phrase seems a little strange."

"Oh--like the moon. I get you," he nodded. "But pictures might be
faked."

"These weren't," she retorted wearily.

"Of course not," he agreed. "But they're open to attack."

"I suppose so," she conceded. "But it doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters!" he expostulated. "Now if you only, had
something you _got_ on the moon--brought away with you--that didn't
exist on earth--"

"People would just say it _did_," put in Bennie. "Who cares? _We_
don't!"

"Sure you don't!" he answered sympathetically. "But it means a heap to
me. Don't you see what a scoop it would be for us to be the only paper
to _prove_ you'd been to the moon?"

Even as Diggs spoke, far out on the black, heaving horizon, a dull
luminosity became suddenly apparent. Brighter it grew, and some stray
wisps of cirrus cloud above smoldered in the sky.

"What's that over there?" asked the reporter. "It looks as if the moon
were coming up--only it _is_ up!"

He turned and gazed into the heavens, where the moon was rolling
through the clouds like a great golden wheel.

Bennie was lighting his pipe, and Rhoda vouchsafed no reply.

Then, on the edge of the distant, watery world, a bead of fire rose and
sent toward them a flittering beam. An orange disk thrust itself above
the waves--a brilliant, dazzling shield of gold marked with strange
wrinkles like a corrugated orange.

"Good heavens, what's that?" exclaimed Diggs. "Am I seeing double?"

"No more--than anybody--else," retorted Bennie puffing. "That is our
evidence--the proof you were asking for. That is Medusa--the earth's
new satellite--the wandering asteroid that will wander hereafter around
the earth."

"Two moons?" demanded Diggs.

"Yes, Mr. Diggs; you can telephone to New York that hereafter you have
arranged for two moons--a big one for the grownups; a little one,
half-size, for the children."

"And not such a bad little moon at that," added Bennie.

"Our honeymoon," whispered Rhoda. "Goodnight, Mr. Diggs."


THE END

       *       *       *       *       *



                            THE MOON MAKER

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       *       *       *       *       *

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