Chapter 4 THE PLUTOCRATS RECONCILED.

Looking back now at that dreadful hour when the realization of our awful predicament burst upon us, I wonder that I preserved my own equilibrium.

The first shock came near to throwing me off my poise, but after that I gained the whip hand of my wits by swift and sure degrees.

I verily believe the professor would have been strangled by Meigs, aided and abetted by Popham and Markham, had I not rushed to his rescue. I had muscles of iron, and after I had caught Meigs by the nape of the neck and thrown him backward, I planted myself between Quinn and his foes.

"Leave the professor alone," said I. "You men show mighty poor judgment, it strikes me, in trying to lay violent hands on him."

"He deserves death," babbled Meigs. "He had no business shooting us into space in this summary manner."

Fear and anger had made Meigs childish. He measured our dilemma in terms so common a smile came to my lips.

"Judgment, poor judgment!" sniffed Popham. "Look at Gilhooly, and then talk about poor judgment, if you can."

In truth, the railway magnate presented a sorry spectacle. His clothing was in wild disorder, his hair was rumpled about his head, and he was hopping back and forth with two fingers in the air.

He was under the impression that he was dealing in railroad stocks, completing the huge transaction that had made him the talk of two continents.

"This professor ought to be flayed alive," declared Markham. "Where are we going, and when will we get there?"

"Now," said I. "you are striking the keynote. Who knows where we are going if the professor doesn't? And who knows when we shall arrive there if it is out of his power to tell? We need the professor, for if we are to be saved it will be his knowledge that does it."

"But what will my family think?" whimpered Meigs. "And my business interests!"

He threw up his hands and fell back in his seat with a groan. Then abruptly he straightened up again.

"This is a dream! By gad, it must be! The whole affair is too outrageously unreal for any sane man to believe."

Gilhooly gave a maudlin chuckle.

"I was dead sure I'd get that last block of X.Y.&Z. stock! That road is the last span in my network of ties and rails. Ha! Now we'll see! Now!"

Meigs shivered. Gilhooly's maunderings struck sharply at his desire to coddle himself with a myth.

"It's awful to have Gilhooly like that," spoke up Augustus Popham. "If he had not been thrown out of balance, his wide knowledge of matters relating to transportation might have proved of inestimable service to us now."

Professor Quinn laughed. It was an eerie laugh, and it shook me to hear it.

"Oh, you!" cried Markham reproachfully, whirling on Quinn. "After causing this disaster and overthrowing as brilliant a mind as there ever was in Wall Street, you have the heart to indulge in levity. Look here: how far are we from the earth at the present moment?"

"That is a difficult matter to estimate, even approximately," answered Quinn calmly. "Ordinarily, gravity exerts a force that can be measured definitely on the earth's surface. A body falling freely from rest acquires a velocity which is equal to the product of thirty-two and one-fifth feet and the number of seconds during which the motion has lasted. What is the time now?"

Three gentlemen reached for their watches, failed to find them, and turned hard looks on me. I appreciated their dilemma and drew from my vest an open-face timepiece that was personal property and honestly come by.

"It is twelve-fifteen," said I.

Quinn took a pencil and notebook from his pocket and did some figuring.

"We might be a little more than two miles from our native planet," said he, "but--"

"Only two miles!" cried the three exiles in chorus.

"You can take us back, sir," said Popham, who had been pacing the floor nervously. "Shut off the power of this infernal machine and let us drop back to where we belong. Two miles is no great matter. Your castle is a slow freight compared with some of Gilhooly's express trains."

"I cannot take you back, sir," returned the professor, "and I would not if I could. You did not hear me out. The law of velocity, recited for your benefit a moment ago, does not measure the speed of this car."

"No?" murmured Markham.

"Decidedly not. The earth sweeps along in its orbit at the rate of eighteen miles to the second, while some aerolites and meteoroids attain a speed of twenty and thirty miles to the second. In building this car, I equipped it with an anti-gravity block geared up to fifty miles to the second. The lever on the wall"-and here Quinn turned and pointed to it--"is thrown so as to give us the maximum."

"In other words," said Popham feebly, "we are sailing skyward at a rate of-of three thousand miles per-per minute?"

"Presumably. As we left my city lot in New York at about eleven-fifteen, it follows that we have been one hour on the way."

"And should be one hundred and eighty thousand miles from home," faltered Meigs.

"About that," answered the professor calmly. "I do not know just how much our progress was impeded by the atmospheric envelope of the earth, but I think we may call our distance from the mother orb some one hundred and eighty thousand miles, in round numbers."

These startling figures came near to unsettling the three gentlemen again. In that flight through space we were confronting immensities well-nigh beyond our puny comprehension. And the professor was not yet done.

"In the storeroom overhead," he continued, "I have a supply of cubes and insulating compound which I can combine and give tremendous added velocity to the car."

"I am sure we are traveling fast enough," said Meigs, leaning back on the divan hopelessly dejected.

"If you are now ready to listen to reason," proceeded Quinn. "I will tell you how Mr. Munn here saved your lives by rescuing me from your mad attack."

"Our lives, forsooth!" exclaimed Markham bitterly. "Of what value is life to us, situated as we are?"

"That is one way to look at it, of course," rejoined Quinn caustically. "But I did not exile you into planetary space for the purpose of wiping you out of existence."

"You might as well have done so," said Popham severely. "That is what this harum-scarum plot of yours amounts to in the long run."

"You may not care to learn how I am preserving you at the present moment," continued Quinn, "nor how I shall do so in the future, yet I will tell you so that you may understand how much you owe to Mr. Munn's foresight and courage."

I was beginning to entertain a high regard for Quinn in spite of what he had done. He may have been laboring under terrible delusions, but his resource certainly commanded respect.

"To my forethought," he continued, "is due the fact that you are breathing oxygen at this moment; and had I not invented a liquid which fortifies animate or inanimate bodies against heat and cold, our rush through the atmosphere of the earth would have incinerated this car and its contents-nay, would have caused it to explode and settle back on our native planet in impalpable powder."

These were things that none of us, aside from the professor, had so much as taken thought of. My respect for him was growing into something like awe, and I fancied I detected traces of the same sentiment in the other three.

"There are roving bodies in space," Quinn went on, noting with apparent satisfaction the interest he had aroused, "with which we might come into collision. I have a good telescope at the observatory window upstairs, and while I cannot guide this car, I can at least increase or slacken its speed so as to dodge any other derelict that may come into dangerous proximity with us."

"Hadn't you better be up there on the look-out?" queried Markham in some trepidation.

He was manifesting an interest in his personal safety that pleased the professor.

"There is not much danger at present," returned Quinn. "When we have plunged farther into the interstellar void, it will be well to stand watch and watch about at the telescope."

"Will it not be possible to land on some other planet, Mars, for instance?" queried Popham with sudden hope.

"I should prefer Mars," added Meigs, reflecting the hope shown in his friend's face. "They have been signaling from Mars, and perhaps we can find out what they want over there."

Quinn shook his head.

"We are in the hands of fate, gentlemen," said he. "We may drop into some port, but what that port will be is beyond my power even to surmise."

"The moon isn't so far off," suggested Markham.

"Only two hundred and forty thousand miles," said Quinn.

"We should be there in less than two hours from the time of starting," remarked Meigs, after a mental bout with the figures.

"If I wished," said Quinn, "I could increase our speed; traveling at the rate we are, however, something will have to be deducted for the resistance of the earth's atmosphere. If we drop on a planet it must be a planet with an atmosphere. The moon has none, and consequently is a dead world. Besides, fate might not throw us into its vicinity, or--"

"Just a minute, sir," interposed Markham, "for I am a man who likes to understand thoroughly every situation with which he is called upon to deal. You invited us to your castle, not, I am constrained to believe, to have us victimized by Munn, here, nor to have us invest in any of your discoveries, but to snatch us away from the scene of our labors. Is that correct, Professor Quinn?"

"Entirely so, Mr. Markham," replied Quinn.

"Evidently," proceeded Markham, "your plot has cost you some time and labor. You had first to find your gravity-resisting compound--"

"The plot followed as a result of my discovery," smiled the professor. "I did not first evolve the plot and then go searching for means to get you off the earth. When I had made the discovery, it remained for me to give it to the world-or to better the world by taking you four gentlemen away from it. Had I given the public the benefit, you shrewd men of affairs might have devised means for setting it aside, or for controlling it. Not being a business man myself, I feared to take chances. For that reason the present enterprise appealed to me."

"You have planned so well in the smaller details that I wonder you overlooked the main point."

"And that is--"

"What you are going to do with us, now that your plan has succeeded."

The professor tossed his hands deprecatingly as though that was really the most insignificant part of his startling scheme.

"We can't go bobbing around through interstellar space," grumbled Popham. "I don't relish the idea of being cribbed, cabined and confined in a steel room indefinitely. I should go mad from the very thought."

"It's awful to contemplate," said Meigs, casting a melancholy glance through the iron latticework at one of the windows.

The bags of loot were in that vicinity, at the moment, and his glance swerved reproachfully to me.

"We shall make a landing, I have no doubt," said the professor soothingly, "somehow and somewhere."

"By gad, sir," cried Popham, bringing his fist emphatically down on the table, "I don't like such a hit-and-miss way of doing things. Whenever I set out to accomplish anything, the goal is always clear in my mind; yet, here I am, through no desire of my own, afloat in the great void, without a single aim or a remote prospect. If we are going to land anywhere-and you remain firm in your decision not to take us back to our native planet-I demand that you make landfall on some orb that is worth while."

"Very good, Popham," approved Meigs. "Unless I am greatly mistaken, that was the very idea Markham had in mind when he began questioning the professor. Eh, Markham?"

"It was," replied Markham. "A full knowledge of where we are going is necessary to a thorough understanding of our-er-most remarkable situation. Now, there are worlds larger than the one we have recently left. Personally, I am predisposed in favor of a large planet-one on which there are traction interests, fuel supplies, and products of the soil similar to those we have been accustomed to."

Under the spell of Markham's words, Popham began to glow and expand. Meigs, all attention, pressed a little closer.

"The bigger the planet the bigger our field of operations!" cried Popham. "What's the matter with Jupiter?"

"Or Saturn?" echoed Meigs.

"Or Neptune?" put in Markham.

"What's the matter with the whole solar system?" inquired Quinn, with gentle irony. He turned to me. "Observe, Mr. Munn, how extravagant are the ideas inspired by monopoly! These gentlemen are hardly started on their journey into space before they forget the business interests, the friends and the environment they are leaving behind and begin planning the commercial conquest of the stars!" He shook his head forebodingly. "Your regeneration," he added to the millionaires, "calls for a landing on some barren world, some outcast of the solar system, where you will have nothing to do but think over the evil of your past and learn something of the duty you owe your fellow-men."

Popham, Markham, and Meigs were visibly annoyed by the professor's remarks. Withdrawing as far as the limits of the steel structure would allow, they put their heads together and held a brief but animated conversation in tones so low that the professor and I could not overhear.

"Think of that, professor!" I muttered. "And yet there are people who find fault with a respectable burglar."

"Softly, Mr. Munn," returned Quinn. "Before we are done with this journey I am fain to believe that all of you will have a different outlook upon life, and a higher regard for your duties of citizenship."

Just then, Popham turned from his friends and stepped toward the professor. His manner was truculent-probably just such a manner as he was accustomed to use in facing a board of obstinate directors.

"If you will not return us to our native planet, Professor Quinn," said he sharply, "then we shall stand upon our rights. We are unalterably opposed to landing upon any orb whose diameter measures less than--"

At that instant a most astounding thing happened. The car ducked sideways, throwing the whole structure out of plumb.

Loose articles began to drop from shelves and other places and to slide across the floor to the lowest point. By a quick movement I saved the lamp and braced myself in an upright position.

Cries of terror went up from Markham, Meigs, and Popham.

"Where's Gilhooly?" shouted the professor.

He was answered by a wild yell from overhead.

"He's in the storeroom!" cried Quinn. "Follow me with that lamp, Munn-quick!"

The professor rushed for the stairway and I made after him with what speed I could.