Chapter II: Part 2

"There is not much danger at present," returned Quinn. "When we have plunged farther into the interstellar void, it will be well to stand watch and watch about at the telescope."

"Will it not be possible to land on some other planet, Mars, for instance?" queried Popham with sudden hope.

"I should prefer Mars," added Meigs, reflecting the hope shown in his friend's face. "They have been signaling from Mars, and perhaps we can find out what they want over there."

Quinn shook his head.

"We are in the hands of fate, gentlemen," said he. "We may drop into some port, but what that port will be is beyond my power even to surmise."

"The moon isn't so far off," suggested Markham.

"Only two hundred and forty thousand miles," said Quinn.

"We should be there in less than two hours from the time of starting," remarked Meigs, after a mental bout with the figures.

"If I wished," said Quinn, "I could increase our speed; traveling at the rate we are, however, something will have to be deducted for the resistance of the earth's atmosphere. If we drop on a planet it must be a planet with an atmosphere. The moon has none, and consequently is a dead world. Besides, fate might not throw us into its vicinity, or----"

"Just a minute, sir," interposed Markham, "for I am a man who likes to understand thoroughly every situation with which he is called upon to deal. You invited us to your castle, not, I am constrained to believe, to have us victimized by Munn, here, nor to have us invest in any of your discoveries, but to snatch us away from the scene of our labors. Is that correct, Professor Quinn?"

"Entirely so, Mr. Markham," replied Quinn.

"Evidently," proceeded Markham, "your plot has cost you some time and labor. You had first to find your gravity-resisting compound----"

"The plot followed as a result of my discovery," smiled the professor. "I did not first evolve the plot and then go searching for means to get you off the earth. When I had made the discovery, it remained for me to give it to the world--or to better the world by taking you four gentlemen away from it. Had I given the public the benefit, you shrewd men of affairs might have devised means for setting it aside, or for controlling it. Not being a business man myself, I feared to take chances. For that reason the present enterprise appealed to me."

"You have planned so well in the smaller details that I wonder you overlooked the main point."

"And that is----"

"What you are going to do with us, now that your plan has succeeded."

The professor tossed his hands deprecatingly as though that was really the most insignificant part of his startling scheme.

"We can't go bobbing around through interstellar space," grumbled Popham. "I don't relish the idea of being cribbed, cabined and confined in a steel room indefinitely. I should go mad from the very thought."

"It's awful to contemplate," said Meigs, casting a melancholy glance through the iron latticework at one of the windows.

The bags of loot were in that vicinity, at the moment, and his glance swerved reproachfully to me.

"We shall make a landing, I have no doubt," said the professor soothingly, "somehow and somewhere."

"By gad, sir," cried Popham, bringing his fist emphatically down on the table, "I don't like such a hit-and-miss way of doing things. Whenever I set out to accomplish anything, the goal is always clear in my mind; yet, here I am, through no desire of my own, afloat in the great void, without a single aim or a remote prospect. If we are going to land anywhere--and you remain firm in your decision not to take us back to our native planet--I demand that you make landfall on some orb that is worth while."

"Very good, Popham," approved Meigs. "Unless I am greatly mistaken, that was the very idea Markham had in mind when he began questioning the professor. Eh, Markham?"

"It was," replied Markham. "A full knowledge of where we are going is necessary to a thorough understanding of our--er--most remarkable situation. Now, there are worlds larger than the one we have recently left. Personally, I am predisposed in favor of a large planet--one on which there are traction interests, fuel supplies, and products of the soil similar to those we have been accustomed to."

Under the spell of Markham's words, Popham began to glow and expand. Meigs, all attention, pressed a little closer.

"The bigger the planet the bigger our field of operations!" cried Popham. "What's the matter with Jupiter?"

"Or Saturn?" echoed Meigs.

"Or Neptune?" put in Markham.

"What's the matter with the whole solar system?" inquired Quinn, with gentle irony. He turned to me. "Observe, Mr. Munn, how extravagant are the ideas inspired by monopoly! These gentlemen are hardly started on their journey into space before they forget the business interests, the friends and the environment they are leaving behind and begin planning the commercial conquest of the stars!" He shook his head forebodingly. "Your regeneration," he added to the millionaires, "calls for a landing on some barren world, some outcast of the solar system, where you will have nothing to do but think over the evil of your past and learn something of the duty you owe your fellow-men."

Popham, Markham, and Meigs were visibly annoyed by the professor's remarks. Withdrawing as far as the limits of the steel structure would allow, they put their heads together and held a brief but animated conversation in tones so low that the professor and I could not overhear.

"Think of that, professor!" I muttered. "And yet there are people who find fault with a respectable burglar."

"Softly, Mr. Munn," returned Quinn. "Before we are done with this journey I am fain to believe that all of you will have a different outlook upon life, and a higher regard for your duties of citizenship."

Just then, Popham turned from his friends and stepped toward the professor. His manner was truculent--probably just such a manner as he was accustomed to use in facing a board of obstinate directors.

"If you will not return us to our native planet, Professor Quinn," said he sharply, "then we shall stand upon our rights. We are unalterably opposed to landing upon any orb whose diameter measures less than----"

At that instant a most astounding thing happened. The car ducked sideways, throwing the whole structure out of plumb.

Loose articles began to drop from shelves and other places and to slide across the floor to the lowest point. By a quick movement I saved the lamp and braced myself in an upright position.

Cries of terror went up from Markham, Meigs, and Popham.

"Where's Gilhooly?" shouted the professor.

He was answered by a wild yell from overhead.

"He's in the storeroom!" cried Quinn. "Follow me with that lamp, Munn--quick!"

The professor rushed for the stairway and I made after him with what speed I could.

*CHAPTER V.*

*TRAVELING SUNWARD.*

There never lived a man, I suppose, who did not, at some time or other in his career, submit his veracity to question. A reformed burglar, therefore, although animated by the most disinterested motives, can scarcely hope to escape the shafts of the incredulous.

Although well-grounded in the science of cracksmanship, and with some store of legal learning as to alibis and so forth, my mind was as empty of astronomical lore as a drained bottle. The professor's sayings were jotted down in a sort of commonplace book at a later day when leisure offered.

Memory may have played me false in some few minor points, but in all of major importance this narrative is to be taken with the same sincerity in which it is written. I ask no more of the reader than that; and if he is not averse to strolling through unfrequented ways touching elbows with a man who has a past, we shall get along famously.

To return, then, to the steel car, and the obliquity it suddenly presented to the direction of its course. Startling disclosures had somewhat obscured Gilhooly, and he had vanished from the lower room without being missed.

For a man of sixty-five, the professor was very agile, and he took the winding iron stairway two steps at a time. I gained the storeroom close behind him, and there we found Gilhooly, crooning to himself and working like mad.

He was not working in the dark, but had possessed himself of my bull's-eye lantern, which I had left on descending from the loft some time before. Mounted on a pile of packing cases, he was engaged in painting a large steel cube, taking his pigment from an open cask with a whitewash brush.

"My anti-gravity compound!" exclaimed the professor in an irritated tone. "There are several blocks on the floor, as you can see: Gilhooly began painting that one, and it rose as insulation proceeded, lodging to the left of the dome and tilted the car."

"This is the shabbiest lot of coaches I ever saw in my life," said Gilhooly, dabbing away with the brush. "I won't own a road with such rolling stock."

The three men downstairs had followed Quinn and me. After some coaxing, Meigs got Gilhooly to descend from his perch and give up the whitewash brush.

Thereupon the cube was pried over until it rested directly under another block in the point of the dome, and the professor finished the insulation begun by the railway magnate.

"Gilhooly will have to be watched," said Quinn, "or he will play havoc with the materials I have stored up here. He has wasted at least a quart of that anti-gravity mixture, and it is worth its weight in gold. Nay, it is worth more than that, for after this supply is exhausted there will be none to be had for love or money.

"Our rate of speed has been multiplied by two, and we are rushing through space with frightful rapidity. There is my telescope"--and the professor pointed to the instrument which stood beneath a window in the sloping roof of the car. "Suppose Gilhooly had demolished that! Or what if he had wrecked the oxygen vat, or the anti-temperature reservoir! Gentlemen, I shudder to think of what might have happened."

The professor sank down on a copper tank and brushed his perspiring brow with a bandanna handkerchief. I placed the lamp on a box beside the bull's-eye lantern and reclined on a bale of something or other that lay conveniently near.

Meigs and Popham dropped down on a packing case with Gilhooly moored between them, and Markham took up his station on an overturned cask.

The loft of the car, stored as it was with odds and ends of science, together with a supply of provisions made ready for us by the farsighted and wonderful man who was conducting this select party into the unknown, was an object of deep solicitude and interest.

Out of a desire to tag the various materials understandingly, I lifted the lid of my curiosity and let out a few questions.

"If I mistake not," said I, "you mentioned this anti-temperature material once before. What is it, professor?"

"A liquid," he answered amiably. "As a discovery, it is outranked only by my anti-gravity compound. An ounce of the fluid in a bath renders the bather impervious to heat or cold, keeping in the animal caloric and keeping out all other extremes of temperature. Some of the mixture was incorporated into the paint with which this car is coated.

"Yonder is the water receptacle," and the professor nodded toward a large tank opposite him. "With economy, the supply in that reservoir will last us several months. The food I have provided is of the ready-prepared kind, mostly in tins, with an alcohol lamp for the brewing of tea, coffee, and chocolate. During this hegira into infinity I have omitted nothing, gentlemen, which will minister to your comfort."

"You are a very able man, professor," acknowledged Popham. "How long have you been planning this little excursion?"

"Ever since I began erecting what the Harlemites were pleased to call my castle," smiled Quinn. "The plan was conceived at the time the success of the manipulations of yourself and your friends seemed assured."

"It was your purpose to foil the speculative gentlemen," I struck in, "and so come to the aid of a long-suffering public?"

"You hit off the matter finely, Mr. Munn," replied the professor. "That was my purpose."

"Could not your anti-temperature mixture have been donated to the poor with beneficial results?"

"It is altogether too expensive for general use. I will not conceal from you gentlemen the fact that we are falling sunward. If we make landfall on a planet where the heat is several hundred degrees beyond our earthly powers of endurance, the mixture in question will preserve us."

"Falling sunward!" exclaimed Markham. "It was hard upon midnight when we left the earth. If my school-day learning is not at fault, the sun, at the hour of our departure, was on the opposite side of our planet. How, then, does it happen that we are falling toward the great luminary?"

"Bravo!" cried the professor, vastly pleased. "I am glad to see, Mr. Markham, that your intellect has not suffered a total eclipse by the demands of commercial supremacy. Night is the result of one of the Earth's hemispheres being turned from the sun, and, other things being equal, we should now be falling toward the outer limits of our solar system; but, if I may use the term, the castle was not aimed for a direct fall from the earth's crust. We dropped at a very sharp angle, and the influence of the sun has attracted us still farther out of a straight course. I trust you follow me?"

The three millionaires understood the situation, but, judging from the expression of their faces, the knowledge brought keen disappointment.

"There are only two planets between the earth and the sun," observed Markham, "Mercury and Venus, if I remember rightly."

"Both insignificant," grumbled Popham.

"Venus is about the size of our own planet, gentlemen," said the professor. "However, it has long been supposed that there is another group of planets between Mercury and the sun, among them a little world called Vulcan, which----"

"That does not interest us," cut in Meigs. "Sunward the planets are smaller, but they get larger as you go the other way."

"Larger," expounded the professor, "but less dense."

"As I was about to tell you, a moment ago," pursued Popham, "Meigs, Markham, and I have decided that either Saturn or Mars would about fill the bill so far as we are concerned. There are lights on Mars, which, as we figure it, presupposes electricity; and electricity means civilization to a degree that affords us a promising prospect. Then, again, there are canals on Mars, and, if canals, certainly water transportation. Transportation problems of any sort will interest Gilhooly; indeed, we are prone to think they would bring him back to his normal poise. Saturn, on the other hand, has rings, and such a condition might afford opportunities to wide-awake men such as are unknown anywhere else in the solar system. Take us either to Mars or to Saturn, Professor Quinn, as you may find it most convenient. We demand it!"

"It is impossible to do anything of that kind, Mr. Popham," returned the professor decidedly. "The influence of the sun upon our course is too powerful."

"Are we to understand, then," cried Markham, "that we are compelled to put up with either Mercury or Venus?"

"Even there, gentlemen, we have no choice. We are in the grip of circumstances and must perforce accept whatever fate throws our way. Possibly we shall become a satellite of the sun, revolving around and around it--Quinn's Planet, the smallest of any in the great system."

Although I felt drowsy, I aroused myself with an effort and kept sharp eyes on the professor's face. I do not think he was in earnest, but merely talking to see what effect his remarks would have on the three millionaires.

"Corner, corner, corner," babbled Gilhooly; "make a corner, corner everything."

Markham dropped his face in his hands, Meigs bowed his head, and I saw a shiver run through Popham.

"Egad," muttered Popham, "this castle of yours, Quinn, is little short of a steel tomb. Inasmuch as we are safely interred, what's the use of living? Gilhooly is the only fortunate one among us, for his reason is shattered and he cannot realize what he is facing."

"You are talking less like a man, now, Popham," reproved Quinn, "than like a driveling idiot. While there's life there's hope. How many brilliant minds have been overthrown as a result of your manipulations of stock in Wall Street? How many bright futures have been wrecked by an adverse trend of the speculative market? Were those unfortunates any better off because thrust into madhouses and unable to realize the fate that had overtaken them? For shame, sir!"

"You are perfectly sure, are you, professor," I struck in, attempting to give a more pleasant twist to the conversation, "that we shall come out all right in the end?"

"I have my plans, Mr. Munn," he answered, not unkindly, "and the success or failure of them will depend largely upon the mental attitude of these gentlemen."

This was too deep for me, and I cast about for some equally important question which would bring a less indefinite response.

"Anyhow," said I, "we have plenty of food for a long journey? It would be a fearful thing to have a famine so--so many miles from a base of supplies."

"The food supply, Mr. Munn," answered the professor, "is adequate. There will be no famine."

"And the water, the oxygen, the----"

"I have looked after everything necessary to our safety and comfort."

I had confidence in Quinn. He had shown that he was an able man, and that his promises were to be taken at face value. With a sigh of relief, I settled back in tolerable comfort.

Meigs took the role of questioner out of my hands at this point, and, although I was eager to hear all that was said, "tired nature's sweet restorer" got the better of my curiosity and I fell asleep on the bale.

*CHAPTER VI.*

*A LANDING EFFECTED.*

It is not my purpose to cumber this narrative with the smaller details of our journey, novel and thrilling though some of them proved to be. It is with our experiences on the planet which finally claimed us that this account has mostly to do, so I shall glide over intermediate incidents in a somewhat cursory manner.

Our faculties, keyed to an understanding of earthly conditions only, found themselves continually at bay; and at nothing did they stand more aghast than at the lightning-like speed with which we shot through space.

The energy developed by the two insulated cubes gave to our steel car the stupendous velocity of one hundred miles per second, six thousand miles per minute, three hundred and sixty thousand miles per hour! Human reason might well falter at the threshold of such immensity.

Yet while I slept peacefully on that bale in the storeroom, these figures were verified by the professor and J. Archibald Meigs, who happened to be the only two who were wide awake. It has been my lasting regret that they did not rouse me so that I might also have had a view of the noble spectacle for the first time unrolled to earthly eyes.

We passed the moon, a dreary, burned-out world, and the professor was able to check off two hundred and forty thousand miles of our sunward plunge. We had traveled a little more than half an hour at our ultimate velocity; taking this into consideration, and noting the exact minute when we crossed the centre of the satellite's orbit, the professor was able to do some figuring and so test his theories as to speed.

The car skimmed through ether less than five hundred miles above the lunar crust. Quinn was doubly pleased, for he not only proved that our velocity was substantially as he had supposed, but also discovered that the moon's attraction, so powerful on the tides of our mother sphere, could not swerve the car by a hair's breadth from its direct course, or overcome the influence of the sun.

Meigs told me later that the marvelous beauty of the satellite, gleaming against the black void with ghostly radiance, was probably worth the trip and its attendant inconveniences. He and Quinn had looked their fill on the hemisphere which is never seen from the earth.

After this the hours literally flew past, the novelty of our journey precluding any such thing as monotony. In fact, we hardly allowed ourselves a sufficient amount of time for rest and refreshment.

A lookout was kept continually at the eye-piece of the telescope to signal the approach of any asteroid with which we might possibly come into collision. Only once did this danger threaten us, and then, as may be supposed, it was the professor who proved our salvation.

The lever in the wall of the lower or living room of the car communicated with screens, ingeniously arranged for shutting off the power of the anti-gravity cubes. By lessening our speed, the professor suffered the asteroid to cross our course, our car ducking through the luminous trail that swept out behind it.

Night reigned around us constantly. Our car caught the rays of the sun, it is true, but the lack of an atmosphere caused the light to be thrown back into space and lost.

The castle was nothing less than a small planet, attended by five satellites which, held to our vicinity by the car's attraction, circled around us continually. These satellites were the four knotted handkerchiefs containing the tribute I had levied upon the plutocrats, and also the revolver which had assisted me in the work.

These objects went through varied phases exactly as more pretentious satellites would have done. It would be difficult to describe my feelings as I watched them from the car windows.

I am prone to think, at the present writing, that this lost booty, waxing and waning under my eyes, planted in my nature those first seeds of regret which finally grew into a reformation.

I recall a conversation that I had with Markham while I sat with my eye at the lower end of the telescope, watching for stray asteroids.

The millionaires had given me to understand that I was not in their set. Circumstances over which they had no control had brought us together within the narrow confines of the car, but no social barriers had been leveled. Occasionally the novelty of our situation, and the consequent excitement, would cause one or other of the wealthy gentleman to forget the gulf that yawned between us.

This attitude of the magnate afforded me a good deal of innocent enjoyment. They had left social prestige, no less than their bank accounts, behind them, and what little collateral they had had upon their persons was now "satelliting" about the car. The line they drew between themselves and me, in their thoughtful moments, was a distinction without much of a difference.

Markham, I remember, was munching a sandwich, contrived out of two crackers and a slice of tinned beef.

"Did you never reflect, Mr. Munn," said he, "upon the evil of your past?"

"When a man writes books which are mainly drawn from his own experience, Mr. Markham," said I, "he has to go into his past pretty exhaustively."

"Ah, yes, I was forgetting about the books. Were you not horrified with the results of your retrospection?"

"Horrified? Well, yes, here and there. I lost a big haul once through the breaking of a jimmy, and I was horrified to think how any dealer in burglar's kits could have foisted such an unreliable instrument upon a well-meaning cracksman."

Markham stared at me dazedly.

"I have set down the experience in Chapter One of 'Forty Ways for Cracking Safes,'" I proceeded, "and one of the first of my ten rules for success in any safe-cracking job was this: Be sure that your kit is reliable, and without flaws."

"Mr. Munn, Mr. Munn!" whispered Markham hoarsely. "Think of the people from whom you have taken property dishonestly."

"I never think of them but to wish that I had been able to relieve them of more."

"This is awful!" muttered Markham. "You really exult over what you have done."

He would have started down the iron stairs had I not restrained him with a word.

"Let me ask you something, Mr. Markham," said I. "Last fall, bread went to ten cents a loaf because the wheat market was cornered--and a man by the name of Markham did the cornering. The people who had to put up that extra five cents missed it more than did those from whom I took five hundred dollars."

Markham coughed. "Any asteroids in sight?" he inquired absently.

"I wonder if _you_ ever did any reflecting?" I asked tartly.

"What do you think of Quinn?" and Markham looked away as I took my eye from the telescope and gave him an expressive wink.

"I don't think," I continued, "that you ever wrote a book called 'Forty Ways to Starve the Poor.' You have material enough for a pretty effective volume on the subject, but you haven't my nerve."

"No," he returned slowly, "I haven't your nerve. It requires unalloyed impudence and a mind incapable of clear thinking to liken the results of high finance with those of your own petty and highly criminal proceedings. You are too bright a man, Mr. Munn, to allow yourself to be led afield by sophistries of that kind."

"Mr. Markham, Mr. Markham!" I breathed, in horrified protest.

"You have bolstered up your nefarious business with false ideals," he went on, "and you are unregenerate and lost!"

"This is awful!" I murmured.

"When we get to where we are going," pursued Markham, either failing to note my sarcasm or else hoping to ride it down, "I trust you will hold your criminal instincts in check. If there are any people there, don't give them any false ideals or implant the notion that your standards belong to the rest of us."

"I would not so belittle my ideals," I returned bluntly.

"Sir," he cried sharply, "am I to understand that you set yourself up as being any better than Mr. Popham, Mr. Gilhooly, Mr. Meigs, or myself?"

"What you understand doesn't concern me in the least," I answered airily. "What you don't understand, it strikes me, is the matter that ought to claim your attention."

"Confound you, sir! Your overwhelming ignorance is equalled only by your colossal egotism. I am sorry that I allowed myself to be beguiled into any talk with you."

"Our regrets are mutual," said I, "for your conversation is demoralizing. You are a past master in successful trickery--trickery of the sort that ought to be stamped out. If the law was as quick to deal with you as with me----"

"Hold!" fumed Markham, plunging for the stairs, "I have heard enough."

I have said that I was a hard man, in those times. I could call a spade a spade with never a thought that my angle of vision was distorted. I have regretted expressing my views in this frank fashion to Markham, yet I believe that there was injustice in his remarks no less than in mine.

Being the only person in the car who possessed a watch, the professor appointed me official time-keeper. It was my duty to bulletin the hour, with its equivalent in days such as we were accustomed to, upon a blackboard in the lower room; I had also to enter this information upon a book, which the professor called the "log-book."

Every ten hours we had a class in astronomy, with the professor as instructor and with every man save Gilhooly and the lookout as students. The railway magnate's aberration continued; all we could do was to watch him solicitously and prevent him from doing any injury to himself or to our paraphernalia.

The class learned that the nearest planet with an atmosphere, and supposedly habitable, was Venus, which, at inferior conjunction, is distant some twenty-five million miles from Terra, as Quinn called our own planet. Counting out the delays at starting, and in maneuvring to escape the asteroid, our instructor asserted that we should reach Venus in something like seventy-five hours.

Markham, Meigs, and Popham, on consulting the bulletin board and finding that seventy hours had passed, began to brush their clothes and tidy themselves against the hour of landing. But they were destined to disappointment.

Unable to locate Venus at the point where he had hoped to find it, the professor decided that it was nearing superior conjunction and was somewhere on the other side of the sun. Meigs made a deplorable display of temper.

Quinn was a mighty poor astronomer, he said sneeringly, if he could find himself so far wide of the mark on such a simple matter. Meigs further added--with a good deal of childishness as I thought--that the role of a derelict was distasteful to him: a derelict, he argued, was nothing more than a tramp, and he objected to being a tramp, even a celestial tramp.

I was out of patience with the man. Admiration for the professor had taken fast hold of me and I would not have him sneered at or maligned.

A war of hot words was on between myself and the Wall Street broker when Quinn interfered.

"True," said he, "we have missed Venus by a few millions of miles, but we are aimed directly at the orbit of another world, and I can so manipulate the lever as to wait for it, if necessary, and drop upon its surface when it overtakes us."

"What world is that?" said Popham, pricking tip his ears.

"Mercury," answered the professor. "It is the smallest orb in our solar system and measures some three thousand miles in diameter."

"I thought Venus was rather contracted for men with such large schemes as ourselves," remarked Meigs, shaking his head, "but this other planet seems to be smaller still."

"I wonder if they have coal mines there?" murmured Popham meditatively.

"And if they grow wheat and cotton?" added Meigs.

"If Mercury is inhabited," spoke up Markham eagerly, "food will certainly be as necessary there as on the earth. I don't know, gentlemen, but it strikes me we might fall into worse places."

"Poor Gilhooly!" sighed Meigs. "What a pity it will be if the Mercurials prove to have traction interests!"

"How long before we shall reach this planet you speak of, professor?" inquired Popham.

"Well," answered Quinn thoughtfully, "Mercury is rather slow. It travels along its orbit at the rate of thirty miles per second, while we are moving at one hundred miles. At a rough estimate, I should say we can effect a juncture with the planet in ten hours, although an extra hour may be required for maneuvres to secure a landing."

The ten hours that followed were hours of great anxiety and feverish labor. Believing that my nerves were the steadiest, the professor placed me at the telescope to act as pilot while he served as engineer and manipulated the lever.

The responsibilities of my position so worked upon me that I had no time for the glories of the planet we were endeavoring to intercept. Through the telescope I saw huge mountains and broad plains, but they were blurred over with a reddish light and the lesser details of topography were lost.

When five hours were gone, the professor left the lever and came upstairs to have a look through the telescope for himself.

"You have done very well indeed, Mr. Munn," he was pleased to say, "but I think that I had better take this post from now on, while you go below and station yourself at the switch board. The slightest mismanagement, when the critical moment arrives, might hurl us against Mercury with a force that would result in annihilation.

"The lever turns in a half circle, as you may know. The arc is divided into spaces, numbered from zero to ninety. I will call down to you the number to which you must throw the lever; you will repeat the number back to me, and instantly obey my order."

"Trust me, sir," said I.

But the professor was loath to let me go without still further impressing upon me the importance of the work before us.

"In order to alight safely, Mr. Munn," he continued, "we must graduate the power of the anti-gravity cubes to the Mercurial atmosphere. By proceeding intelligently in the matter, we shall make the car weigh slightly more than the atmosphere we encounter; then, when we are about to land, we will let the car just counterbalance the 'pull' of the planet and there will not be the slightest jar."

"I understand, professor," I answered and went downstairs.

Markham, Meigs, and Popham ascended to the upper chamber, this position bringing them a few feet nearer the goal of our desires as well as giving them a point of vantage from which to watch events. Gilhooly was the only one besides myself in the lower room; he was kneeling on the divan writing imaginary stock quotations on the steel wall with the point of his finger.

For four hours or more the professor called out for slight variations in the speed of the car, but in the main the lever was held on the number, 90, which gave a maximum velocity. The tension of the minutes ushering in the last hour of the ten is beyond my power to describe.

Once in my evil days I manipulated the tumblers of a combination and pulled open a vault door. Behind the door stood two men with revolvers. For two seconds I stared agape at the trap which I had sprung upon myself; and when I got away I had a bullet in my shoulder.

Intensify my feelings fourfold as I stood looking into the leveled revolvers of those two men, then spread out the two seconds to cover a half hour. In this way only can I describe my state of mind while we fought for a safe landing on the planet Mercury.

Cries of wonder and apprehension echoed to me from overhead. Above them I heard the shrill voice of the professor:

"Zero."

"Zero," I repeated, throwing the lever clear over.

There followed a jolt as the screens covered the cubes and shut off their energy. Instantly there came the sickening sensation of a fall, accompanied by a rush of displaced air that roared and bellowed all about the car.

"Forty-five!" shrieked Quinn.

"Forty-five!" I yelled, throwing the lever half over.

Then we caught ourselves with a suddenness that threw me to my knees. We were moving upward again--I could feel the steel floor rising under me.

"Twenty!" came down from above.

"Twenty," I answered hoarsely, struggling erect and shifting the lever.

I felt that we were still rising, but slowly. The professor was juggling with an unknown atmosphere, and on the success of his judgment depended our lives.

"Fifteen!"

"Fifteen!" and over went the lever for five degrees.

We were swinging stationary in mid-air. From the window by the switch board I looked outward and downward with bulging eyes.

A dazzling glow covered peak and plain, and I turned away that my sight might not be blinded to the lever numbers.

"Ten!" cried the professor.

"Ten it is!" and I threw the switch to the number given.

Then again we dropped, but slowly, very slowly.

"Five!"

I repeated the order, and again the air rushed against the blunt base of the car, yet not so fiercely as before. Then, all of a sudden, I felt a grip of fingers about my throat, and I was hauled from the lever and thrown back on the floor.

Gilhooly had a knee on my breast and was strangling me with fingers of steel. The fire of an insane purpose gleamed in his eyes, and he seemed possessed of the strength of a dozen demons.

I struggled, but I might as well have tried to rise under the thousand-tons pressure of a hydraulic press.

"Ten!" cried Quinn.

I did not answer--I could not, for my tongue was lolling between my lips.

"Ten!" screamed Quinn. "_Ten--or we're lost!_"

A groan, hardly audible, escaped my gasping throat. I heard a frantic clamor above and then there was such a jar and crash as I hope I shall never experience again.

All tangible life slipped away from me, and I collapsed into an unconsciousness that I felt might be death itself.

*CHAPTER VII.*

*FACING A MERCURIAL STORM.*

That our lives were preserved and the car saved from destruction was due to two circumstances, one of them most peculiar and of far-reaching importance.

The lesser of the two circumstances was this: the car had not dropped to the plain, but had had its downward rush intercepted by an elevation, so that the force of our fall was just about half what might have been expected.

As to the other and more vital circumstance, the fall itself was not what it would have been on our own sphere. The "pull" of gravity on Mercury, as we afterward discovered, has only one-third the power it has on Terra. To this phenomenon were due many wonderful things, as the reader will discover before we have gone very far.

I was not the first of our party to open his eyes after the landing, for when I sat up and stared about me I saw the professor moving around the steel chamber and ministering to the others.

Gilhooly was creeping toward the divan on all fours, muttering something about "a great slump in the market" and chuckling over the way in which he had "got out from under."

J. Archibald Meigs was groaning and trying to lift himself on his elbow; Augustus Popham was on his knees, wobbling erratically and apparently undecided whether to say his prayers or to try and get up; Hannibal Markham was flattened out along the floor, the professor kneeling over him and chafing his temples.

"What sort of a navigator are you, Quinn?" asked Meigs crossly. "By gad, it is more dangerous to make port with you than it is to sail through space."

"Don't blame the professor for a fault of mine, Meigs," I spoke up warmly.

The broker looked at me with something like contempt.

"I blame him for placing an incompetent and irresponsible person at such an important post as the switch board," said Meigs. "He should have known that a man who holds your distorted views on the subject of personal property is not to be trusted."

"That's right," added Popham, lifting himself to the divan.

"Gilhooly made an attack on me," said I. "He bore me down and came within one of strangling me."

"Quinn is the cause of Gilhooly's abnormal condition," persisted Meigs, who was bound to have Quinn at fault for every evil that overtook us.

I got up, rather more wrathful than the situation demanded. The fall had jarred my temper no less than my body, and I was in a mood to have the business out with Meigs at close quarters.

"Softly, Mr. Munn!" cautioned the professor. "It is well to have a deaf ear for these gentlemen at times. Help me lift Mr. Markham to the divan."

The professor's words dispelled my anger. Without another word to Meigs I went over and assisted in getting the food trust magnate into a more comfortable position.

Markham was not long in recovering, and when we took stock of ourselves we found that we were not much the worse for our shaking up. Quinn called to me to go upstairs with him and see if any havoc had been wrought there.

We found that no particular damage had been done to the instruments or other material. When we descended to the lower chamber, after an absence of fifteen or twenty minutes, Meigs had the key in the steel door and was standing at the entrance with Popham and Markham on either side of him.

"Where did you get that key?" demanded the professor, one hand groping in his pocket.

Heretofore he had been careful to keep the key upon his person. Small wonder that he was now surprised to find it in the possession of Meigs.

"I found it on the floor," replied the broker with a good deal of dignity. "Probably you lost it out of your pocket when you fell from the stairs a few minutes ago."

"What are you intending to do?" asked the professor quietly.

"Professor Quinn, sir," returned Meigs with elaborate condescension, "we have reached the parting of the ways. While we were traveling through space, I and my friends could do nothing less than bear with your company, and with that of the rogue at your side; but now that we are safely moored on Mercury, and can debark, we see fit to withdraw ourselves and renounce further intercourse with you."

"Ah!" murmured Quinn, a slow smile hovering about his thin lips.

The smile caused some acerbity to manifest itself in the three gentlemen at the door. They drew themselves up haughtily.

"Quinn," went on the broker sharply, "you lured us into your castle and abducted us from our native orb, with small regard for the feelings of our relatives or friends, and no consideration whatever for the business interests with which we were engaged; so----"

"Your business interests had my every consideration," interrupted the professor.

Meigs took no notice of the remark.

"So," he continued, "remembering these wrongs, we feel that we can no longer associate with you. As for Munn"--here he turned a fastidious eye in my direction--"he is utterly impossible to men of our social standing. This planet, you tell us, is three thousand miles in diameter. May we request that you and Munn take one end of the diameter and leave the other end to us?"

The professor laughed softly and seated himself.

"Sit down, Mr. Munn," said he. "We have been ostracized by our fellow-exiles. Let us see how well they get along without us."

"We bid you farewell," finished Meigs loftily.

Thereupon he turned the key, threw open the door--and dropped on the threshold as though he had been shot! Markham and Popham cried aloud, threw their arms across their faces and reeled back.

A blast as from a furnace drove in at the opening, filling the chamber like a draft from Hades. I could scarcely breathe in the stifling atmosphere.

"Hurry, Munn!" cried Quinn. "Drag Meigs away from the door or he'll be burned to a crisp!"

The broker was already smoking when I caught his ankles and jerked him inside. The professor slammed the door.

Presently the air within the car readjusted itself to normal conditions. Meigs, red as a beet and breathing heavily, was little the worse for his warm experience.

"I fancy, Mr. Meigs," cooed the professor, "that you will wish to avail yourself of one of my anti-temperature baths before cutting loose from myself and Mr. Munn. There is plenty of water left for all of us, and I will go aloft, set up the collapsible tub, and make the bath ready. We have alighted in the tropics, evidently, and at the period of mid-summer. The temperature is about five hundred degrees, fahrenheit."

With that the professor took the key from the door to keep Gilhooly from making a dash outside, and started for the storeroom. I followed him, the three disgruntled gentlemen gazing after us mutely.

The professor and I were the first to fortify ourselves with the anti-temperature bath. After dipping our bodies, we rinsed our clothing in the liquid.

Aside from a pleasant, cooling sensation the bath gave no evidence of its potent qualities. There was no hardening of the skin, as I fancied there might be, no change in its ruddy color, no inconvenience.

When we went down again we sent the other three gentlemen aloft, the professor instructing them as to the necessity of making their clothing as well as their bodies proof against the climate. In due course, Popham, Meigs, and Markham once more showed themselves.

Gilhooly, of course, had also to be made immune; and he struggled against it so fiercely that we were obliged to hold him in the tub while the professor poured three buckets of the mixture over him.

He was not disrobed, and when sufficiently drenched he leaped from the tub and fled, raving, to the lower chamber.

"Now," said the professor, "we are prepared to fare forth. You gentlemen"--he addressed himself to Markham, Meigs, and Popham--"may go with Mr. Munn and me, or keep by yourselves, as you may elect. But it will be well to make this car our headquarters. Here we have food and drink, also a stronghold in case of attack by the Mercurials--if there happen to be any."

"How can there be any life in such an over-heated atmosphere?" inquired Markham.

"Nature is a great leveler of barriers," replied Quinn. "She is able to adjust life to its environment, you may be sure, just as easily as she can bridge the social chasm that separates a thief from a trust magnate."

His eyes twinkled.

"Such a bridge," he added, "would not prove much of a tax on her resources. For my own part, I do not think the chasm either so wide or so deep as you gentlemen appear to imagine."

I chuckled at that, and Meigs and his two companions grew duly resentful.

"As for Mr. Gilhooly," continued Quinn, "we cannot take him with us on our tour of observation. It will be best to leave him locked in the car. I will close the trap leading into the store-room and I do not think it will be possible for him to work much damage in the room below."

"I don't know what good it will do me to go out with your exploring expedition," said Popham dejectedly; "in a country as hot as this there can be no earthly use for coal."

"Or wearing apparel," added Meigs listlessly. "Cotton couldn't grow in such a temperature. And as for wheat!" He shook his head wearily.

Cotton and wheat were the abc of his Wall Street experience. Beyond those commodities he groped in the dark.

"What sort of food can be grown on such a sun-baked planet?" grumbled Markham.

The railway man was shouting something about watered stock, and his babbling was wafted up to us.

"Gilhooly," added Markham, "is the only fortunate man in the party. Realization will blast the hopes and mayhap prove the death of the rest of us, while he--he cannot realize!"

"You gentlemen lose courage too quickly," said the professor. "In my lectures on Venus I told you how that planet was inclined to the plane of its orbit. The axis of Mercury has a still greater inclination; in fact, the orb leans on itself as though about to fall. Its days are of about the same length as the days of Terra--only three minutes longer--but its years, owing to its contracted orbit, are much shorter. In eighty-eight days Mercury makes its round, so that each season is only twenty-two days in length.

"At the poles of Mercury, in what answers to the polar regions of our own earth, there must be a more tempered climate----"

"Then let us get there, by all means," cut in Popham.

"In whatever we do," answered Quinn, "we must make haste slowly."

"Let's get out and look around, anyhow," cried Meigs. "It may happen, after all, that we have a world to conquer here, and I have not the patience to remain longer in this steel cell of yours."

"Very good," returned the professor. "We will make our preparations and go forth."

He shut off the flow of oxygen from the tank and then followed the rest of us to the under apartment, closing a steel door over the trap at the head of the stairs and locking it. Gilhooly, imagining himself a conductor, was walking around the edge of the circular divan collecting tickets from imaginary passengers.

"Sing Sing!" he called out as the professor unlocked the door at the entrance and pulled it open.

"Here's where you get off, Munn," said Meigs maliciously.

"Here's where we all get off," returned the professor, smiling.

Thereupon we passed hastily into the blinding glare of the Mercurial day. For several minutes our eyes rebelled at the brightness; when finally they became inured to it, we looked around us upon a desolation that struck dismay to our hearts.

We saw then that our car had alighted upon an elevation which was nothing less than the rim of an extinct volcano of vast proportions. From ridge to ridge across the abysmal crater at least half a mile could be measured.

It was beyond the power of our eyes to penetrate to the black depths of the great pit.

"Listen!" cried the professor, his voice resounding so thunderously as almost to deafen us--some trick of the atmosphere.

We stood silently, our ears alert, and heard a confused babel of sound proceeding apparently out of the very core of the volcano.

"Sub-Mercurial fires may be at work down there," whispered the professor, nodding toward the crater.

Even the whisper sounded unpleasantly loud to us.

"What a world!" came from Augustus Popham in bellowing tones. "With fire within and without, what chance is there for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

Some of Meigs' peevishness had got into the coal man, and he rent the air with it. We remained mule after this outburst, I with my gaze hopefully on the professor and the professor blinking at the sun.

In a little time I allowed my own eyes to falter zenithward, and the glory of the sun in Mercury's mid-heaven has ever since been one of the treasured memories of my life. Its disk was six times its diameter as viewed from Earth, and the grandeur of its flaming surface is beyond the powers of my feeble pen to make known.

I was oppressed and held captive by a feeling of awe and wonder. There was a red tinge to the atmosphere, caused by a reflection from the red of the planet's brick-like crust; through this warm color pulsed the golden streamers--yellow and scarlet overhead, fading to faintest orange on the horizon.

"Think you, Mr. Popham," murmured the professor, his voice awakening us as from a trance, "that all yon splendor, which has been in these skies for ages upon ages, was created for the enjoyment of no living thing? If so, you are wrong. There are now, as there have always been, beings with an intelligence capable of appreciating all this magnificent profusion of light and color. But enough. We have looked down into the crater and up into the heavens; suppose we turn our eyes another way and see what there is to offer."

He faced about as he spoke, and gazed down the bare rocky slope of the volcano and off across an equally bare and forbidding plain.

"No trees, no water, no life of any kind," muttered Meigs querulously.

"There is a bright spot over there," said Quinn, shading his eyes and pointing.

Our eyes followed his finger and encountered a glittering object on a slight elevation. As we gazed, the object, whatever it was, slowly vanished.

"We might investigate that," suggested Popham excitedly. "Perhaps it was a Mercurial wearing a sort of armor to protect him from the heat. It may be that there are people here, and that they live underground."

He would have started forthwith, but the professor stretched out a hand and detained him.

"Just a moment," said Quinn. "Before we get too far from the car, let me make sure that all of you are sufficiently immune from the heat. Do you feel that you are fully protected in that respect, gentlemen?"

So far as I was personally concerned, I had not felt the slightest inconvenience from the sun's rays. I declared as much, and the others likewise so expressed themselves.

"There's another one of the things!" spoke up Meigs, pointing in another direction.

We were just able to detect a glow on another low elevation when it also flashed into thin air. Then we began looking for the little hills, and counted no less than a dozen within our range of vision.

Some of the hills were capped with the mysterious gleam, which dazzled for a time and then twinkled out.

The professor was perplexed, as I could see plainly.

"We'll examine one of those hills," said Meigs, "and find out what this means."

The top of the volcano, where we were standing, was perhaps five hundred feet from the plain. As Meigs spoke, he leaped for a rock a yard or so below him.

To the astonishment of all of us, he rose in the air like a human balloon, soared over the rock by a score of feet, and alighted several rods down the slope.

It was a titanic jump, but Meigs had regained a foothold with the lightness of a piece of down. He was a large man, was Meigs, his ponderosity exceeding two hundred pounds, Fairbanks.