PART II

THE FLYING RING

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.