CHAPTER VII
The Terrors of Light
I was weary from the trials of the day on Earth, and fell asleep easily.It was the red sunlight streaming in at the port-hole that awakened me.I thought I had slept but a very short time, but the night was evidentlyover. As soon as the doctor heard me moving, he cried out to me,--
"Here is the daylight I promised you. Did you ever see it at midnightbefore?"
"How do you know it is midnight? It looks more like a red sunset to me,"I said, for the sun was just in the horizon.
"The sun has just set, and is now rising. It did not go out of sight,but gradually turned about and began to mount again. That is how I knowit is midnight."
"Sunset presses so closely upon sunrise that night is crowded outaltogether. Then this must be the land of the midnight sun that I haveread about?"
"Yes, we are very near the Earth again, and this is far inside thearctic polar circle, where the sun never goes down during summer, butsets for a long night in the winter. I have kept far to the westward toavoid the magnetic pole, which might play havoc with my apparatus."
"Then your little side-trip is----"
"To the North Pole, of course!" he cried triumphantly.
How simple this vexed problem had become, after all! It had worsted themost daring travellers of all countries for centuries. Thousands uponthousands spent in sending expeditions to find the Pole had only calledfor other thousands to fit out relief expeditions. Ship after ship hadbeen crashed, life after life had been clutched in its icy hand! But nowit had become an after-thought, a side-trip, a little excursion to bemade while waiting for midnight! And it is often that such a simplesolution of the most baffling difficulties is found at last.
The doctor had been observing his quadrant, and was now busy makingcalculations. He called me up to his compartment.
"Longitude, 144 degrees and 45 minutes west; Latitude, 89 degrees 59minutes and 30 seconds north. That is the way it figures out. We werehalf a mile from the Pole when I took my observation. We must have justcrossed over it since then."
"Go down a little nearer, so we may see what it looks like!" I saidexcitedly.
"I dare not go too close to all that ice, or we may freeze the mercuryin our thermometer and barometer. We must keep well in the sunlight, butI will lower a little."
What mountains of crusted snow! What crags and peaks of solid ice! Itwas impossible to tell whether it was land or sea underneath. Judging bythe general level it must have been a sea, but no water was visible inany direction. The great floes of ice were piled high upon each other. Amillion sharp, glittering edges formed ramparts in every direction tokeep off the invader by land. How impotent and powerless man would be toscale these jagged walls or climb these towering mountains! Howabsolutely impossible to reach by land, how simple and easy to reachthrough the air! The North Pole and Aerial Navigation had been cousinproblems that baffled man for so long, and their solution had cometogether.
"Empty a biscuit tin to contain this record, and we will toss it outupon this world of ice, so that if any adventurer ever gets this farnorth he may find that we have already been here," said the doctor,bringing down a freshly-written page for me to sign. It read asfollows:--
"Aboard Anderwelt's Gravity Projectile, 12.25 a.m., June 12th, 1892. The undersigned, having left the vicinity of Chicago at nine o'clock on the evening of June 11th, took bearings here, showing that they passed over the North Pole soon after midnight. Then they took up their course to the planet Mars.
"(Signed) HERMANN ANDERWELT. ISIDOR WERNER."
This was duly enclosed in the biscuit tin, which I bent and crimped alittle around the top so that the cover would stay on tightly. Then Ilearned how such things were conveyed outside the projectile. Acylindrical, hollow plunger fitting tightly into the rear wall waspulled as far into the projectile as it would come. A closely fittinglid on the top of the cylinder was lifted, and the tin deposited within.The lid was then fitted down again, and the plunger was pushed out andturned over until the weight of the lid caused it to fall open and thecontents to drop out. The tin sailed down, struck a tall crag, boundedoff, and fell upon a comparatively level plateau. The cylinder was thenturned farther over, causing the lid to close, and the plunger waspulled in again. I remember how crisply cold was that one cubic foot ofair that came back with the cylinder. My teeth had been chattering eversince I wakened, and I had been too excited to put on a heavier coat.
"What is the thermometer?" asked the doctor. It was a Fahrenheitinstrument we were carrying.
"Thirty-eight degrees below zero, and still falling!" I told him.
"Then we must be off at once, and at a good speed, to warm up. Now say along good-bye to Earth, for it may be nothing more than a pale star tous hereafter."
The doctor steered to westward as he rose steadily to a height of aboutten miles. Then he fell with a long slant to the south-west. He wasworking back into the darkness of night again. We had lost the sun longbefore we started to rise again.
"We are now well above the Pacific Ocean, about fifteen hundred milesnorth-west of San Francisco," said the doctor, consulting his largeglobe.
"It seems to me you cross continents with remarkable ease and swiftness.From Chicago to San Francisco alone is almost three thousand miles," Iventured.
"But we have been gone four hours, and if we had simply stood stillabove the Earth for four hours it would have travelled under us aboutfour thousand miles, so that San Francisco would already have passed theplace where we started."
"Then one only needs to get off somewhere and remain still in order tomake a trip around the World!" I exclaimed.
"You are quite right, and travelling upon the Earth's surface is themost awkward method, because it is impossible to take advantage of theEarth's own rapid motion. Around the World in eighty days was onceconsidered a remarkable feat, but if we were to travel steadilywestward we should make the circuit in very much less than twenty-fourhours. The motion of the Earth upon its axis is such an immenseadvantage that if we were only going from Chicago to London, the tripcould be more easily and quickly made by going to the westward sometwenty-one thousand miles, rather than going directly eastward less thanfour thousand miles. For going eastward we should have to travel athousand miles an hour in order to keep up with the Earth. It isquestionable whether we could make that speed tacking up and slantingdown."
"Then we shall have to follow the course of Empire, always westward!" Ilaughed.
While we were talking thus, the whizzing and whistling of the wind,which had been at first very loud and hissing, had gradually died down.I looked at the barometer, and reported that there was scarcelythree-eighths of an inch of mercury in the tube.
"We are practically above the atmosphere, then," said the doctor,turning in all the batteries. He tried the rudder in the ether, andfound it turned her when fully extended and turned rather hard over.
"I tried to sleep this morning at Whiting to prepare for to-night'swork," said the doctor presently; "but I find I am gettinguncontrollably drowsy. Come up, and I will show you the course we mostkeep, and then I will lie down to get a little rest."
I mounted to his compartment and gazed through the telescope at Mars,looking like a little, red baby-moon, floating in one side of the bluecircle.
"Keep him always in view, but in the edge of the field like that," saidthe doctor. "We must always steer a little to the right of him--that is,a little behind him."
"But he travels around the sun in the same direction the Earth does," Iobjected. "I should think we ought to aim a little ahead of him, or tothe left, to allow for his motion forward in his orbit."
"That looks reasonable at first sight, doesn't it?" said the doctor."But a little learning is a dangerous thing. I will explain to you whywe must steer a little behind him after I have had my nap. I am toosleepy now;" and he finished with a yawn.
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sp; He soon fell asleep, and I was left alone to think over the events ofthe day and the still more strange happenings of the night. It hurt myeyes to look long through the telescope, so I closed them and gave freerein to my thoughts.
How soon will it be morning? How shall I know when it _is_ morning? Thatterm "morning" applies only to the surface of revolving planets. I hadjust seen the morning come at midnight, and then the darkness of nightfall again directly after morning. After all, what are night andmorning? The one is a passing into the shadow of the Earth, and theother is simply the emerging into the light. They depend on a rotation,and we shall know no more of them until we land on a revolving planetagain. But which shall we have on the trip, night or daylight? Naturallywe would very soon emerge from the little shadow cast by the Earth. Ithad taken us but an hour or two to travel out of it into the daylightand then back into the darkness again. Even if we did not leave it, theEarth would move on and leave us.
And what then? Nothing but uninterrupted, untempered, unhindereddaylight! Eternal, dazzling, direct sunlight, unrelieved by any night,unstrained through any clouds! This deep blue of the starry night wouldbe succeeded by the hot, white light of a scorching, gleaming Sun. Andthen (the thought chilled my bones as it fell upon me!), then how wouldwe see Mars? How would we see any star, or perchance the Moon? Even theEarth might be drowned in that sea of everlasting, all-engulfingbrilliancy! Nothing in all the Universe would be visible but the beamingSun, and he too blindingly bright to look upon.
As the truth of all this took hold of me, it filled me with a growingterror. At any moment we might emerge from this grateful shadow of theEarth, and then we would be lost, drowned, engulfed in a blinding,sight-suffocating light! In desperate terror I looked around toward thedoctor, as if for assistance. He was sleeping peacefully. He had neverthought of it! _This_ was the great thing he had overlooked! Even atstarting he had a dreadful presentiment of it.
He was a great man, and his discovery a wonderful one; but here was thetrouble with it. He had solved the question of navigating space, but thesunlight! the dazzling, burning, terrible sunlight! how was he tonavigate that? It was simply impossible! We would have to turn backbefore we emerged into it. We would have to retrace our path while wewere still in the grateful shadow. Ah, the blessedness of night afterall!
Then slowly and cautiously, so that I might not waken him, I crept downto the rear window to see how far away the Earth was. We were at sogreat a distance that I could see the whole outline of it, as a greatdull globe filling all the view behind us. And as I looked again Istarted and uttered a cry! A thin sickle of bright, white lightglimmered over the whole eastern edge of it, like the first glimpse ofthe new Moon, but a hundred times larger! It was the sunlight! It mustbe creeping around the eastern edge, and would soon engulf us.
The doctor had been aroused by my cry. Not seeing me in his compartment,he had gone at once to the telescope.
"What is the matter?" he said. "You have lost the course a little." Andas I peered out of my port-hole I saw that narrow sickle of light growthinner and thinner, and finally go out. Had I imagined it all? No, Ihad seen it.
"Ah, Doctor, I am so glad you have wakened. I am frightened, terrified,by the light!"