"Ground under repair!" repeated the other stubbornly.
"Rub of the green!" shouted Mr. Tassifer.
A sound of heavy footfalls came from behind them, and they turned to see the man from the flying machine coming up the steps. He had taken off his helmet and looked very pale and tired and quite tame.
"Excuse me," he said huskily. "Can I telephone to the observatory from here? My name's Hooker and we've just come down from Ungava—five hours. Simply had to land on your course—nowhere else! You couldn't let me have a cigarette, could you?"
II
The morning after the successful descent of the Flying Ring among the bunkers and hazards of the golf-course of the Chevy Chase Club, at Washington, Professor Benjamin Hooker awoke to find himself not only famous but, beyond peradventure, the most interesting human being upon the terrestrial globe. Equipped with a marvelous engine capable of navigating space and of discharging a lavender ray which could annihilate anything from a fleet of battle-ships to a mountain-range, he was justly acclaimed "The First Citizen of the World." He, or the nation to which he should give his allegiance, could, it was properly assumed, control the destinies of mankind.
It had been universally known that the nations involved in the world-war had concluded a treaty of peace only under the threat of the mysterious being known as "Pax" to shift the axis of the globe and turn Europe into an arctic waste. It was now, therefore, generally believed that Hooker was himself none other than Pax, and that, having brought about the end of the war, he had returned with his aerial monster to pursue further scientific investigations under the auspices of the national government.
At any rate, Professor Benjamin Hooker, hitherto the most modest of all the retiring inhabitants of Cambridge, Massachusetts, now found himself in the spotlight of publicity, and hailed not only as the arbiter of world-politics but as the dictator of human destiny. True to his instincts, however, Professor Hooker paid no attention to this surfeit of adulation. The day after his arrival, having reported himself at the office of the Secretary of State, he retired to the Congressional Library to prepare his statement for the Smithsonian Institution, and, having rented a hall bedroom in a quiet lodging-house on H Street, resumed the unpretentious existence of a scientific investigator.
By arrangement with the government, the Flying Ring was moved to a large aerodrome beyond the city, where its mysteries were protected from public curiosity by a steel fence, thirty feet high, outside which, both by day and night, armed guards were constantly on patrol. For, in the Flying Ring and in Professor Hooker, the government of the United States realized that it possessed not only the key to permanent peace but to the safety and prosperity of mankind as a whole. It may be said quite confidently that the head on anybody other than Professor Hooker would have been completely turned. Daily there arrived at his boarding-house various ambassadorial representatives of foreign nations, who conferred upon him, in the name of their governments or monarchs, the highest decorations in their gift. But, as became a true American, he thought little of these decorations, and simply threw their crosses and other insignia into an empty and not very clean bureau drawer. All this fuss and feathers took, in his opinion, a confounded lot of time and interfered with the serious business of life. Yet his very modesty operated to increase his notoriety. Here was a shabby little man, with tousled brown hair, double-lensed spectacles, and a protruding Adam's apple—the most famous man in the world; nay, the most celebrated man since the creation—who, for simplicity and diffidence, surpassed both U. S. Grant and Admiral Dewey, who was content to go on wearing the same very baggy eighteen-dollar suit of clothes for years, and to live in a three-dollar-a-week hall bedroom, when his picture hung in every kitchen from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific coast.