PIRATIANS BEGONE

Chapter 16

department of life.

"It runs our errands, takes us from place to place, builds our houses,cooks our food, and even is applied to the growth of our food when weare in haste for any article. Its laws are so well understood that thereis no fear of personal injury from its use, and I will show you howfamiliar an aid it is to us. Here," he continued, taking from hispocket a brightly polished case of metal, "is a compact storage battery,containing, not electricity itself, of course, but elements so preparedthat a simple touch will start into motion a powerful current, able toperform almost any task I may ask of it. This case, you see, is so smalland light that it is no burden, and yet it contains power enough toserve me for many days. Of course, all our work of a fixed characterhas appliances with the power permanently attached, and these portablereservoirs are carried about with us only for detached and unexpectedtasks."

To my experienced eye the ship healer's face looked a little skeptical atthis last remark, and he said:

"But how can the power be applied in these emergencies? Suppose, forexample, it were necessary for you to go from here to the other end ofthis vessel in half a second, how would the electricity in your box helpyou do it?"

"If I really thought, ship healer, you wanted to be rid of me I would betempted to try it; but, as I told your companion just now, you hadbetter learn all you can of our history before you begin to see what wecan do.

"I haven't told you half of the wonders performed by this marvelouspower. It has long been our chief reliance for rapid traveling. You findus in this ship; but, although navigation is a perfected science, thismode of traveling is tedious, and ships are used only for pleasure andsuch out-of-the-way trips as this. Journeys from place to place overestablished routes are made in large tubes, in which the cars arepropelled by electricity. These tubes run both on land and water, beingsuspended in the latter a little way below the surface. Both tubes andcars are air-tight, and the adjustment is so perfect that the cars slidealong with the greatest ease. Riding in an air-tight chamber would notbe pleasant if much time were to be occupied in that way, but the carsare propelled so swiftly that the time from one station to another ishardly appreciable. At every stop the cars are opened and apparatus setin motion which changes the air completely almost in a moment. Where thetubes run under water shafts for air are put in at the stations. Thereis always a double line, one tube for each direction. No chance is leftfor accidents.

"Of course we navigate the air, swiftly and safely. If not in too muchhaste we always take the aerial passage, and often on a pleasant day thesky over a great city will be as full of air ships, or balloons as westill sometimes call them, as its harbor is of pleasure boats. In thisdepartment inventors had a fruitful field, the use of aluminum offeringabundant opportunity for the greatest variety of devices, and thedevelopment of the flying machine was one of the most interestingfeatures in the march toward our present high civilization. Perhaps thepresence of so many electrical machines in the air and the utilizationof so much electricity on land and water have, after thousands of years,done much toward freeing us from the thunderstorm, with its deadlylightning. We have fairly robbed the clouds of their electricity andtaught it to do our work.

"Swift and economical as our modern electric cars are, there is onemode of traveling sometimes adopted which is more rapid still, andthe cheapest and in some respects the easiest way of getting over thesurface of the globe ever dreamed of. It was discovered by accident,just before accidents entirely ceased, in the following manner:

"A couple of scientific enthusiasts, of the kind we call cranks--I don'tkno

w what you call them on the earth--conceived the idea that theycould find something better to take the place of the highly purified andbuoyant gases which we used in our flying machines. They observed, inthe lofty flights they were accustomed to make into the air, that asthey ascended the atmosphere grew lighter, and this led them to thinkthey might go far into the upper regions, collect large quantities ofrarefied air, bring it down, and use it for floating flying machines. Ofcourse, they understood that any vessel this thin air was put into mustbe strong enough to prevent being collapsed by the weight of the denseratmosphere on the surface. But they thought small spherical vessels ofvery thin metal could be made that would withstand this pressure andstill hold enough to float and carry some weight besides. They had alarge number of these hollow balls made and started on a trial trip,expecting to bring down only a small quantity each time. But, in theirendeavor to obtain the very best quality of lifting material possible,they went much higher than they intended, although this did not causethem as much

inconvenience as might have been expected, since they wereprovided with the latest improved breathing apparatus. The result oftheir adventure, however, was a discovery of such magnitude that itdrove from their minds all thought of their real errand and we neveragain heard of that project. After remaining at an extreme height a fewhours, the surface of the planet being hidden by clouds, they beganto descend, and when they were near enough to see the features of thecountry below them, everything looked strange and unknown. They couldnot account for this, but continued their fall, fully persuaded that itmust be their own world and not some other which they were approaching.But even if they had not been correct in that, they could hardly havebeen more surprised than they were to find, on landing, that they werealmost exactly on the opposite side of the globe from the place wherethey made the ascent. They seemed to have traveled half way around theworld in that incredibly short space of time, when in reality they hadremained stationary and the world had traveled around them. The fact is,they had risen above all the denser portion of the planet's atmosphere,and had reached a stratum of extremely rarefied air, which, it seems,does not accompany the globe in its revolution. Of course, the factswere at once heralded to the four quarters of the world, and the twoaerial travelers found themselves famous. But they did not wish tolet such an astounding discovery rest upon the results of a singleexperiment, and so they proved themselves worthy of their new fameby going home the way they came. That is, they mounted their flyingmachine, rose again to the same lofty height, remained there about thesame time as before, descended, and were near their home."