out here and tell me what you think of the prospect."
I put my face close to the glass, and my heart jumped into my mouth!
"Where are we?" I cried out.
Jack, hearing my agitated exclamation, jumped up and ran to my side.
It was truly enough to take away one's breath!
We seemed to be at an infinite height, and the sky was as black as ink and ablaze with stars, although the sunlight was streaming into the window behind us! I could see nothing of the earth. Evidently we were too high for that. It must lie away down under our feet, I thought, so that even the horizon had sunk out of sight. I had that queer, uncontrollable qualm that comes to every one who stands on the verge of an abyss.
Straight before us, so I presently became aware, was a most singular appearance in the sky. I thought at first glance that it was a round cloud, curiously mottled. But it was strangely changeless for a cloud, and it had, moreover, a certain solidity of aspect that could not consist with vapor.
"Good Heaven!": cried Jack, catching sight of it. “What’s that?”
"That's the earth!"
It was Edmund who had spoken, and now he looked at us with a quizzical smile.
Breakfast on Board, Far Up Above the Eastern Hemisphere
A thrill shot through me. My mind went into a whirl. I saw that it was the truth he had told; for, as sure as I sit here, at the moment that Edmund spoke, the great cloud rounded out before my eyes, the deception vanished, and I recognized the outlines of Asia and the Pacific Ocean, as clearly as ever I saw them on a school-globe!
In another minute I had become too weak to stand, and I sank, trembling, upon a seat. Jack, whose eyes had not accommodated themselves to the gigantic perspective as rapidly as mine, remained at the window, declaring:
"Fiddlesticks! What are you trying to give us? The earth is down below, I reckon."
But in a little while he, too, saw the thing as it really was, and then his excitement equaled mine. In the meantime Henry, awakened by the noise, had run to the window, and had gone through the same experience. Our astonishment and dismay were too great to recover from, but after some minutes we gained a little self-control.
"In Heaven's name, Edmund," Jack at last exclaimed, "what have you been doing?"
"Nothing very extraordinary," Edmund replied coolly. "At least, nothing that ought to seem extraordinary. If men had not been fools for so many ages they might have done this long ago. They've been wasting their time with steam and coal and a hundred other petty sources of power, when all the while they had the limitless energy of the atoms under their thumbs and didn’t know it. It's the interatomic energy that has brought us out here and that is going to carry us a good deal farther before we are through."
We simply listened in silence; for what could we say? There was not the shadow of a doubt about it; we were out in the middle of space, and there was the earth hanging on nothing, like a summer cloud. Heaven knows how far away! It might have been a million miles, for all we could tell.
A Speed of 20 Miles a Second
"We've made a pretty good run during the night," said Edmund, finding that we were speechless. "You must be hungry by this time, for you've slept late. Let's have breakfast."
So saying, he opened a locker, took out a folding table, covered it with a white cloth, turned on 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 that the inner man does not find itself neglected. The smell of breakfast would almost reconcile a man to purgatory; anyhow, it reconciled us, for the moment, to our situation, and we ate and drank and fell into as cheerful good comradeship as a fishing-party after a big morning’s catch.
When the breakfast things had been cleared away, we began to smoke and chat, frequently interrupting the talk, however, to take a turn at the window, staring at the spectacle of the world we were leaving behind us. Edmund got out some binoculars, and with them we could recognize many geographical features.
We could see Japan and the Philippines, spots near the shore of the Pacific; we recognized the crinkling line of the snowy Himalaya Mountains; and a great white smudge over the ocean showed where a storm was raging, and where good ships were, no doubt, battling with the waves beneath.
I noticed that Edmund was continually going from one window to the other, as if watching for something; and there was, at times, a look almost of apprehension in his eyes. He had a peep-hole in the forward end of the car, covered with thick glass, and he frequently visited it. Even while we were at breakfast, I had observed that he was not easy, but kept jumping up and running to look out. At last I asked him:
"What are you looking for, Edmund?"
"Meteors," he replied shortly.
"Meteors out here?"
"Of course. You're something of an astronomer. Don't you know that they hang round all the planets? They didn’t let me sleep last night. They kept me on tenter-hooks all the time. I was half inclined to get one of you up to help me. We passed some pretty ugly looking fellows during the night. You know, this is an unknown sea that we are navigating, and I don't want to run on a rock and wreck the ship."
"But we seem to be pretty far from the earth now," I said; "and there ought not to be much danger."
"It's not so dangerous as it was, but there.may be some round yet. I'll feel easier when I’ve put a few more million miles behind us."
Millions of miles!
When we had imagined that the earth looked as though it might be a million miles away, it was merely a passing thought which didn't impress us with its real immensity; but now, when we heard
