"How fast are we going now?" she asked in awe.
Bennie glanced at his watch.
"It's just twenty minutes since we started. We must be doing about twelve thousand feet a second, and are probably well over a thousand miles from the earth already."
They lay speechless, gazing down through the deadlight for ten or fifteen minutes—at the end of which period Bennie suddenly started to his feet.
"By George, I almost forgot something!" he exclaimed. "It's time for me to rig my ropes."
Hastily going to an adjacent cupboard, he removed several coils of clothes-line, which he began to fasten systematically to small steel staples attached to the floor, sides, and ceiling of the chart-room, running them back and forth and diagonally across the interior.
"Is this wash-day?" jocularly inquired Rhoda.
"Those are life-lines," replied Bennie. "Another twenty minutes, and we shall stop our engines and coast. Then you'll find it difficult to get around without something of this sort. Gravitation will no longer be felt. I figured it all out long ago. You see there isn't really any 'up' or 'down' out here, and, if you get out of position, there is nothing to pull you back where you belong again, unless you have something to grab hold of."
In fact, the room now looked as if a gigantic spider had been at work in it. Clothes-lines radiated everywhere from the chart-table, one leading directly to the door of the air-lock, another to the wardrobe, and the last into the control-room, where Atterbury was likewise engaged in rigging more "aerial roads."
These precautionary measures having been arranged, they all partook, at Bennie's suggestion, of a light supper, in order to avoid the inconvenience to which they might be subjected in handling plates and glasses when, later, the dynamo having been shut off, there should be no downward pressure from the lift of the Ring.