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luckily, the doctor's apparatus worked well.
And thus it came about that, within five minutes from being exposed to the air
of the sky-car, that whole immense bulk, chair and all, had vanished. The
powder had turned it to vapor, and the purifying chemicals had sucked it up.
Nothing was left save a heap of smoking, grayish ashes in the center of the
broken glass.
Van Emmon's fingers relaxed their grip. He stirred to action, and turned
briskly to Smith.
"Here! Help me with this thing!"
Between them they got the remains of the cabinet, with its gruesome load, into
the vestibule. As for the doctor, he was bending over Jackson's still
unconscious form. When he saw what the others were doing, he gave a great
sigh of relief.
"Good!" He helped them close the door. "Let's get away from this damned
place!"
The outer door was opened. At the same time Smith started the machinery; and
as the sky-car shot away from the ground he tilted it slightly, so that the
contents of the vestibule was slid into space. Down it fell like so much lead.
The doctor glanced through a nearby window, and his face brightened as he made
out the distant gleam of another planet. He watched the receding surface of
Mercury with positive delight.
"Nice place to get away from," he commented. "And now, my friends, for Venus,
and then home!"
But the other's eyes were fixed upon a tiny sparkle in the dust outside the
palace, where the vestibule had dropped its load. It was the sun shining upon
some broken bits of glass; the glass which, for untold ages, had enclosed the
throne of the Death-lord.
PART IV. THE QUEEN OF LIFE
I. NEXT STOP, VENUS!
When he first got the idea of the sky-car, the doctor never stopped to
consider whether he was the right man for such an excursion. Personally, he
hated travel.
He was merely a general practitioner, with a great fondness for astronomy;
and the sole reason why he wanted to visit the planets was that he couldn't
see them well enough with his telescope. So he dabbled a little in magnetism
and so forth, and stumbled upon the principle of the cube.
But he had no mechanical ability, and was on the point of giving up the scheme
when he met Smith. He was instantly impressed by the engineer's highly
commonplace face; he had had considerable experience with human contrariness,
and felt sure that Smith must be an absolute wonder, since he looked so very
ordinary.
Kinney's diagnosis proved correct. Smith knew his business; the machinery was
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finished in a hurry and done right. However, when it came to fitting the
outfit into a suitable sky-car, Kinney was obliged to call in an architect.
That accounts for E. Williams Jackson. At the same time, it occurred to the
doctor that they would need a cook. Mrs. Kinney had refused to have anything
whatever to do with the trip, and so Kinney put an ad in the paper. As luck
would have it, Van Emmon, the geologist, who had learned how to cook when he
first became a mountaineer, saw the ad and answered it in hope of adventure.
The doctor himself, besides his training in the mental and bodily frailities
of human beings, had also an unusual command of the related sciences, such as
biology. Smith's specialties have already been named; he could drive an
airplane or a nail with equal ease. Van Emmon, as a part of his profession,
was a skilled
"fossilologist," and was well up in natural history.
As for E. Williams Jackson the architect was also the sociologist of the four.
Moreover, he had quite a reputation as an amateur antiquarian. Nevertheless,
the
most important thing about E. Williams Jackson was not learned until after the
visit to Mercury, after the terrible end of that exploration, after the
architect, falling in a faint, had been revived under the doctor's care.
"Gentlemen," said Kinney, coming from the secluded nook among the dynamos
which had been the architect's bunk; "gentlemen, I must inform you that
Jackson is not what we thought.
"He I mean, she is a woman!"
Which put an entirely new face upon matters. The three men, discussing it,
marveled that the architect had been able to keep her sex a secret all the
time they were exploring at Mercury. They did not know that none of E.
Williams
Jackson's fellow architects had ever guessed the truth. Ambitious and
ingenious, with a natural liking for house-planning, she had resolved that her
sex should not stand in the way of success.
And when she finally came to herself, there in her bunk, and suspected that
her secret was out instead of shame or embarrassment she felt only chagrin.
She walked, rather unsteadily, across the floor of the great cube-shaped car
to the window where the three were standing; and as they quietly made a place
for her, she took it entirely as a matter of course, and without a word.
The doctor had been speaking of the peculiar fitness of the four for what they
were doing. "And if I'm not mistaken," he went on, "we're going to need all
the brains we can pool, when we get to Venus.
"I never would have claimed, when we started out, that Mercury had ever been
inhabited. But now that we've seen what we've seen, I feel dead sure that
Venus once was peopled."
The four looked out the triple-glazed vacuum-insulated window at the steadily
growing globe of "Earth's twin sister." Half in sunlight and half in shadow,
this planet, for ages the synonym for beauty, was now but a million miles
away.
She looked as large as the moon; but instead of a silvery gleam, she showed a
creamy radiance fully three times as bright.
"Let's see," reflected the geologist aloud. "As I recall it, the brightness of
a planet depends upon the amount of its air. That would indicate, then, that
Venus has about as much as the earth, wouldn't it?" remembering how the home
planet had looked when they left it.
The doctor nodded. "There are other factors; but undoubtedly we are
approaching a world which is a great deal like our own. Venus is nearly as
large as the earth, has about nine-tenths the surface, and a gravity almost as
strong. The main difference is that she's only two-thirds as far from the sun
as we are."
"How long is her day?" Smith wanted to know.
"Can't say. Some observers claim to have seen her clearly enough to announce a
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day of the same length as ours. Others calculate that she's like Mercury;
always the same face toward the sun. If so, her day is also her year two
hundred and twenty-five of our days."
Van Emmon looked disappointed. "In that case she would be blistering hot on
one side and freezing cold on the other; except," remembering Mercury, "except
for the 'twilight zone,' where the climate would be neither one nor the other,
but temperate." He pointed to the line down the middle of the disk before
them, the line which divided the lighted from the unlighted, the day from the
night.
The four looked more intently. It should be remembered that the very
brilliance of Venus has always hindered the astronomers; the planet as a whole
is always very conspicuous but its very glare makes it impossible to see any
details.
The surface has always seemed to be covered by a veil of hazy, faintly
streaked vapor.
Smith gave a queer exclamation. For a moment or two he stared hard at the
planet; then looked up with an apologetic grin. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]