"So long!" he remarked, as he shot forward, and, floating horizontally through the door of the control-room, disappeared.
"Easy way to go to work!" chuckled Atterbury. "Lie on your back and kick yourself down-town. Watch me!"
He lifted himself with his forearms until he was poised like an athlete above a pair of parallel bars. Then, extending his arms in front of him, he gave a jerk with his legs and swam through the doorway after Burke. Rhoda and Bennie looked at each other in amusement.
"Have you thought what is going to happen when we begin to get within the sphere of Medusa's attraction?" she inquired.
"You mean that, since that is the direction of our flight, gravitation will lift us up instead of down?"
"Exactly. We shall have to walk on the ceiling with our heads toward the floor."
"That won't be very convenient, will it?" he replied. "You know, I never thought of that at all. All our fixtures will be in just the wrong places. This table, for instance, will be way down below us and upside down at that. No—I mean it will be upside down above us on the ceiling. No—what do I mean?"
"I don't know," she retorted. "If we are right side up, it will be upside down, but if we are wrong side up, it will be right side down, for if the up side becomes the down side then the wrong side will be the right side, and the up side and the down side—"
"Stop—stop—For heaven's sake, stop!" shrieked Bennie. "You're talking nonsense, anyway. We're going to turn the Ring over before we slow down."
It is problematical in what result the complexities of the situation would have involved them had not Bennie suddenly noticed that the spot of sunlight upon the ceiling had shifted slightly to one side. Calling Rhoda's attention to this unexpected phenomenon, they returned to the deadlight, to find that the sun was no longer below them but considerably to one side, and, shielding their eyes with their hands, they were able to observe, where the vast black circle had been beneath the car, a shining crescent, light-bluish white in color and fifteen or twenty times the diameter of the moon. Neither Rhoda nor Bennie could repress a gasp of awe as they saw, for the first time, the enormous silvery arch of the earth pinned, as it were, against the utter blackness of space, with all its seas and continents plotted like a map.