Yet, accustomed as Rhoda now was to supernormal situations and surroundings, Bennie's practical suggestion of landing on the moon, which, after all, was the one celestial body with which they were at all familiar, seemed utterly inconceivable of execution.
"The moon!" she repeated vaguely. "The moon!"
She had seen the moon off and on with the greatest regularity for nearly thirty years—had photographed it, drawn pictures of it, made calculations about it, and read all sorts of fanciful yarns concerning it and its imaginary inhabitants. She really knew a good deal about it and could call some of its mountains and dried-up seas by name—Copernicus, for instance, and Tycho—but she had never taken it seriously—had regarded it rather as a sort of stage-setting for the earth. Thus, when Bennie proposed, almost casually, to set foot on what had hitherto been nothing more than an abstraction or figure of speech, it left her uncomprehending. She had always associated the moon with harvest-fields, straw-rides, weddings, and green cheese. There was a "man in the moon," a "lady in the moon" and "two children carrying a pail" up there—in it. That was the moon of her childhood and when she was "off duty"—the real moon. The other one—the imaginary moon, far less real in every respect—was the one she knew in her work—a dead world of pitted craters, dry oceans, marked with strange, shining furrows and concentric circles, just so many thousand miles from the earth and having regular habits that could be absolutely relied upon. That was not the real moon at all. The genuine moon, as far as she was concerned, was the old-fashioned one—that cast its yellow light over pumpkin-sprinkled fields and down leafy lanes, or rose like a huge red lantern out of a sparkling blue-black ocean. The real moon signified coon-hunting, fried chicken, banjos, and "Merrily We Roll Along." The imaginary moon meant the "Mappa Selenographica," by Beer and Madler.
"The moon!" she murmured again.
"Yes," remarked Bennie curtly; "the moon—that moon right up there"—he glanced up and wrinkled his forehead—"that ought to be there, I mean! Say, there's something queer about all this! Hard alee, Burke! Steer for the moon!"
The aviator pressed his control-lever, and once more the moon floated overhead into their field of vision. But what a moon! Twenty-four times her usual diameter—her circular craters plainly visible to the naked eye, her physical configuration seemingly becoming more and more distinct each moment.
"But can we land?" protested the girl, reawakening to the perils of their position. "Suppose we can find no suitable spot—particularly with our machinery out of control? There will be no landing-stage—"
"We must land!" he interrupted fiercely. "What's more, we've got to turn the Ring upside down so as to land right side up. It's going to be ticklish business, because we must bring our machine to rest within a hundred miles or so of the lunar surface, and we're traveling more than ten miles a second at the present moment."
"But how can you turn the Ring upside down away out here in space?" she expostulated.
"By slanting the tractor at its maximum angle," he answered. "Since there is little gravitational force acting on us now, the Ring will then rotate around its center of inertia and bring the moon below us. We can then straighten out the tractor and use its full force to slow down our velocity. As soon as we get within striking-distance of the moon, we will reduce our power and come down by gravitational force."