The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 04

by Anthology

  "No, not yet. But you must. It pollutes the air, which we must keep clean and fresh as long as possible."

  "Now, Doctor, you must let me have a good smoke once a day, just before pumping the air out of my compartment."

  "No, not even that. It is impossible to pump all the air out, and what is left mixes back with what is in my compartment. Once contaminated with tobacco smoke, we could never get it perfectly pure again."

  "Well, may I smoke on Mars, then? I will take them along for that. But, I warn you, I eat like a farm horse when I can't smoke."

  "I have provided plenty to eat, but I know I have forgotten something. Mention something now, mention everything you can think of, so that I may see if it is provided for."

  "Have you any money?" I asked. "I have changed some into gold, and have a fairly heavy bag here."

  "Oh, yes, I have some gold and silver money, besides a lot of beads, trinkets, and gaudy tinsel things, such as earthly savages have been willing to barter valuable merchandise for."

  "So you are going on a trading expedition, are you?" I asked.

  "Not exactly. I leave all that to your superior abilities. But we may find these things valuable to give as presents. Many of them are of tin, and if they do not happen to have that useful metal on Mars, they will be of rare value there."

  We had now reached the little grove where the projectile was hidden. I proceeded to open the rear port-hole, saying,—

  "Let me look inside, and when I see what you have, some other necessary thing may suggest itself."

  "Let me go in first, for I am afraid you will allow the menagerie to escape," he said, as he peered in by the light of the lantern. A diminutive fox terrier barked from the inside, and wagged his tail faster than a watch ticks, so glad he was to see us. The bright light also awakened a small white rabbit that had been asleep in the doctor's compartment.

  "You are taking these along for companions, I suppose?"

  "Yes, for that and for experiments. We may reach places where it will be necessary to determine whether living, breathing things can exist before we try it ourselves. Then we shall put one of these out and observe the effects."

  "You may experiment on the rabbit all you please, but this little puppy and I are going to be fast friends, and we shall die together; shan't we, Two-spot?"

  "Why do you call him Two-spot? There is only one spot on him, and his name is Himmelshundchen."

  "Rubbish! The idea of such a long, heavy name for such a little puppy! I shall call him Two-spot because he is the smallest thing in the pack. Heavenly-puppy, indeed!"

  The doctor had entered and lighted a small gas jet, supplied on the Pintsch system from compressed gas stored in one of the chambers. The rear compartment, which was to be mine, looked half an arsenal and half a pantry. On the right side a cupboard was filled with newly-cooked meats. I remember how plentiful the store looked at the time, but, alas! how soon it vanished and we were reduced to tinned and bottled foods! There was a cold joint of beef, a quarter of roast mutton, three boiled hams and four roast chickens.

  On the left, folding up into the concavity of the wall, like the upper berth of a Pullman sleeping car, was my bunk. On the walls not thus occupied the arms were hung. There were two repeating rifles, each carrying seventeen cartridges; two large calibre hammerless revolvers; two long and heavy swords, designed for cleaving rather than for stabbing; two chain shirts, to be worn under the clothing to protect against arrows; and finally two large shields, made of overlapping steel plates and almost four feet high. The doctor explained to me that the idea was to rest the lower edge of these on the ground and crouch behind them. They were rather heavy and cumbersome to be carried far, and were grooved in three sections, so that they slipped together into an arc one-third of their circumference.

  I examined everything closely and asked a hundred questions, but the doctor seemed to have provided for every necessity or contingency.

  "Let us waste no more time," said I. "If we have forgotten anything, we must get along without it. All aboard! What is our first stop?"

  "The planet Mars, only thirty-six million miles away, if we are successful in meeting him just as he comes into opposition on the third day of August. This is the most favourable opposition in which to meet him for the past quarter of a century. Back in the year 1877 he was only about thirty-five million miles away, and it was then that we learned most that we know of his physical features. But we shall not have a more favourable time than this for the next seventeen years."

  "Still it seems like nonsense to talk about travelling such an incomprehensible distance, doesn't it?" I ventured.

  "Not at all!" he replied positively. "If the Earth travels a million miles per day in her orbit, without any motion being apparent to her inhabitants, why should we not travel just as fast and just as unconsciously? We are driven by the same force. The same engine of the Creator's which drives all the universe, drives us. When we have left the atmosphere we shall rush through the void of space without knowing whether we are travelling at a thousand miles per minute or standing perfectly still. Our senses will have nothing to lay hold on to form a judgment of our rate of speed. But if we make an average of only five hundred miles per minute we shall accomplish the distance in about fifty days, and arrive soon after opposition."

  "But have you given up stopping on the Moon?" I asked. "I had great hopes of making those rich discoveries there."

  "We must leave all that until our return trip. I have chosen this starting time in the dark of the Moon in order to have the satellite on the other side of the Earth and out of the way. She would only impede our progress, as we wish to acquire a tremendous velocity just as soon as we leave the atmosphere. We must accelerate our speed as long as gravity will do it for us. When we can no longer gain speed, we shall at least continue to maintain our rapid pace.

  "But if we stopped on the Moon, we should only have her weak gravity to repel us towards Mars, and we could make but little speed. On our return, the stop on the Moon will be a natural and easy one. We shall be near home and can afford to loiter."

  While the doctor was saying this, he had been busy making tests of his apparatus. He now called me to see his buoyancy gauge, which was a half-spherical mass of steel weighing just ten pounds. It was pierced with a hole at right angles to its plane surface and strung upon a vertical copper wire. Small leaden weights, weighing from an ounce to four pounds each, were provided to be placed upon the plane surface of the steel. The doctor explained its action to me thus:—

  "The polarizing action of the gravity apparatus affects only steel and iron, and has no effect upon lead. Therefore, when the current is conducted through the copper wire into the soft steel ball, it will immediately rise up the wire, by the repulsion of negative gravity. Now, if the leaden weights are piled upon the steel ball one by one, until it is just balanced half way up the wire, our buoyancy is thus measured or weighed. For instance, with the first two batteries turned in we have a buoyancy a little exceeding one pound. That means, we should rise with one-tenth the velocity that we should fall. Turning in two more batteries, you see the buoyancy is three pounds, or our flying speed will be three-tenths of our falling speed. With all the batteries acting upon the gauge, you see it will carry up more than ten pounds of lead, because the pressure of the air is against weight and in favour of buoyancy. So long as we are in atmospheres, then, it is possible to fall up more rapidly than to fall down; but, on account of friction and the resultant heat, it is not safe to do so."

  "So we have been doing the hard thing, by falling all our lives, when flying would really have been easier!" I put in.

  "We have been overlooking a very simple thing for a long time, just as our forefathers overlooked the usefulness of steam, being perfectly well acquainted with its expansive qualities. But let us be off. Close your port-hole, and screw it in tightly and permanently for the trip. Then let down your bunk and prepare for a night of awkward, cramped positions. We shall be more unc
omfortable to-night than any other of the trip. You see, when we start, this thing will stand up on its rear end, and that end will continue to be the bottom until we begin to fall into Mars. Then the forward end will be the bottom. But after the first night our weight will have so diminished that we can sleep almost as well standing on our heads as any other way. Within fifteen hours you will have lost all idea which end of you should be right side up, and we will be quite as likely to float in the middle of the projectile as to rest upon anything."

  My bed was hinged in the middle, and one end lifted up until it looked like a letter L, with the shorter part extending across the projectile and the longer part reaching up the side. I could sit in it in a half reclining posture. The doctor then pulled out a fan-like, extending lattice-work of steel slats, to form a sort of false floor over the port-hole. This was full of diamond-shaped openings between the slats, so that the view out of the rear window was not obstructed. Then he did the same to form a false floor for his compartment. Finally he said to me,—

  "Now, if you are all ready, I will stand her on end;" and by applying the currents to the forward end only he caused her to rise slowly until she stood upright. The cupboard in my compartment and the desk in his end were each hung upon a central bolt, and they righted themselves as the projectile stood up, so that nothing in them was disarranged. I was sitting on the lower hinge of my bed, clutching tightly and watching everything, when the doctor called to me to turn the little wheel which operated a screw and served to push out the rudder.

  "But the whole weight of the projectile is now on the rudder," I objected.

  "You will have to make over all your ideas of weight," he said, with some impatience. "Run the rudder out. The gauge shows an ounce of buoyancy, which is nearly enough to counteract all the dead weight we have. You can lift the rest with the rudder-screw."

  And, true enough, it was perfectly easy to whirl the little wheel around which made the rudder creep out. There was a steering wheel in the doctor's compartment and one in my own. He set it exactly amidships, and told me to prepare for the ascent. I turned out the gas in my compartment and crouched nervously over the port-hole window to watch the panorama of Earth fade away.

  "Here go two batteries!" he cried. I held on frantically, expecting that we would leap into the heavens in one grand bound, as I had seen the model do. But we began to rise very slowly, a foot and a half the first second, three feet the next, and so on, as the doctor told me afterwards. It was all so slow and quiet that I was suddenly possessed with a fear that after all the projectile was a failure. Had a balloon started so slowly, it would never have risen far. This fear held me for only a minute, for when I looked down again, the landscape below was beginning to look like a dim map or a picture, instead of the reality. The doctor was steering to the northward, directly over the lake. I could see its great purple, restful surface below me, but more plainly could I discern the outline where its silvery edge bathed the white sands of the shore. Following this outline I could see a web of railroads, like ropes bent around the lower end of the lake. The night was too dark to see it long. The hundreds of huge oil tanks of Whiting had now disappeared, and I could see only the flaming tops of the iron furnaces of South Chicago. Suddenly they went out in an instant, as if a thick fog had smothered them, and there was a long minute of pale mist; and then suddenly a bright blue sky, the twinkling stars and a veil of grey shutting off all view of the Earth.

  "We have passed through the clouds," said the doctor cheerily. "What does the barometer register?"

  I looked, and was astonished to see the mercury down to fifteen. I asked him if he thought the barometer might be broken.

  "No, that is quite right," he replied. "That is half the surface pressure, which shows that we are two and a half miles high. I have four batteries in, and we are going at a constantly increasing speed now."

  I could easily believe it, for the wind howled around my compartment and whistled over the rudder aperture in a most dismal way. Whenever the rudder was changed, there was a new sound to the moaning. Still, as I looked back at the clouds, I saw that no wind was moving them. It was not wind, but only the air whistling as we rushed through it.

  "Watch the barometer, and let me know the exact time when it registers seven and a half inches," said the doctor. "We shall be five miles high then, and we started at nine o'clock to a second."

  I noted the rapidly sinking mercury and opened my watch. When it was just at seven and a half, I looked at the watch, and it said half a minute after nine. Knowing that could not be correct, I held it to my ear and discovered it was stopped. I attempted to wind it, but found it almost wound up.

  "Something wrong with my watch, Doctor. You will have to look."

  "Half a minute after nine, that can't be right!" he exclaimed. Then as the truth flashed upon him he added,—

  "There is the first thing I have overlooked! Our watch springs are steel, and the magnetic currents affect them. It is strange I did not think of that, for I knew a mariner's compass would be of no use to us in steering on account of the currents. For that reason I have risen above the clouds so as to steer by the stars. I am making for the North Star yonder, now."

  "We will have to get back to the same primitive methods of measuring time," I put in. "Neither weight clocks nor spring clocks would have been of any account. And an hour glass would tell a different tale just as gravity varied. We will have to rely on the Moon and stars, and it may be rather awkward." But I did not then appreciate how awkward it would be when even the markings of day and night would be taken away from us.

  "We can count our pulse or go by our stomachs," said the doctor, who was really disappointed at having forgotten anything. But he was destined to get used to that. Presently he inquired,—

  "What is the barometer now? Perhaps we are high enough for the present."

  "There is scarcely two inches of mercury in the tube!" I cried out.

  He hesitated for a moment as if calculating, and then said,—

  "That makes us ten miles high. Work the rudder gradually very much farther out for this thinner atmosphere, and we will try falling awhile, with a long slant to northward."

  And so saying, the doctor detached all the polarizing batteries, and I could hear the monotonous howling of the wind die down; and the whistling ceased altogether as the feeble resistance of the rarefied air slowly but surely overcame our momentum. As we began to fall, the doctor turned the rudder hard down, in order to give us a long sailing slant. This modified the position of the projectile so that it lay almost flat again, with a dip of the forward end downward.

  "Lie down and have a nap while she is in this comfortable position," he said to me. "When you waken, I shall have a surprise for you."

  Chapter VII

  The Terrors of Light

  I was weary from the trials of the day on Earth, and fell asleep easily. It was the red sunlight streaming in at the port-hole that awakened me. I thought I had slept but a very short time, but the night was evidently over. As soon as the doctor heard me moving, he cried out to me,—

  "Here is the daylight I promised you. Did you ever see it at midnight before?"

  "How do you know it is midnight? It looks more like a red sunset to me," I said, for the sun was just in the horizon.

  "The sun has just set, and is now rising. It did not go out of sight, but gradually turned about and began to mount again. That is how I know it is midnight."

  "Sunset presses so closely upon sunrise that night is crowded out altogether. Then this must be the land of the midnight sun that I have read about?"

  "Yes, we are very near the Earth again, and this is far inside the arctic polar circle, where the sun never goes down during summer, but sets for a long night in the winter. I have kept far to the westward to avoid the magnetic pole, which might play havoc with my apparatus."

  "Then your little side-trip is——"

  "To the North Pole, of course!" he cried triumphantly.

 
; How simple this vexed problem had become, after all! It had worsted the most daring travellers of all countries for centuries. Thousands upon thousands spent in sending expeditions to find the Pole had only called for other thousands to fit out relief expeditions. Ship after ship had been crashed, life after life had been clutched in its icy hand! But now it had become an after-thought, a side-trip, a little excursion to be made while waiting for midnight! And it is often that such a simple solution of the most baffling difficulties is found at last.

  The doctor had been observing his quadrant, and was now busy making calculations. He called me up to his compartment.

  "Longitude, 144 degrees and 45 minutes west; Latitude, 89 degrees 59 minutes and 30 seconds north. That is the way it figures out. We were half a mile from the Pole when I took my observation. We must have just crossed over it since then."

  "Go down a little nearer, so we may see what it looks like!" I said excitedly.

  "I dare not go too close to all that ice, or we may freeze the mercury in our thermometer and barometer. We must keep well in the sunlight, but I will lower a little."

  What mountains of crusted snow! What crags and peaks of solid ice! It was impossible to tell whether it was land or sea underneath. Judging by the general level it must have been a sea, but no water was visible in any direction. The great floes of ice were piled high upon each other. A million sharp, glittering edges formed ramparts in every direction to keep off the invader by land. How impotent and powerless man would be to scale these jagged walls or climb these towering mountains! How absolutely impossible to reach by land, how simple and easy to reach through the air! The North Pole and Aerial Navigation had been cousin problems that baffled man for so long, and their solution had come together.

  "Empty a biscuit tin to contain this record, and we will toss it out upon this world of ice, so that if any adventurer ever gets this far north he may find that we have already been here," said the doctor, bringing down a freshly-written page for me to sign. It read as follows:—