Across the Zodiac Read Online Free PDF Page B

horizontal wheel with two
projecting squares of antapergic metal, against each of which, as it
reached a certain point, a very small stream of repulsive force was
directed from the apergion, keeping the wheel in constant and rapid
motion. I had, of course, supplied myself with an ample store of
compressed vegetables, preserved meats, milk, tea, coffee, &c., and a
supply of water sufficient to last for double the period which the
voyage was expected to occupy; also a well-furnished tool-chest (with
wires, tubes, &c.). One of the lower windows was made just large
enough to admit my person, and after entering I had to close it and
fix it in its place firmly with cement, which, when I wished to quit
the vessel, would have again to be removed.
    Of course some months were occupied in the manufacture of the
different portions of the vessel and her machinery, and sometime more
in their combination; so that when, at the end of July, I was ready to
start, the opposition was rapidly approaching. In the course of some
fifty days the Earth, moving in her orbit at a rate of about eleven
hundred miles
[4]
per minute, would overtake Mars; that is to say,
would pass between him and the Sun. In starting from the Earth I
should share this motion; I too should go eleven hundred miles a
minute in the same direction; but as I should travel along an orbit
constantly widening, the Earth would leave me behind. The apergy had
to make up for this, as well as to carry me some forty millions of
miles in a direction at right angles to the former—right outward
towards the orbit of Mars. Again, I should share the motion of that
particular spot of the Earth's surface from which I rose around her
axis, a motion varying with the latitude, greatest at the equator,
nothing at the pole. This would whirl me round and round the Earth at
the rate of a thousand miles an hour; of this I must, of course, get
rid as soon as possible. And when I should be rid of it, I meant to
start at first right upward; that is, straight away from the Sun and
in the plane of the ecliptic, which is not very different from that in
which Mars also moves. Therefore I should begin my effective ascent
from a point of the Earth as far as possible from the Sun; that is, on
the midnight meridian.
    For the same reason which led me to start so long before the date of
the opposition, I resolved, having regard to the action of the Earth's
rotation on her axis, to start some hours before midnight. Taking
leave, then, of the two friends who had thus far assisted me, I
entered the Astronaut on the 1st August, about 4.30 P.M. After sealing
up the entrance-window, and ascertaining carefully that everything was
in order—a task which occupied me about an hour—I set the generator
to work; and when I had ascertained that the apergion was full, and
that the force was supplied at the required rate, I directed the whole
at first into the main conductor. After doing this I turned towards
the lower window on the west—or, as it was then, the right-hand
side—and was in time to catch sight of the trees on the hills, some
half mile off and about two hundred feet above the level of my
starting-point. I should have said that I had considerably compressed
my atmosphere and increased the proportion of oxygen by about ten per
cent., and also carried with me the means of reproducing the whole
amount of the latter in case of need. Among my instruments was a
pressure-gauge, so minutely divided that, with a movable vernier of
the same power as the fixed ones employed to read the glass circles, I
could discover the slightest escape of air in a very few seconds. The
pressure-gauge, however, remained immovable. Going close to the window
and looking out, I saw the Earth falling from me so fast that, within
five minutes after my departure, objects like trees and even houses
had become almost indistinguishable to the naked eye. I had half
expected to hear the whistling of the air as the vessel rushed upward,
but nothing