A Honeymoon in Space
high, with halliards rove through a sheer in the top. He took a little
roll of bunting out of a locker under the desk, opened a glass slide,
brought in the halliards and bent the flag on.
Meanwhile the long shape of the great liner was getting bigger and
bigger. Her decks were black, with people staring up at this strange
apparition which was dropping upon them from the clouds. Another minute
and the _Astronef_ had dropped to within five hundred feet of the water,
and about half a mile astern of the _Deutschland_. Redgrave turned the
wheel back two or three inches and touched a second button.
The _Astronef_ stopped her descent instantly, and then she shot forward.
The new greyhound was making her twenty-two and a half knots, hurling a
broad white torrent of foam away from under her counters. But in half a
minute the _Astronef_ was alongside her.
Redgrave ran the roll of bunting up to the top of the flagstaff, pulled
one of the halliards, and the White Ensign of England floated out.
Almost at the same moment the German flag went up to the staff at the
stern of the _Deutschland_, and they heard a roar of cheers, mingled
with cries of wonder, come up from her swarming decks.
Each flag was dipped thrice in due course. Redgrave took off his cap and
bowed to the Captain on the bridge. Zaidie nodded and fluttered her
handkerchief in reply to hundreds of others that were waving on the
decks. Mrs. Van Stuyler woke up in wonder and waved hers instinctively,
half longing to change crafts. In fact, if it hadn't been for her
absolute devotion to the proprieties she would have obeyed her first
impulse and asked Lord Redgrave to put her on board the steamer.
While the officers and crew and passengers of the _Deutschland_ were
staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the graceful glittering shape of
the _Astronef_, Redgrave touched the first button in the second row
once, moved the 100-degree wheel on a few degrees, and then gave the
other a quarter turn. Then he closed the window slide, and the next
moment Zaidie saw the great liner sink down beneath them in a curious
twisting sort of way. She seemed to stop still and then spin round on
her centre, getting smaller and smaller every moment.
"What's the matter, Lenox?" she said, with a little gasp. "What's the
_Deutschland_ doing? She seems to be spinning round on her own axis like
a top."
"That's only the point of view, dear. She's just plugging along straight
on her way to New York, and we've been making rings round her and going
up all the time. But of course you don't notice the motion here any more
than you would if you were in a balloon."
"But I thought you were going to speak them. Surely you don't mean to
say that you intended that just as a little bit of showing off?"
"That's about what it comes to, I suppose, but you must not think it was
altogether vanity. You see the German Government has bought Count
Zeppelin's air-ship or steerable balloon, as it ought to be called,
always supposing that they can steer it in a wind, and of course their
idea is to make a fighting machine of it. Now Germany is engaged to
stand by us in this trouble that's coming, and by way of cementing the
alliance I thought it was just as well to let the wily Teuton know that
there's something flying the British flag which could make very small
mincemeat of their gas-bags."
"And what about Old Glory?" said Miss Zaidie. "The _Astronef_ was built
with English money and English skill, but----"
"She is the creature of American genius. Of course she is. In fact she
is the first concrete symbol of the Anglo-American Alliance, and when
the daughter of her creator has gone into partnership with the man who
made her we'll have two flagstaff's, and the Jack and Old Glory will
float side by side."
"And meanwhile where are we going?" asked Zaidie, after a moment's
interval. "Ah, there we are through the clouds again. What makes us
rise? Is that the force that Pop told me he discovered?"
"I'll answer the last question first," said Redgrave. "That was the
greatest of your father's discoveries. He got at the secret of
gravitation, and was able to analyse it into two separate forces just as
Volta did with electricity--positive and negative, or, to put it better,
attractive and repulsive.
"Three out of the five sets of engines in the _Astronef_ develop the R.
Force, as I call it for short. This wheel with the hundred degrees
marked behind it regulates the development. The further I turn it this
way to the right, the more the R. Force overcomes the attractive force
of the earth or any other planet that we may visit. Turn it back, and
gravitation asserts itself. If I put this arrow-head on the wheel
opposite zero the weight of the _Astronef_ is about a hundred and fifty
tons, and of course she would go down like a stone, and a very big one
at that. At ten she weighs nothing; that is to say the R. Force exactly
counteracts gravitation. At eleven she begins to rise. At a hundred she
would be hurled away from the earth like a shell from a twelve-inch gun,
or even faster. Now, watch."
He took up the speaking-tube. "Is she all tight everywhere, Andrew?"
"Yes, my Lord," came gurgling through the tube.
Then Redgrave slowly turned the wheel till the indicator pointed to
twenty-five. Zaidie, all eyes and wonder, saw a vast sea of glittering
white spread out beneath them, an ocean of snow with grey-blue patches
here and there. It sank away from under them till the patches became
spots and the sunlit clouds a vast, luminous blur. The air about them
grew marvellously clear and limpid. The sun blazed down on them with a
tenfold intensity of light, but Zaidie was astonished to find that very
little heat penetrated the glass walls and roof of the conning-tower.
"What an awful height!" she exclaimed, looking round at him with
something like fear in her eyes. "How high are we, Lenox?"
"You'll find afterwards that the _Astronef_ doesn't take any account of
high or low or up or down," he replied, looking at the dial of an
aneroid barometer by the side of him. "Roughly speaking, we're rather
over 60,000 feet--say ten miles--from the surface of the Atlantic.
That's why I asked Andrew whether everything was tight. You see we
couldn't breathe the air there is outside there--too thin and cold--and
so the _Astronef_ makes her own atmosphere as we go along. But I won't
spoil what you're going to see by any more of this. So if you please,
we'll go down now and get along to Washington. Anyhow, I hope I've
convinced you so far that I've kept my promise."
"Yes, dear, you have, and splendidly! I've only one regret. If _he_ was
only here now, what a happy man he'd be! Still, I daresay he knows all
about it and is just as happy. In fact he must be. I feel certain he
must. The very soul of his intellect was in the dream of this ship, and
now that it's a reality he must be here still. Isn't it part of himself?
Isn't it his mind that's working in these wonderful engines of yours,
and isn't it his strength that lifts us up from the earth and takes us
down again just as you please to turn that wheel?"
"There's little doubt about that, Zaidie," said Redgrave quietly, but
earnestly. "You know we North-country folk all have our traditions and
our ghosts; and what more likely than that the spirit of a dead man or a
man gone to other worlds should watch over the realisation of his
greatest work on earth? Why shouldn't we believe that, we who are going
away from this world to other ones?"
"Why not?" interrupted Zaidie, "why, of course we will. And now suppose
we come down in more ways than one and go and give poor Mrs. Van Stuyler
something to eat and drink. The dear old girl must be frightened half
out of her wits by this time."
"Very well," replied Redgrave; "but we'll come down literally first, so
that we can get the propellers to work."
He turned the wheel back till the indicator pointed to five. The
cloud-sea came up with a rush. They passed through it, and stopped about
a thousand feet above the sea. Redgrave touched the first button twice,
and then the next one twice. The air began to hiss past the walls of the
conning-tower. The crest-crowned waves of the Atlantic seemed to sweep
in a hurrying torrent behind them, and then Redgrave, having made sure
that Murgatroyd was at the after-wheel, gave him the course for
Washington, and then went down to induct his bride-elect into the art
and mystery of cooking by electricity as it was done in the kitchen of
the _Astronef_.
CHAPTER V
As this narrative is the story of the personal adventures of Lord
Redgrave and his bride, and not an account of events at which all the
world has already wondered, there is no necessity to describe in any
detail the extraordinary sequence of circumstances which began when the
_Astronef_ dropped without warning from the clouds in front of the White
House at Washington, and his lordship, after paying his respects to the
President, proceeded to the British Embassy and placed the copy of the
Anglo-American agreement in Lord Pauncefote's hands.
Mrs. Van Stuyler's spirits had risen as the _Astronef_ descended towards
the lights of Washington, and when the President and Lord Pauncefote
paid a visit to the wonderful craft, the joint product of American
genius and English capital and constructive skill, she immediately
assumed, at Redgrave's request, the position of lady of the house _pro
tem._, and described the "change of plans," as she called it, which led
to their transfer from the _St. Louis_ to the _Astronef_ with an
imaginative fluency which would have done credit to the most
enterprising of American interviewers.
"You see, my dear," she said to Zaidie afterwards, "as everything turned
out so very happily, and as Lord Redgrave behaved in such a splendid
way, I thought it was my duty to make everything appear as pleasant to
the President and Lord Pauncefote as I could."
"It was real good of you, Mrs. Van," said Zaidie. "If I hadn't been
paralysed with admiration I believe I should have laughed. Now if you'll
just come with us on our trip, and write a book about it afterwards just
as you told--I mean as you described what happened between the _St.
Louis_ and Washington, to the President and Lord Pauncefote, you'd make
a million dollars out of it. Say now, won't you come?"
"My dear Zaidie," Mrs. Van Stuyler replied, "you know that I am very
fond of you. If I'd only had a daughter I should have wanted her to be
just like you, and I should have wanted her to marry a man just like
Lord Redgrave. But there's a limit to everything. You say that you are
going to the moon and the stars, and to see what the other planets are
like. Well, that's your affair. I hope God will forgive you for your
presumption, and let you come back safe, but I----No. Ten--twenty
millions wouldn't pay me to tempt Providence like that."
The _Astronef_ had landed in front of the White House, as everybody
knows, on the eve of the Presidential election. After dinner in the
deck-saloon, as the Space Navigator lay in the midst of a square of
troops, outside which a huge crowd surged and struggled to get a look at
the latest miracle of constructive science, the President and the
British Ambassador said goodbye, and as soon as the gangway ladder was
drawn in the _Astronef_, moved by no visible agency, rose from the
ground amidst a roar of cheers coming from a hundred thousand throats.
She stopped at a height of about a thousand feet, and then her forward
searchlight flashed out, swept the horizon, and vanished. Then it
flashed out again intermittently in the longs and shorts of the Morse
Code, and these, when translated, read:
"Vote for sound men and sound money!"
In five minutes the wires of the United States were alive with the