A Honeymoon in Space
distance makes! This little thing is only a trifle larger than our Moon,
and it's hiding everything else."
As she was speaking the full-orbed disc of Calisto, measuring nearly
three thousand miles across, swept between them and the planet. It shone
with a clear, somewhat reddish light like that of Mars. The _Astronef_
was feeling his attraction strongly, and Redgrave went to the levers and
turned on about a fifth of the R. Force to avoid too sudden contact with
it.
"Another dead world!" said Redgrave, as the surface of Calisto revolved
swiftly beneath them, "or at any rate a dying one. There must be an
atmosphere of some sort, or else that snow and ice wouldn't be there,
and everything would be either black or white as it was on the Moon. We
may as well land, however, and get a specimen of the rocks and soil to
add to the museum, though I don't expect there will be very much to see
in the way of life."
In another hour or so the _Astronef_ had dropped gently on to the
surface of Calisto at the foot of a range of mountains crowded with
jagged and splintery peaks, and a mile or two from the edge of a sea of
snow and ice which stretched away in a vast expanse of rugged frozen
billows beyond the horizon. Redgrave, as usual, went into the
air-chamber and tried the atmosphere. A second's experience of it was
enough for him. It was unbreathably thin and unbearably cold, although,
when mixed with the air of the _Astronef_, it distinctly freshened it
up. This proved that its composition was, or had been, fit for human
respiration.
"There's only one fault about it," he said, when he rejoined Zaidie in
the sitting-room. "You know what the schoolboy said when he started
kissing his first sweetheart, 'It takes too long to get enough of it.'"
"You seem to be very fond of referring to that particular subject,
Lenox."
"Well, yes; to tell you the truth I am," and then he referred to it
again in another form.
After this they went and put on their breathing-dresses and went for a
welcome stroll along the arid shores of the frozen sea after their
lengthy confinement to the decks of the _Astronef_. The Sun was still
powerful enough to keep them comfortably warm in their dresses, and
there was enough atmosphere to make this warmth diffused instead of
direct. So they were able to step out briskly, and every now and then
open their visors a little and take in a breath or two of the thin,
sharp air, which they found quite exhilarating when mixed with the air
supplied by their own oxygen apparatus.
The attraction of the satellite being only a little more than that of
the Moon--or, say, about a fifth of that of the Earth--they were able to
get along with a series of hops, skips, and jumps which might have
looked rather ridiculous to terrestrial eyes, but which they found a
very pleasant mode of locomotion. They were also able to climb the
steepest mountainsides with no more trouble than they would have had in
walking along a terrestrial plain.
On the heights they found no sign either of animal or vegetable
life--only rocks and gravel and sand of a brownish red, apparently
uniform in composition. They took a few lumps of rock and a canvas bag
full of sand back with them from the mountain-side. In the valley
sloping towards the ice-sea they found what had once been watercourses
opening out into rivers towards the sea; and in the lowest parts there
was a kind of lichen-growth clinging to the rocks under the snow. On the
surface of the snow they saw traces of what might have been the tracks
of animals, but, as there was no breath of wind in the attenuated
atmosphere, it was quite possible that these might have been frozen into
permanent shape hundreds or thousands of years before. It was also
possible that if they had explored long enough they might have found
some low forms of animal life, but as they had landed almost on the
equator of the satellite, under the full rays of the Sun, and seen
nothing, this was hardly likely.
"I don't think it is worth while stopping here any longer," said Zaidie,
who was getting a little bit _blase_ with her interplanetary
experiences. "We've got lots to see further on, so if you don't mind I
think I'll just take two or three photographs, then we can get back to
the ship and have dinner and go on and see what Ganymede is like. He's
bigger than Mercury, and nearly as big as Mars, so we ought to find
something interesting there. This is only a sort of combination of the
Moon and the polar regions and I don't think very much of it. Suppose we
go back."
"Just as your Ladyship pleases," laughed Redgrave over the wire which
connected their helmets, as, with joined hands, they turned back and
danced along the snow-covered ocean shore towards the _Astronef_.
Zaidie took a couple of photographs of the mountain range and the
ice-sea and another one of the general landscape of Calisto as they rose
from the surface. Then, while she went to get lunch ready, Redgrave took
the pieces of rock and the bag of dust into the laboratory which opened
out of the main engine-room and analysed them. When he came out about an
hour later he saw Murgatroyd going through his beloved engines with an
oil-can and a piece of common cotton-waste which had come from a faraway
Yorkshire mill.
"Andrew," he said, "should you be surprised if I told you that that moon
we've just left seems to be mostly made of a spongy sort of alloy of
gold and silver?"
"My lord," said the old engineer, straightening himself up and looking
at him with eyes in which this announcement had not seemed to kindle a
spark of interest, "after what I have seen so far there's nothing
that'll surprise me unless it be that the grace of God allows us to get
back safely."
"Amen, Andrew, that's well said," replied Redgrave, and then he went
back to the saloon and Murgatroyd went on with his oiling.
When he told her ladyship of his discovery she just looked up from the
table she was laying and said:
"Oh, indeed! Well, I'm very glad that it's five or six hundred million
miles from the Earth. A dead world bigger than the Moon, and made of
gold and silver sponge, wouldn't be a nice thing to have too near the
Earth. There's trouble enough about that sort of thing at home as it is.
Still, it'll be a nice addition to the museum, and if you'll put it away
and go and wash your hands lunch will be ready."
When they got back to the deck-chamber Calisto was already a half moon
in the upper sky nearly five hundred thousand miles away, and the full
orb of Ganymede, shining with a pale golden light, lay outspread beneath
them. A thin, bluish-grey arc of the giant planet overarched its western
edge.
"I think we shall find something like a world here," said her ladyship,
when she had taken her first look through her telescope; "there's an
atmosphere and what look like thin clouds. Continents and oceans too, or
something like them, and what is that light shining up between the
breaks? Isn't it something like our Aurora?"
"It might be," replied Redgrave, turning his own telescope towards the
northern pole of Ganymede, "though I never heard of a satellite having
an aurora. Perhaps it's the Sun shining on the ice."
As the _Astronef_ fell towards the surface of Ganymede she crossed his
northern pole, and the nearer they got the plainer it became that a
light very like the terrestrial Aurora was playing about it,
illuminating the thin, yellow clouds with a bluish-violet light, which
made magnificent contrasts of colouring amongst them.
"Let us go down there and see what it's like," said Zaidie. "There must
be something nice under all those lovely colours."
Redgrave checked the R. Force and the _Astronef_ fell obliquely across
the pole towards the equator. As they approached the luminous clouds
Redgrave turned it on again, and they sank slowly through a glowing mist
of innumerable colours, until the surface of Ganymede came into plain
view about ten miles below them.
What they saw then was the strangest sight they had beheld since they
had left the Earth. As far as their eyes could reach the surface of the
Ganymede was covered with vast orderly patches, mostly rectangular, of
what they at first took for ice, but which they soon found to be a
something that was self-illuminating.
"Glorified hot-houses, as I'm alive," exclaimed Redgrave. "Whole cities
under glass, fields, too, and lit by electricity or something very like
it. Zaidie, we shall find human beings down there."
"Well, if we do I hope they won't be like the half-human things we found
on Mars! But isn't it all just lovely! Only there doesn't seem to be
anything outside the cities, at least nothing but bare, flat ground with
a few rugged mountains here and there. See, there's a nice level plain
there near the big glass city, or whatever it is. Suppose we go down
there."
Redgrave checked the after engine which was driving them obliquely over
the surface of the satellite, and the _Astronef_ fell vertically towards
a bare, flat plain of what looked like deep yellow sand, which spread
for miles alongside one of the glittering cities of glass.
"Oh, look, they've seen us!" exclaimed Zaidie. "I do hope they're going
to be as friendly as those dear people on Venus were."
"I hope so," replied Redgrave, "but if they're not we've got the guns
ready."
As he said this about twenty streams of an intense bluish light suddenly
shot up all round them, concentrating themselves upon the hull of the
_Astronef_, which was now about a mile and a half from the surface. The
light was so intense that the rays of the Sun were lost in it. They
looked at each other, and found that their faces looked almost perfectly
white in it. The plain and the city below had vanished.
To look downwards was like staring straight into the focus of a ten
thousand candle-power electric arc lamp. It was so intolerable that
Redgrave closed the lower shutters, and meanwhile he found that the
_Astronef_ had ceased to descend. He shut off more of the R. Force, but
it produced no effect. The _Astronef_ remained stationary. Then he
ordered Murgatroyd to set the propellers in motion. The engineer pulled
the starting-levers, and then came up out of the engine-room and said to
him:
"It's no good, my Lord; I don't know what devil's world we've got into
now, but they won't work. If I thought that engines could be
bewitched----"
"Oh, nonsense, Andrew!" said his lordship rather testily. "It's
perfectly simple: those people down there, whoever they are, have got
some way of demagnetising us, or else they've got the R. Force too, and
they're applying it against us to stop us going down. Apparently they
don't want us. No, that's just to show us that they can stop us if they
want to. The light's going down. Begin dropping a bit. Don't start the
propellers, but just go and see that the guns are all right in case of
accidents."
The old engineer nodded and went back to his engines, looking
considerably scared. As he spoke the brilliancy of the light faded
rapidly, and the _Astronef_ began to sink slowly towards the surface.
As a precaution against their being allowed to drop with force enough to
cause a disaster, Redgrave turned the R. Force on again and they fell
slowly towards the plain, through what seemed like a halo of perfectly
white light. When she was within a couple of hundred yards of the ground
a winged car of exquisitely graceful shape rose from the roof of one of
the huge glass buildings nearest to them, flew swiftly towards them, and
after circling once round the dome of the upper deck, ran close
alongside.
The car was occupied by two figures of distinctly human form but rather
more than human stature. Both were dressed in long, close-fitting