A Columbus of Space | Page 9

here, his
words had hardly struck my ears when the great cloud rounded out and
hardened, the deception vanished, and I recognized, as clearly as ever I
saw them on a school globe, the outlines of Asia and the Pacific Ocean!
In a second I had become too weak to stand, and I sank trembling upon
a bench. But Jack, whose eyes had not accommodated themselves as
rapidly as mine to the gigantic perspective, remained at the window,
exclaiming:
"Fiddlesticks! What are you trying to give us? The earth is down below,
I reckon."
But in another minute he, too, saw it as it really was, and his
astonishment equaled mine. In fact he made so much noise about it that
he awoke Henry, who, jumping out of bed, came running to see, and
when we had explained to him where we were, sank upon a seat with a
despairing groan and covered his face. Our astonishment and dismay
were too great to permit us quickly to recover our self-command, but
after a while Jack seized Edmund's arm, and demanded:

"For God's sake, tell us what you've been doing."
"Nothing that ought to appear very extraordinary," answered Edmund,
with uncommon warmth. "If men had not been fools for so many ages
they might have done this, and more than this long ago. It's enough to
make one ashamed of his race! For countless centuries, instead of
grasping the power that nature had placed at the disposal of their
intelligence, they have idled away their time gabbling about nothing.
And even since, at last, they have begun to do something, look at the
time that they have wasted upon such petty forces as steam and
'electricity,' burning whole mines of coal and whole lakes of oil, and
childishly calling upon winds and tides and waterfalls to help them,
when they had under their thumbs the limitless energy of the atoms,
and no more understood it than a baby understands what makes its
whistle scream! It's inter-atomic force that has brought us out here, and
that is going to carry us a great deal farther."
We simply listened in silence; for what could we say? The facts were
more eloquent than any words, and called for no commentary. Here we
were, out in the middle of space; and there was the earth, hanging on
nothing, like a summer cloud. At least we knew where we were if we
didn't quite understand how we had got there.
Seeing us speechless, Edmund resumed in a different tone:
"We made a fairly good run during the night. You must be hungry by
this time, for you've slept late; suppose we have breakfast."
So saying, he opened a locker, took out a folding table, covered it with
a white cloth, turned on something resembling a little electric range,
and in a few minutes had ready as appetizing a breakfast of eggs and as
good a cup of coffee as I ever tasted. It is one of the compensations of
human nature that it is able to adjust itself to the most unheard-of
conditions provided only that the inner man is not neglected. The smell
of breakfast would almost reconcile a man to purgatory--anyhow it
reconciled us for the time being to our unparalleled situation, and we
ate and drank, and indulged in as cheerful good comradeship as that of
a fishing party in the wilderness after a big morning's catch.

When the breakfast was finished we began to chat and smoke, which
reminded me of those gulping mouths under the wainscot, and I leaned
down to catch a glimpse of their rows of black fangs, thinking to ask
Edmund for further explanation about them; but the sight gave me a
shiver, and I felt the hopelessness of trying to understand their function.
Then we took a turn at looking out of the window to see the earth.
Edmund furnished us with binoculars which enabled us to recognize
many geographical features of our planet. The western shore of the
Pacific was now in plain sight, and a few small spots, near the edge of
the ocean, we knew to be Japan and the Philippines. The snowy
Himalayas showed as a crinkling line, and a huge white smudge over
the China Sea indicated where a storm was raging and where good
ships, no doubt, were battling with the tossing waves.
After a time I noticed that Edmund was continually going from one
window to the other and looking out with an air of anxiety. He seemed
to be watching for something, and there was a look of mingled
expectation and apprehension in his eyes. He had a peephole at the
forward end of the car and another in the floor, and these he frequently
visited. I now recalled that even