Adrift in the Unknown; or, Queer Adventures in a Queer Realm, Page 4

  *CHAPTER IV.*

  *THE PLUTOCRATS RECONCILED.*

  Looking back now at that dreadful hour when the realization of our awfulpredicament burst upon us, I wonder that I preserved my own equilibrium.

  The first shock came near to throwing me off my poise, but after that Igained the whip hand of my wits by swift and sure degrees.

  I verily believe the professor would have been strangled by Meigs, aidedand abetted by Popham and Markham, had I not rushed to his rescue. Ihad muscles of iron, and after I had caught Meigs by the nape of theneck and thrown him backward, I planted myself between Quinn and hisfoes.

  "Leave the professor alone," said I. "You men show mighty poorjudgment, it strikes me, in trying to lay violent hands on him."

  "He deserves death," babbled Meigs. "He had no business shooting usinto space in this summary manner."

  Fear and anger had made Meigs childish. He measured our dilemma interms so common a smile came to my lips.

  "Judgment, poor judgment!" sniffed Popham. "Look at Gilhooly, and thentalk about poor judgment, if you can."

  In truth, the railway magnate presented a sorry spectacle. His clothingwas in wild disorder, his hair was rumpled about his head, and he washopping back and forth with two fingers in the air.

  He was under the impression that he was dealing in railroad stocks,completing the huge transaction that had made him the talk of twocontinents.

  "This professor ought to be flayed alive," declared Markham. "Where arewe going, and when will we get there?"

  "Now," said I. "you are striking the keynote. Who knows where we aregoing if the professor doesn't? And who knows when we shall arrivethere if it is out of his power to tell? We need the professor, for ifwe are to be saved it will be his knowledge that does it."

  "But what will my family think?" whimpered Meigs. "And my businessinterests!"

  He threw up his hands and fell back in his seat with a groan. Thenabruptly he straightened up again.

  "This is a dream! By gad, it must be! The whole affair is toooutrageously unreal for any sane man to believe."

  Gilhooly gave a maudlin chuckle.

  "I was dead sure I'd get that last block of X.Y.&Z. stock! That road isthe last span in my network of ties and rails. Ha! _Now_ we'll see!_Now!_"

  Meigs shivered. Gilhooly's maunderings struck sharply at his desire tocoddle himself with a myth.

  "It's awful to have Gilhooly like that," spoke up Augustus Popham. "Ifhe had not been thrown out of balance, his wide knowledge of mattersrelating to transportation might have proved of inestimable service tous now."

  Professor Quinn laughed. It was an eerie laugh, and it shook me to hearit.

  "Oh, you!" cried Markham reproachfully, whirling on Quinn. "Aftercausing this disaster and overthrowing as brilliant a mind as there everwas in Wall Street, you have the heart to indulge in levity. Look here:how far are we from the earth at the present moment?"

  "That is a difficult matter to estimate, even approximately," answeredQuinn calmly. "Ordinarily, gravity exerts a force that can be measureddefinitely on the earth's surface. A body falling freely from restacquires a velocity which is equal to the product of thirty-two andone-fifth feet and the number of seconds during which the motion haslasted. What is the time now?"

  Three gentlemen reached for their watches, failed to find them, andturned hard looks on me. I appreciated their dilemma and drew from myvest an open-face timepiece that was personal property and honestly comeby.

  "It is twelve-fifteen," said I.

  Quinn took a pencil and notebook from his pocket and did some figuring.

  "We might be a little more than two miles from our native planet," saidhe, "but----"

  "Only two miles!" cried the three exiles in chorus.

  "You can take us back, sir," said Popham, who had been pacing the floornervously. "Shut off the power of this infernal machine and let us dropback to where we belong. Two miles is no great matter. Your castle isa slow freight compared with some of Gilhooly's express trains."

  "I cannot take you back, sir," returned the professor, "and I would notif I could. You did not hear me out. The law of velocity, recited foryour benefit a moment ago, does not measure the speed of this car."

  "No?" murmured Markham.

  "Decidedly not. The earth sweeps along in its orbit at the rate ofeighteen miles to the second, while some aerolites and meteoroids attaina speed of twenty and thirty miles to the second. In building this car,I equipped it with an anti-gravity block geared up to fifty miles to thesecond. The lever on the wall"--and here Quinn turned and pointed toit---"is thrown so as to give us the maximum."

  "In other words," said Popham feebly, "we are sailing skyward at a rateof--of three thousand miles per--per minute?"

  "Presumably. As we left my city lot in New York at abouteleven-fifteen, it follows that we have been one hour on the way."

  "And should be one hundred and eighty thousand miles from home,"faltered Meigs.

  "About that," answered the professor calmly. "I do not know just howmuch our progress was impeded by the atmospheric envelope of the earth,but I think we may call our distance from the mother orb some onehundred and eighty thousand miles, in round numbers."

  These startling figures came near to unsettling the three gentlemenagain. In that flight through space we were confronting immensitieswell-nigh beyond our puny comprehension. And the professor was not yetdone.

  "In the storeroom overhead," he continued, "I have a supply of cubes andinsulating compound which I can combine and give tremendous addedvelocity to the car."

  "I am sure we are traveling fast enough," said Meigs, leaning back onthe divan hopelessly dejected.

  "If you are now ready to listen to reason," proceeded Quinn. "I willtell you how Mr. Munn here saved your lives by rescuing me from your madattack."

  "Our lives, forsooth!" exclaimed Markham bitterly. "Of what value islife to us, situated as we are?"

  "That is one way to look at it, of course," rejoined Quinn caustically."But I did not exile you into planetary space for the purpose of wipingyou out of existence."

  "You might as well have done so," said Popham severely. "That is whatthis harum-scarum plot of yours amounts to in the long run."

  "You may not care to learn how I am preserving you at the presentmoment," continued Quinn, "nor how I shall do so in the future, yet Iwill tell you so that you may understand how much you owe to Mr. Munn'sforesight and courage."

  I was beginning to entertain a high regard for Quinn in spite of what hehad done. He may have been laboring under terrible delusions, but hisresource certainly commanded respect.

  "To my forethought," he continued, "is due the fact that you arebreathing oxygen at this moment; and had I not invented a liquid whichfortifies animate or inanimate bodies against heat and cold, our rushthrough the atmosphere of the earth would have incinerated this car andits contents--nay, would have caused it to explode and settle back onour native planet in impalpable powder."

  These were things that none of us, aside from the professor, had so muchas taken thought of. My respect for him was growing into something likeawe, and I fancied I detected traces of the same sentiment in the otherthree.

  "There are roving bodies in space," Quinn went on, noting with apparentsatisfaction the interest he had aroused, "with which we might come intocollision. I have a good telescope at the observatory window upstairs,and while I cannot guide this car, I can at least increase or slackenits speed so as to dodge any other derelict that may come into dangerousproximity with us."

  "Hadn't you better be up there on the look-out?" queried Markham in sometrepidation.

  He was manifesting an interest in his personal safety that pleased theprofessor.

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

&
nbsp; "Will it not be possible to land on some other planet, Mars, forinstance?" queried Popham with sudden hope.

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

  Quinn shook his head.

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

  "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 therate we are, however, something will have to be deducted for theresistance of the earth's atmosphere. If we drop on a planet it must bea planet with an atmosphere. The moon has none, and consequently is adead world. Besides, fate might not throw us into its vicinity, or----"

  "Just a minute, sir," interposed Markham, "for I am a man who likes tounderstand thoroughly every situation with which he is called upon todeal. 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 ofyour 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 andlabor. 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 getyou off the earth. When I had made the discovery, it remained for me togive it to the world--or to better the world by taking you fourgentlemen away from it. Had I given the public the benefit, you shrewdmen of affairs might have devised means for setting it aside, or forcontrolling it. Not being a business man myself, I feared to takechances. For that reason the present enterprise appealed to me."

  "You have planned so well in the smaller details that I wonder youoverlooked 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 reallythe most insignificant part of his startling scheme.

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

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

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

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

  "By gad, sir," cried Popham, bringing his fist emphatically down on thetable, "I don't like such a hit-and-miss way of doing things. WheneverI 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 landanywhere--and you remain firm in your decision not to take us back toour native planet--I demand that you make landfall on some orb that isworth while."

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

  "It was," replied Markham. "A full knowledge of where we are going isnecessary to a thorough understanding of our--er--most remarkablesituation. Now, there are worlds larger than the one we have recentlyleft. Personally, I am predisposed in favor of a large planet--one onwhich there are traction interests, fuel supplies, and products of thesoil 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!" criedPopham. "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, withgentle irony. He turned to me. "Observe, Mr. Munn, how extravagant arethe ideas inspired by monopoly! These gentlemen are hardly started ontheir journey into space before they forget the business interests, thefriends and the environment they are leaving behind and begin planningthe commercial conquest of the stars!" He shook his head forebodingly."Your regeneration," he added to the millionaires, "calls for a landingon some barren world, some outcast of the solar system, where you willhave nothing to do but think over the evil of your past and learnsomething of the duty you owe your fellow-men."

  Popham, Markham, and Meigs were visibly annoyed by the professor'sremarks. Withdrawing as far as the limits of the steel structure wouldallow, they put their heads together and held a brief but animatedconversation in tones so low that the professor and I could notoverhear.

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

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

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

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

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

  Loose articles began to drop from shelves and other places and to slideacross the floor to the lowest point. By a quick movement I saved thelamp 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 whatspeed I could.