Chapter IV

THE MYSTERIOUS CYLINDER.

A step sounded behind us. It was one of Grenfell's assistants, a man named Baker.

"Come up. Dr. Grenfell thought you'd like to know that the cylinder is visible."

We ascended to the upper tier. Dr. Grenfell was alone in the observatory dome. Baker rejoined one of his fellows in the near-by control room. The other men were dispersed at their posts about the cube.

I realized again how intolerably hot it was from the friction-heat of our rapid upward passage through the atmosphere. Dr. Grenfell sat hunched over the telescope. He was coatless and collarless, his sleeves rolled up exposing his thick muscular forearms, mottled with dark hair wet now with sweat.

There was barely room for us all in the dome-chamber. Through the circular overhead pane the star-field blazed in an almost dead-black sky. A new glory to the stars—amazingly steady, amazingly brilliant.

"Hot, isn't it?" Grenfell greeted us. "Have the cooling system on full. It will be better presently. We've stopped ascending—the atmosphere is very rare here—little friction now."

His gaze fell on the quiet, intent Rowena. "Child, didn't I tell you this cube would be successful? Didn't I?"

He was triumphant. The test ascent was a success. The cube was controlable—the secret of interplanetary flight had been conquered! Strange, but in all my awe at this new experience, never once had I thought of that.

And Jimmy was only concerned with the oncoming cylinder.

"Where is it, doctor?" he demanded. "I don't see it."

Through the small telescope it was visible off to the west where the Pacific slopes of the Rocky Mountains showed, with the snow on their higher peaks still brightened by the fading sunlight.

The cylinder was a faint luminous dot. We hung poised and the dot grew, took form. And suddenly I realized that it was quite close to us. Perhaps we were moving along with it. I do not know. But it seemed approaching at a leisurely rate. At first I could not guess its size, or its distance—the one factor dependent upon the other, and nothing with which to compare either of them. A glowing, silver-white, bullet-shaped projectile. It sailed majestically along, heated luminous, with a faint trail of light-fire like a fan-tail behind it—gases from its heated metal burning faintly in this rarefied air.

We could soon see it plainly without the telescope. Grenfell spoke into a telephone mouthpiece.

"Baker? Raise us slightly. Can you see it? Close now. Swing D-face westward, if you can. A little—not much!"

Through the silent, vibrationless interior of the cube Baker's signal-gongs were ringing; and we could hear the hiss of the plate-shifter valves.

The electronic rocket-streams were cut off now. The gravity plates were shifted; and our turning was aided by the streams of etheric pressure-vibrations darting from each corner of the cube like streams from a pinwheel. As we swung the vault of the heavens moved around in a slow twist—then steadied.

Grenfell's voice was hurried, tense. "Dean, you and Turk go down to the deck, on D-face. Stand by the exit-porte. I can only spare Gibbons for down there. You can help him with the manual locks. I don't dare trust the automatics. We'll have the thing aboard in a few minutes—if we're lucky. Rowena, child, you stay with me."

The cylinder seemed no more than half a mile away now. It was much closer when in a minute or so we gazed at it again from the deck bull's-eye window.

The man Gibbons stood by a series of hand-levers that operated the pressure doors of the lock-chamber. Its inner deck-door was closing as we arrived.

The pane was of massive glassite, transparent. Through it the interior of the little lock-room projecting out from the deck was visible. The outer door-slide was closed.

Gibbons shifted a lever. "Hold that, will you?"

I held it, and he bent and opened a valve-cock. The outer door of the lock slid open—an aperture six feet wide and five feet high opening into the empty realms of Space. The air in the lock-chamber, which had been under a pressure of one atmosphere like the rest of the cube's interior, went out with a rush. The hiss and surge of it were audible with the first widening slit of the outer door.

No wonder care was needed in the handling of these controls, being operated now for the first time! If we should let this inner slide open, half the air in the cube would rush out in a tornado-blast! And we would be sucked out with it! There was a heavy iron wrench which had been lying neglected on the floor of the lock. It went out like a wind-blown feather when the outer slide opened.

The glowing cylinder slowly approached. I judged it now to be no more than two or three feet long. It came point toward us. Silent, dramatic meeting—our poised cube and this wandering projectile! Up in the starlight with the blazing firmament above and the Earth spread like a gigantic convex relief-map beneath us.

I knew that Dr. Grenfell was endeavoring to hold us so that the cylinder might fall into the open outer door-slide of the lock-chamber. It needed several trials. The men were inexperienced as yet in handling the cube.

We missed it completely at the first trial. It seemed to waver with the attraction of our greater mass. We circled it several times. The disturbance we caused made it begin to rotate end over end upon an axis of its own creation. And with forward velocity destroyed it began sinking toward the Earth.

Then at last we moved at it diagonally from above. A true aim this time. It settled through the yawning open porte and fell upon the metal floor of the lock-chamber, to lie there with a fading glow as instantly it began to cool.

Gibbons flung the outer slide closed. Dr. Grenfell triumphantly joined us on the deck, and Rowena with him. The other men arrived. The controls of the cube were set-locked. We were sinking very slowly back to Earth—so slowly it would take hours to reach the lower atmospheric strata.

"No hurry," said Grenfell. "Don't let the pressure in yet—let it cool slowly."

It lay on the floor of the lock, apparently undamaged, though its metallic outer shell was fused, pitted and scarred by the friction-heat. It was a small affair, not much over two feet long.

"Now, Gibbons—easy at first. Don't be rash."

Opened pressure-valves began admitting the cube's air pressure into the near-vacuum of the lock's interior. They hissed and sizzled, and after a moment Gibbons turned them full. The cylinder stirred, rolled and bumped against the lock-wall.

In five minutes the inner door-slide was opened. A last rush of wind-pressure sucked at me as I stood near by.

Gibbons and Jimmy bent and entered the lock, to come out, gingerly carrying the prize.

"Not heavy," said Jimmy. "Thirty or forty pounds."

Our gravity-equalizers in the inner shell-floor of the cube's base were set to give us a gravity-pull normal to Earth. The cylinder had an Earth-weight of some forty pounds.

Jimmy and Gibbons laid it on the deck.

"Hollow," said Jimmy. He tapped it with his knuckles. But Grenfell stopped him with a sharp command. "Don't do that! Want to blow us up?"

I had not thought of that! This could so easily be a bomb—a strange, deadly missile aimed at the Earth!

Jimmy leaped back as though the thing had stung him. Unreasonably, ludicrously I took a step away and drew Rowena with me. As if that could help us!

"Don't touch it!" cautioned Grenfell. "Rance, look it over."

Rance, I learned later, was head of the so-called bomb squad of New York. An expert in dealing with "infernal machines." He bent over the cylinder. Under the light of his flash he ran careful, practiced fingers along its pitted sides. Suddenly he straightened.

"Grenfell, look here. Something written—etched in the metal."

Scrawled, hand-written words, burned away in places. Almost illegible, but not quite! Three words:

FROM GUY PALISSE

As Grenfell uttered them, there came a cry behind me.

"From Guy—"

Rowena stood trembling, her face white as chalk with the blood draining from it.

"Guy! Oh—if he is alive! If only—alive—"

I thought she would fall. My arm went about her, but she pushed me away.

"I'm—not so silly, Jack." She even mustered a smile. "From Guy! Why, then, he must be alive. He must be alive!"

We carried the cylinder down to the lounge-room of the cube's lower tier and gathered over it. Rance showed us its series of small vents through which some chemical charge giving etheric wave-pressure had propelled it by a rocket principle through Space.

"Open it!" Jimmy urged impatiently. "Can't you open it?"

Then Rance located the lever, embedded in the burned metal, by which presumably some hidden slide would move. But the lever was fused solid; the cracks of the slide were barely discernible along the scarred metal surface.

But at last we got it open. The interior was a series of compartments holding the operating mechanism. But there was one packed with a thick layer of what seemed a strange form of paper. A hundred or more sheets, covered with handwriting burned into them with a faint tracery of black hairlines.

Dr. Grenfell seized them, carried them to a light, riffed through them.

"Front Guy! He's alive! It was not the Moon he reached, but Mercury! He's alive!"

Fully half the sheets contained astronomical data, technical notes and diagrams. But the rest held a message from Guy Palisse. A message and a warning to us of Earth!

We sat there in the lounge-room of the cube, listening breathlessly while Dr. Grenfell read from the pages. They were all fully legible. How well this strange narrative fitted into the weird events in Maine through which we had just passed! How much, inexplicable to us, was now explained!

And as I listened, I forgot this dim interior of the Bolton Flying Cube, hanging in Space high above the Earth's surface. Forgot Rowena sitting white-faced and tense beside me, with her hand gripping my forearm. My thoughts conjured the naked, rain-swept copper hills of a strange planet.