It was as if I lay in the softest feather-bed in the world. I drifted in silence, content to doze like a child.
“…Ned? Ned, can you hear my voice?”
The words stirred my awareness. At first I resisted their probing, but the voice persisted, and at last I felt myself bobbing like a cork to the surface of consciousness.
I opened my eyes. The round face of Holden hovered over me, bearing every expression of concern; he had lost his cummerbund, his collar and tie were crumpled and pulled around through a right- angle, and his mussed hair appeared oddly to float around his face, like an oiled, black halo.
“Holden.” I found my throat was dry, and the taste of blood lingered in my mouth.
“Are you all right? Can you sit up?”
I lay there for a moment, allowing the sensations of my body, my limbs, to run through my mind. “I certainly feel stiff, as if I have been worked over by a few toughs; and yet I feel remarkably comfortable.” I turned my head, half-expecting to find that I was lying on some form of bunk bed, but only a rug—bloodstained—lay beneath me. “How long have I been out?”
Holden took my shoulder and lifted me to a sitting position; I seemed to bounce oddly on the Turkish rug and my stomach lurched briefly, as if I were falling. I dismissed this as dizziness. “Only a few minutes,” Holden said, “but—Ned, our situation has changed. I think you should prepare yourself for a shock.”
“A shock?”
I glanced around the craft. Holden himself was crouched on the rug, grasping its edge as if his life depended on it; poor Pocket remained strapped into his chair, his face as clammy as a plucked chicken.
And Traveller?
Sir Josiah stood before a porthole, his stovepipe screwed tightly to his head. In one hand he held a small notebook and pencil, and the other hand he held between his face and the window with fingers outstretched; blue-white light streamed in through the window, casting highlights from the polished platinum fixed to his face. (The other windows were darkened, I noticed, and the Cabin’s acetylene lamps had been lit.)
Then I wondered if I were still dreaming.
I have said that Traveller stood before his port, and such was indeed my impression on first glance; but as I studied him more closely I observed that his large shoes were some four inches above the oilskin. Indeed, a slight bend in Traveller’s knees allowed me to inspect the manufacturer’s name imprinted on the soles.
Thus Sir Josiah floated in the air like some illusionist, apparently without support.
I looked up into Holden’s face. His hand was on my shoulder. “Steady, now, Ned. Take it one item at a time—”
A wave of panic swept over me. “Holden, am I losing my mind?” I pushed at the rug with my hands, intending to draw my legs under me and stand up. The rug drifted from beneath my fingers, and I sailed into the air as if drawn by an invisible string. I scrabbled at the rug, first with my hands, then with the tips of my boots, but to no avail; and soon I was stranded, adrift in the air, arms and legs outstretched like some flailing starfish.
“Holden! What is happening to me?”
Holden remained seated on the rug, his fingers wrapped around it. “Ned, come down from there.”
“If you’ll tell me how, I will,” I shouted with feeling. Now, with a soft impact, my neck and shoulders collided with the upper, curving hull of the chamber. I reached behind my back with both hands, seeking a purchase, but my fingers slid over the frustratingly sheer leather of the walls, and I succeeded only in pushing myself forward so that I hung upside down in the air. It was as if Holden hung absurdly from the ceiling, and Pocket was suspended from the straps of his chair, while the Great Eastern model in its glass case dangled like some nautical chandelier.
My stomach revolved.
A strong hand shot out and grabbed my arm. “In God’s name, Wickers, keep your breakfast down; we’d never get the damn place cleaned up.”
It was Traveller; with his bony ankles wrapped in chair straps like some frock-coated monkey’s he hauled me through a disconcerting 180 degrees and hurled me bodily toward the floor. I landed close to a chair; with relief I grabbed at it, pulled myself down and strapped in.
In the exertion Traveller’s hat had become dislodged. Now it hung in the air, rotating like a dandelion seed; with grunts of irritation Traveller swatted at it until the hat sailed into his arms, and then he jammed it safely back on his head.
With comparative normality restored—save for the disturbing propensity of my legs to hover in mid- air—I remarked to Holden, quite coolly in the circumstances, “I have no doubt this all has a rational explanation.”
“Oh, indeed.” He brushed a hand over his black hair, plastering it into comparative order. “Although I suspect you will not enjoy the answer.”
Traveller floated once more before a blue-lit porthole (a different one, I noted, showing that the mysterious blue light had moved about the ship). I said loudly, “Sir Josiah, since you are responsible for our entrapment within this aerial brougham, I think you owe us some explanation of our condition.”
Traveller stood—or rather floated—quite at ease in the air, one hand resting on the sill of the port. From a pocket he extracted his small humidor, opened it and drew out a cigarette and—leaving the humidor dangling in mid-air!—struck a match, and soon the air was filled with tendrils of acrid gas. Traveller then mercifully stowed away the acrobatic humidor. “What is it that makes young men so damnably pompous? Our situation is obvious,” he said briskly.
I opened my mouth and would have replied intemperately, but Holden stepped in smoothly. “You must recall our unscientific vocations, sir; events are not always as self-explanatory to us as they are perhaps to you.”
“For example,” I said frostily, “perhaps you would be good enough to supply an explanation of this damnable mid-air floating. Is it some phenomenon connected with flight above the ground?”
Traveller rubbed the stub of human nose which remained between his eyes. “Good God, what do they teach in the schools these days? Is the work of Sir Isaac Newton a closed book?”
Stubbornly I said, “Please describe how the eminent Sir Isaac is arranging for you to float about in the air like a human dust-mote.”
“The Phaeton’s engines have been turned off,” Traveller said. “Perhaps you noticed a difference in the ambient noise.”
I was startled; for, until Sir Josiah pointed it out, I had not noticed the silence of the Cabin.
My heart leapt. “Then we are on the ground. But where?” I gazed out of the darkened windows—noting that the odd blue light had shifted once more, so that it shone through still another port. “It is night-time outside. Have we traveled to a region of darkness?” My mind raced; perhaps we were in North America or some other distant land—or what if we were stranded in some untrodden jungle? “But surely we have nothing to fear,” I said rapidly. “All we need do is climb down from the craft and seek out the nearest British Consul; no city on Earth is without representation, and comfort and aid will be provided—”
“Ned.” Holden looked at me steadily, although I noticed that his plump hands, still wrapped around the carpet, were trembling. “You must be still and try to understand. We are rather further from any Consulate than you imagine.”
Traveller spoke slowly and simply, as if to a child. “Let us take this one step at a time. The engines are still. But we are not on the ground. Surely that is obvious, even to a diplomat. Instead—without the rocket propulsion provided by the engines—the craft is falling freely. And we are falling within it; and so we float, as a marble would seem to float within a dropped box.” Sir Josiah continued with a long and complicated expansion of this concept, involving the lack of reaction forces between my backside and the chair I sat in…
But I had grasped the essential concept. We were falling.
A wave of panic swept over me and I grabbed at my restraints. “Then we are doomed, for we shall surely be dashed against the ground within moments!”
Traveller groaned theatrically and slapped at his thigh; and Holden said, “Ned, you don’t see it yet. We are in no danger of falling to the ground.”
I scratched my head. “Then I confess I am utterly at a loss, Holden.”
Traveller said slowly, “At the moment of the Albert’s launch—and the sabotage—Phaeton’s engines ignited. The craft rose into the air—and rose still higher, accelerating—and continued to rise, leaving the Earth far behind.”
I felt a chill course through my veins, and abruptly I felt faint, light-headed. “Then are we in the upper atmosphere?”
Traveller extinguished his cigarette in a tray built into the nearest seat, and extended an arm to me. “Ned, I think you should join me. Do you think you can do that?”
The thought of launching myself once more like some trampolinist filled me with dread; but I opened the buckles and pushed off the floating straps. I straightened up so that I floated in the air, and pushed with both hands against my seat. Like a log of wood I crossed the Cabin, fetching up at last against Traveller, whose strong hand propelled me to the porthole frame.
“Thank you, sir.”
The blue illumination picked out his battered, predatory profile. “Now if you will consider the view…”
I pulled my face close to the port. A globe hung suspended against a backdrop of stars, like some wonderful blue lantern; a third of it was in shadow, and lights twinkled in that darkness. On the bright side of the globe the familiar shapes of continents could be made out through a film of wispy cloud. A small, brilliant point of light came crawling around the globe’s far limb, evoking highlights from the ocean below.
This was, of course, the Earth, and the minuscule companion traversing patiently through its ninety- minute month was the Little Moon.
I felt Traveller’s hand on my shoulder. “Even the Empire seems diminutive from this distance, eh, Ned?”
“Are we still in the atmosphere?”
“I fear not. Beyond the hull of the Phaeton lies only the desert of space: airless, lightless—and some tens of degrees colder than hypothesized by Monsieur Fourier.”
“And are we still traveling away from the world?”
“We are.” Traveller extracted his notebook with some dexterity, using only the fingers of one hand, and checked calculations. “I have estimated our velocity by triangulating against known points on the globe below. My results are crude, of course, as I lack anything resembling the proper equipment—”
“Nevertheless,” Holden prompted.
“Nevertheless I have ascertained that we are falling away from the Earth at some five hundred miles per hour. And this is consistent with the time of some minutes during which the rockets thrust, driving us away from Earth at approximately twice the acceleration due to sea-level gravity.”
There was a sobbing behind me; I turned from the image of Earth. Pocket, still strapped into his chair, had buried his face in his hands; his shoulders shook and his thin hair fell about his fingers.
I explored my own feelings. So we were above the air. And it must be true after all that Traveller had journeyed this way before—not once, but many times. My mood of panic dissipated, to be replaced by a boyish sense of wonder.
Earth’s image shifted to my right, and I deduced that the ship must be rotating slowly. Through some trick of perspective the planet looked like a vast bowl, constructed of the finest china, but it was a bowl which held all the cities and peoples who had ever lived; and who could have guessed at such bewildering beauty?
I turned to Traveller and said, “I’ve no idea why, Sir Josiah, but I feel quite calm at present, and will feel calmer still when you ignite the Phaeton’s engines once more and return us to the ground.”
I could see kindliness and a mean impatience warring across Traveller’s scarred brow. “Ned, it was not I who launched the Phaeton in the first place.”
“It wasn’t? Then how—”
“The craft is directed from the Bridge. Do you not recall how I struggled to open the access hatch to the Bridge before the launch?”
I noticed now that the hatch in the ceiling remained locked, although it bore the scars of Traveller’s efforts to prize it open.
“Then who is responsible?”
“How can we know?” Traveller said.
“But we can speculate,” Holden said from the floor, a trace of anger emerging through his fear. “For this event and the wrecking of the Prince Albert are surely not unconnected.”
Fear sank deep into my thoughts. “You infer that we are in the hands of a saboteur?”
Holden said grimly, “I fear that a member of the same band of Prussians is at this moment at the controls of this craft.”
The full horror of our predicament at last broke over me. “We are trapped in this box, hurtling ever further from the Earth, and at the mercy of a crazed Prussian… Then we must gain access to the Bridge at once!”
I would have started for the hatch immediately, but Traveller laid a restraining hand on my arm. “I’ve spent some time trying that route, Ned. And even if access to the Bridge were somehow acquired, we would face many obstacles before a successful return to Earth.”
Holden demanded, “What obstacles, Traveller?”
Traveller smiled. “They will keep. And in the meantime, you are my guests on this craft. What do you say, Pocket?”
The wretched manservant could do nothing but shake his head, his face still buried in his sodden hands.
Traveller pulled at the crumpled lapel of my jacket. “You, for instance, are still encrusted with the blood you spilled during the launch. And what better than a hot bath to relieve the aches of your bruises, eh? Pocket, would you arrange that? And then perhaps we should take a little light supper—”
“Bath? A little light supper?” I could scarcely believe my ears. “Sir Josiah, this is neither the time nor the place. And Pocket is hardly in a fit state to—”
“On the contrary,” Traveller said heavily, fixing me with a knowing glare. “There is nothing better the redoubtable Pocket could do now than fix you a hot bath.” I stared back at Sir Josiah, and then turned to watch Pocket; and the manservant, despite a distressing clumsiness, displayed a markedly increased composure as he tackled these tasks.
I reflected that Josiah Traveller was perhaps blessed with a greater understanding of his fellow creatures than he cared to affect.
Already I knew that no end of marvels had been hidden within the padded walls of the Smoking Cabin; but I could scarcely have guessed that it would be possible to take a full, hot bath in conditions quite as comfortable as any middle-range English gentlemen’s club.
Pocket drew back a section of Turkish rug from the floor to reveal a series of panels; these folded up to form a screen some five feet tall within which I was able to remove my stained clothes in privacy. The section of floor beneath these panels was covered with overlapping rubber sheets, and there were taps laid into recesses in the floor. Pocket turned the taps—finding his body twisting rather comically in response—and from beneath the floor there came the sound of rushing water. At length a pleasant warmth and a few wisps of steam seeped around the rubber sheets, giving the place the atmosphere of a bathhouse.
When the water was ready Pocket bade me slide between the rubber sheets. Leaving only my head protruding into the air, I entered water which was just on the hot side of comfortable. The bath itself—the size and shape of a coffin, I deduced from its feel—lay beneath the rubber, and the overlapping sheets completely restrained the water which would otherwise have drifted about the air of the Cabin. I lay there feeling the aches depart from my bruised flesh. And when the brave Pocket brought me a brandy—sealed into a snifter-sized globe, from which one sucked the liquor through a small rubber nipple—and as the incongruous smells of cooking meat—and the sound of piano music!—drifted over my screen, I closed my eyes and found it quite impossible to believe that I was at that moment suspended in a small metal can and hurtling between the worlds at five hundred miles per hour.
I emerged from the bath and allowed Pocket to assist me with a towel. When I was dry I dressed, again with Pocket’s assistance. My clothes had been cleaned and brushed, only superficially, but sufficiently to give me the feeling of freshness and comfort.
“So, Pocket; and how are you now?”
“More myself, thank you, sir,” he said, evidently embarrassed.
“What is your view of our situation? Have you shared such adventures with Sir Josiah before?”
Pocket’s thin mouth twitched. “We’ve seen some scrapes, I dare say, sir,” he said, “but nothing quite on the scale of this little lot… I have two grandchildren, sir,” he blurted suddenly.
I straightened my jacket. “Never fear, old chap. I am quite sure it will not be long before Sir Josiah finds a way to reunite you with your family.”
“He is a resourceful bloke,” Pocket said; and with deft movements—already he seemed to be growing accustomed to our falling conditions—he folded away the privacy screen.
I touched his bony shoulder. “Tell me,” I said. “Is Traveller aware of your—infirmity?”
“I suppose you don’t know him all that well, sir. I doubt very much he is aware of any such thing.”
I was scarcely surprised to see that Traveller had unfolded a small piano from the Cabin wall; he floated before it, one foot locked around a fold-down leg, and played the jolly melodies I had heard earlier. Holden remained sprawled on, or against, his rug; he watched Traveller in a bemused fashion, currently the most ill-at-ease of the four reluctant voyagers.
He turned to me and forced a smile. “So, are your wounds healed?”
“Salved, at least; thank you.” I nodded at Traveller. “Will the marvels of the man not cease?”
Holden raised his eyebrows. “What amazes me is not the fact that he’s playing the piano in interplanetary space—no such feat could surprise me any more—but what he’s playing.”
I listened more closely, and was startled to recognize one of the bawdier music-hall melodies popular at the time.
Traveller became aware of our attention and, with an uncharacteristic touch of self-consciousness, abandoned his tune in mid-phrase. “Rather a neat little device,” he observed. “I picked it up at the Exhibition of ’51. Intended for yachts, I think.”
“Really?” Holden replied drily.
A gong sounded softly; I turned to observe Pocket hovering in the air, utterly composed, bearing a small disc of metal. “Supper is served, gentlemen.”
“Splendid!” Traveller cried, and he folded his piano with a snap.
And so I took part in one of the strangest repasts, surely, in the tangled story of mankind.
The three of us took our seats. I wore my harness loosely, just sufficiently tight to keep from floating around the place. Pocket spread napkins over our laps and helped us affix wooden trays to our knees with leather straps. The food itself had been wrapped in packets of greased paper which Pocket drew from one of the Cabin’s ubiquitous cubbyholes. Another hinged panel hid a small iron stove into which Pocket inserted his packets. The meal, when served, was of astonishingly high quality; we started with a fish mousse of intense but delicate flavor, followed by slices of roast lamb, potatoes and peas embedded in gravy; and concluded with a heavy syrup pudding. We drank—from globes—a satisfactory French vintage with the main course, and concluded with smaller globes of port, and thick, strongly flavored cigars.
The whole was served with silver cutlery and on china decorated with the livery of the Prince Albert company, which centered on a crest depicting the Neptunian sculpture decorating the Albert’s Promenade Deck.
It was a meal that would have graced many a high table across dear, distant England, even if some of the circumstances remained a little peculiar. The only constraint on the food seemed to be the necessity to glue it to its plate or bowl in some way. The gravy served with the main roast, for instance, was thus rather more glutinous than I would otherwise have preferred, but it served its purpose—save for one or two peas which bounced away from my fork.
But never before had I been served by a waiter who swam through the air like a fish.
Pocket was allowed to sit with us to eat, as there was no separate galley or kitchen.
When Pocket had cleared away the debris we sat in the silence of the Smoking Cabin, sipping at our port and watching Earthlight slant through the smoky air. Holden said, “I have to congratulate you on your table, Sir Josiah. I refer both to the quality of the provision, and to the ingenuity with which you have arranged your galley.”
“Hydraulic presses, that’s the secret,” Traveller said comfortably, and he stretched his long legs out in the air before him. “The food is prepared in a decent restaurant in London I favor from time to time—and then rapidly dried out, in hot ovens, and compressed into those packets you observed. The result is a small, compact bundle which can be stored for some weeks without spoiling, and which requires the application of only a little heat and water to be reconstituted into a fine meal.”
“Remarkable,” I observed. “And I would hazard that there are many more such meals stored in the walls of this vessel?”
“Oh, yes,” Traveller said. “We have some weeks’ provisions.”
Holden relit his cigar. (I noticed how oddly match flames behaved in this falling condition; the flame clustered in a little globe around the head of the match, and would extinguish itself rapidly if one did not draw the match gently through the air to new regions of oxygen.) The journalist said, “I am relieved that we are in little danger of starving to death. But perhaps this is the moment at which we should discuss the provisions available to us in general.”
The thought of starvation had not entered my limited imagination before that moment; but of course Holden was right. After all we were lost in a cold, desolate void, with only the contents of this fragile vessel available to sustain us. I reflected guiltily now on my enjoyment of the meal; perhaps we should already have entered a regime of rations.
“Very well. As for water,” Traveller said, “we carry several gallons.” He thumped the floor with one bony foot. “It is contained below, in a series of small tanks. One large tank would be unsuitable, you see, for as the craft flies there would be a danger of the water sloshing about—”
“Several gallons hardly sounds a lot,” I said uneasily. “Especially since I’ve already run a bath.”
Traveller smiled. “You need not worry, Wickers; bathing water is passed through a series of filters and pipes which enable it to be used several times over. It is fit to drink, even after four or five filterings.” He laughed at our expressions. “But the water we use in the closet—which Pocket will show you later—is vented directly, you will be relieved to hear, from the hull of the craft.” Then his expression melted to one of worry and calculation. “Nevertheless water remains our problem. For water is used as our reaction mass, and I very much fear that our Prussian friend may have expended rather too much of it for comfort.”
I would have asked for a discourse on this worrying mystery, reaction mass, but Holden was leaning forward urgently. “Sir Josiah, what of air? This is a small vessel. How can four men—or five, counting the Prussian—survive here for more than a few hours?”
Traveller waved a long-fingered hand languidly. “Sir, you need have no concerns. Once more an ingenious—if I may say so—filtering system is in operation. In one hour a healthy man will absorb the oxygen contained in twenty-five gallons of air, and replace it with carbonic acid, useless for respiration. A pump works continuously to draw the air from this Cabin—and the Bridge—through grilles. The air is passed through potassium chlorate, at a temperature several hundred degrees above room temperature; the chlorate decomposes to the chloride salt of potassium and releases oxygen to replenish the stale air. And then a measure of caustic potash is applied, which combines with the carbonic acid, so removing it from the air.
“We have stocks of the relevant chemicals sufficient to sustain life for several weeks.”
“Ah.” Holden nodded, evidently impressed.
“As for heat and light,” Traveller went on, “acetylene burners power the lamps above our heads, and also heat air which is passed through pipes embedded in the hull of the craft. In fact, bathed as we are in relentless sunlight, it is not cold which is our problem but the danger of being cooked. Hence the slow rotation of the craft which you have observed, and which serves to spread the burden of the sun’s radiation over all parts of the ship’s hull.”
“Then,” I said, “you see no obstacle to our surviving and returning safely to our home world.”
“I did not say that, Ned.” His cigar extinguished, Traveller lit up one of his preferred Turkish concoctions. “I designed the Phaeton to conduct observations in the upper atmosphere of the Earth. I even hoped one day to bring it into Earth orbit.” (This concept, which was new to me, was explained later by Holden; it involves the continual falling, under the influence of gravity, of a body around a planet, much as the Little Moon circles the Earth.) “But,” Traveller went on, “the Phaeton is not designed for a flight into deep space.”
He went on to describe the principles of the marvelous craft’s propulsion system. Anti-ice stoves, it seemed, were used to heat steam to monstrous temperatures. But instead of directing the expansion of the hot gas to a piston (as in the design of the land liner’s drive system), pipes led the steam to the nozzles I had observed affixed to the base of the craft, whence the steam was expelled. By hurling the superheated steam away from itself, the Phaeton drove itself forward. Thus a skater may push away his companion; the companion slides away across the lake, but the skater himself is impelled backwards by the reaction force. This is the principle of the rocket, and the “reaction mass” mentioned earlier by Traveller was the steam hurled away by the rocket.
This steam emerged from its nozzles at many thousands of miles per hour.
But even so, to enable the craft to move forwards with an acceleration of twice that due to Earth’s gravity, a full four pounds of water had to be lost to space every second.
Holden nodded gravely. “Then the weight of the completed craft can be no more than two or three tons.”
Traveller looked briefly impressed. “The weight of the craft is clearly at a premium,” he said. “And that drove my selection of aluminum as the principal construction material of the hull. It is far lighter than any iron alloy, or steel, despite its absurd price—a full nine sovereigns a pound, as compared to two or three pennies for cast iron.”
“Good Lord,” Holden said.
“My choice of water for the reaction material was driven by its wide availability and cheapness—even if the Phaeton were to crash into the sea, a tankful of brine would suffice to get me airborne again.”
I gestured to the darkened windows. “But there is no ocean out there.”
“No. We have only what remains in our tanks. And, although I cannot be sure without access to the Bridge, there lies our problem. I very much fear that our Prussian host may have exhausted our supply beyond the point at which we can turn the ship around and reverse its flight from Earth—and even if we could, there may be nothing left to work the rockets so that we could land in a controlled fashion, and not plummet like some meteor into the landscape.”
I shivered at these words, and crushed the port bulb in my hand.