"Winslow," he said, "have you any rope handy?"
The inventor was annoyed. "Why, yes, I guess so. Why? What do you want of it?"
"I want you to tie me up again," said Jerry Foster. "I want you to carry me off as you planned. I want to go with you."
The tall man stared at the quiet, determined face before him. Slowly his own strained features smoothed into kindly lines. He grasped tight at Jerry's hand.
"I was dreading that part of it," he confessed slowly: "going alone. It would have been lonely--out there...."
The shining cylinder of aluminum alloy was hurtling through space. No longer was it a ship of the air; it had thrown itself far beyond that thin gaseous envelope surrounding the earth; out into the black and empty depths that lay beyond. And in it were two men, each reacting in his own way to an adventure incredible. One was deep in the computation of astronomical data; the other athrill with a quivering, nerve-shaking joy that was almost breath-taking.
A metal grating that had formed the rear wall of their cabin was now the floor. Winslow had thrown the ship into a vertical climb that made of their machine a projectile shooting straight out from the earth. Gravitation held them now to the grating floor. And, stronger even than the earth-pull, was the constant acceleration of motion that made their weight doubled again and again.
The inventor moved ponderously, with leaden limbs, to take sights from the windows above, to consult his maps of the sky, check and re-check his figures. But Jerry had eyes only for the earth they had left.
Flat on the grating he lay, his eyes over a thick glass in a proturbance of the shell that allowed him to stare and stare at what lay directly below. He watched the familiar things of earth vanish in fleecy clouds; through them there formed the great ball, where oceans and continents drew slowly into focus.
And now he was filled with a sense of great solitude. The world, in its old, familiar companionship, was gone--probably forever. The earth--_his_ earth--_his_ world--that place of vast distances on land and on sea, of lofty mountain ranges and heaving oceans, of cities, countries, continents--was become but a toy. A plaything from the nursery of some baby god, hanging so quiet in space he could almost reach and take it in his hands.