Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [38]
When dinner was over, the Professor got up and said —
“Bring your cigar up into the study, Mr. Princeps. I want a pipe, and I can talk more comfortably there than here. Besides, I’ve something to show you.”
“All right, Professor; but if you’re going to have a pipe, I’ll do the same. One can think better with a pipe than a cigar. It takes too much attention.”
He tossed the half of his Muria into the grate and followed the Professor up to his sanctum, which was half study, half laboratory, and withal a very comfortable apartment. There was a bright wood-and-coal fire burning in the old-fashioned grate, and on either side of the hearth there was a nice, deep, cosy armchair.
“Now, Mr. Princeps,” said the Professor, when they were seated, “I am going to ask you to believe something which I dare say you will think impossible.”
“My dear sir, if you think it possible, that is quite enough for me,” replied Princeps. “What is it?”
The Professor took a long pull at his pipe, and then, turning his head so that his eyes met his guest’s, he replied —
“It’s a journey through the centre of the earth.”
Arthur Princeps bit the amber of his pipe clean through, sat bolt upright, caught the pipe in his hand, spat the pieces of amber into the fireplace, and said —
“I beg your pardon, Professor — through the centre of the earth? That’s rather a large order, isn’t it? I’ve just been reading an article in one of the scientific papers which goes to show that the centre of the earth — the kernel of the terrestrial nut, as it were — is a rigid, solid body harder and denser than anything we know on the surface.”
“Quite so, quite so,” replied the Professor. “I have read the article myself, and I admit that the reasoning is sound as far as it goes but I don’t think it goes quite far enough — I mean far enough back. However, I think I can show you what I mean in a much shorter time than I can tell you.”
As he said this, he got up from his chair and went to a little cupboard in a big bureau which stood in a recess beside the fireplace. He took out a glass vessel about six inches in diameter and twelve in height, and placed it gently on a little table which stood between the easy-chairs.
Princeps glanced at it and saw that it was filled with a fluid which looked like water. Exactly half-way between the surface of the fluid and the bottom of the glass there was a spherical globule of a brownish-yellow colour, and about an inch in diameter. As the Professor set the glass on the table, the globule oscillated a little and then came to a rest. Princeps looked at it with a little lift of his eyelids, but said nothing. His host went back to the cupboard and took out a long, thin, steel needle with a little disc of thin white metal fixed about three inches from the end. He lowered it into the fluid in the glass and passed it through the middle of the globule, which broke as the disc passed into it, and then re-shaped itself again in perfectly spherical form about it.
The Professor looked up and said, just as though he were repeating a portion of one of his lectures —
“This is a globule of coloured oil. It floats in a mixture of alcohol and water which is of exactly the same specific gravity as its own. It thus represents as nearly as possible the earth in its former molten condition, floating in space. The earth had then, as now, a rotary action on its own axis. This needle represents that axis. I give it a rotary motion, and you will see here what happened millions of years ago to the infant planet Terra.”
As he said this, he began to twirl the needle swiftly but very steadily between the forefingers of his right and left hand. The globule flattened and spread out laterally until it became a ring, with the needle and the disc in the centre of it. Then the twirling slowed down. The ring became a globule again, but it was flattened at either pole, and there was a clearly defined circular