A strange sight, the start of the Hooker Expedition!
Doctor Jelly's coloured housemaid had just thrown a pail of blue-gray suds over his front steps—it was 6:30 A.M.—and was on the point of resignedly kneeling and swabbing up the doctor's porch, when she saw the door of the professor's residence open cautiously and a curious human exhibit, the like of which had ne'er before been seen on sea or land, surreptitiously emerge. It was Prof. Bennie Hooker—disguised as a salmon fisherman!
Over a brand-new sportsman's knickerbocker suit of screaming yellow check he had donned an English mackintosh. On his legs were gaiters, and on his head a helmetlike affair of cloth with a visor in front and another behind, with eartabs fastened at the crown with a piece of black ribbon—in other words a "Glengarry." The suit had been manufactured in Harvard Square, and was a triumph of sartorial art on the part of one who had never been nearer to a real fisherman than a coloured fashion plate. However, it did suggest a sportsman of the variety usually portrayed in the comic supplements, and, to complete the picture, in Professor Hooker's hands and under his arms were yellow pigskin bags and rod cases, so that he looked like the show window of a harness store.
"Fo' de land sakes!" exclaimed the Jellys' coloured maid, oblivious of her suds. "Fo' de Lawd! Am dat Perfesser Hookey?"
It was! But a new and glorified professor, with a soul thrilling to the joy of discovery and romance, with a flash in his eyes, and the savings of ten years in a large roll in his left-hand knickerbocker pocket.
Thus started the Hooker Expedition, which discovered the Flying Ring and made the famous report to the Smithsonian Institution after the disarmament of the nations. But could the nations have seen the expedition as it emerged from its boarding-house that September morning they would have rubbed their eyes.
With the utmost difficulty Prof. Bennie Hooker negotiated his bags and rod cases as far as Harvard Square, where, through the assistance of a friendly conductor with a sense of humour, he was enabled to board an electric surface car to the North Station.
Beyond the start up the River Moisie his imagination refused to carry him. But he had a faith that approximated certainty that over the Height of Land—just over the edge—he would find Pax and the Flying Ring. During all the period required for his experiments and preparations he had never once glanced at a newspaper or inquired as to the progress of the war that was rapidly exterminating the inhabitants of the globe. Thermic induction, atomic disintegration, the Lavender Ray, these were the Alpha, the Sigma, the Omega of his existence.
But meantime[3] the war had gone on with all its concomitant horror, suffering, and loss of life, and the representatives of the nations assembled at Washington had been feverishly attempting to unite upon the terms of a universal treaty that should end militarism and war forever. And thereafter, also, although Professor Hooker was sublimely unconscious of the fact, the celebrated conclave, known as Conference No. 2, composed of the best-known scientific men from every laud, was sitting, perspiring, in the great lecture hall of the Smithsonian Institution, its members shouting at one another in a dozen different languages, telling each other what they did and didn't know, and becoming more and more confused and entangled in an underbrush of contradictory facts and observations and irreconcilable theories until they were making no progress whatever—which was precisely what the astute and plausible Count von Koenitz, the German Ambassador, had planned and intended.
The Flying Ring did not again appear, and in spite of the uncontroverted testimony of Acting-Consul Quinn, Mohammed Ben Ali el Bad, and a thousand others who had actually seen the Lavender Ray, people began gradually, almost unconsciously, to assume that the destruction of the Atlas Mountains had been the work of an unsuspected volcano and that the presence of the Flying Ring had been a coincidence and not the cause of the disruption. So the incident passed by and public attention refocussed itself upon the conflict on the plains of Châlons-sur-Marne. Only Bill Hood, Thornton, and a few others in the secret, together with the President, the Cabinet, and the members of Conference No. 1 and of Conference No. 2, truly apprehended the significance of what had occurred, and realized that either war or the human race must pass away forever. And no one at all, save only the German Ambassador and the Imperial German Commissioners, suspected that one of the nations had conceived and was putting into execution a plan designed to result in the acquirement of the secret of how the earth could be rocked and in the capture of the discoverer. For the Sea Fox, bearing the German expeditionary force, had sailed from Amsterdam twelve days after the conference held at Mainz between Professor von Schwenitz and General von Helmuth, and having safely rounded the Orkneys was now already well on its course toward Labrador. Bennie Hooker, however, was ignorant of all these things. Like an immigrant with a tag on his arm, he sat on the train which bore him toward Quebec, his ticket stuck into the band on his hat, dreaming of a transformer that wouldn't—couldn't—melt at only six thousand degrees.