Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [57]
“However, we finally learned to regulate the thing. And now you see this car is furnished with a Helium screen, which, once put into the non-gravitating state, is adjusted and regulated by the voyager, who sits inside this small non-conducting chamber, well provided with stored oxygen for breathing. Of course, many experiments were made before Bronson’s last attempt to reach Mars.”
“But how,” I asked, “can a traveler subsist in so small a space through such a long journey?”
“Oh, it isn’t long,” was his answer. “It takes about five hours to reach the limit of the earth’s atmosphere. When that has been passed, the screen or shield is so adjusted that the car attains to a speed of one hundred thousand miles per second, there being no friction in vacuous spaces to retard its progress. Now, the whole distance to Mars being forty-eight million miles, it should take the stellar car, at the rate of one hundred thousand miles a second, only four hundred and eighty seconds to traverse it. Four hundred and eighty seconds are only eight minutes. But when the car reaches the atmosphere of Mars, the screen must be molecularly rearranged again, so as not to resist too greatly the attraction of that planet. The car must descend through the Mars atmosphere slowly, by ordinary flotation-shutter apparatus.”
(The shutter apparatus for sailing in the air and propelling ships was, I found, one of the most useful inventions of the age; and I shall describe it later.)
“To pierce through the Mars atmosphere, then, involves a delay of three hours more, So we have; for earth’s atmosphere, five hours; for Mars atmosphere, three hours; and the intermediate distance, eight minutes; that is, in all, eight hours and eight minutes.”
“Whew!” I exclaimed in amazement.
Graemantle laughed indulgently.
“And at what rate do your electric trains move?”
“About a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”
“Then it takes no longer to go to Mars by the stellar car than it takes to come from New York to Wisconsin?”
“No,” said he; “why should it? Time is only an idea. You thought you knew that before; but now you begin to realize it.”
“Still,” I objected, “the journey to Mars has not yet actually been accomplished.”
At this moment a small side door opened and Wraithe and Stanifex, who had just come to Penokee by the electric, and by walking balloon, entered. “Quite right,” remarked Stanifex, the doubter, who had heard my last words.
“Wait and see,” retorted Graemantle. “I still have confidence.”
The floor now opened, and some tables ascended noiselessly through a trap door, delicately set out with pleasing viands, most of which were new to me. Animal food was not present, and the articles of diet laid before us were chiefly vegetable nitrogenous products made by the fixature of nitrogen. Thus we had vegetable steaks, partridges, and so on, which contained all the nutriment of beef and bird without their heaviness, and were exceedingly palatable. Among the liquids we had a new sort of milk somewhat resembling koumiss, but with a daintier taste and a delicious fragrance; also sparkling colored water and a compound called “Life-brew,” which was as stimulating as wine, but more sustaining, and nonalcoholic. Alcoholic drinks, I learned, had gone out completely; not by law, but by common-sense, and were used only in medicine or for the punishment of criminals, in rare cases. There was nothing that malefactors dreaded more than a sentence to a month or two of rum, whisky, brandy, or even champagne diet.
I took no note of time, for my three-century sleep