"I'm really worried about her," came Mrs. Tassifer's voice plaintively from within the vehicle.
And then Bentham suddenly slapped his leg and uttered a whoop of surprise, consternation, and baffled rage. With his right fist raised in imprecation toward the Milky Way, the assistant solicitor of the Department of Justice descended with astonishing agility to the ground and thrust his head into the open window of the car.
"She's done it!" he yelled retributively.
"Done what?" demanded Mrs. Tassifer.
"Gone along with 'em! Up there!" He pointed vaguely in the direction taken by the Ring.
"Oh," protested his wife, in a shocked tone, "she hasn't! She wouldn't have! Why, it wouldn't be proper—she, an unmarried woman, alone with three strange men! I'd never be able to look any of my friends in the face again. You must be mistaken, Bentham."
"Well, she has, all right!" he replied vindictively. "That's just exactly what she's done. I always said she wasn't all there—rooms to let—bats in her belfry—balmy on the crumpet. And now she's proved it! I'm glad she isn't my niece! All right, driver; you may start along."
III
Two hundred and forty thousand miles away, Rhoda, descending to the lunar plain, strode rapidly in the direction of the ridge behind which the summit had now disappeared, and, in the course of about twenty minutes, found herself at the foot of a wall of impassable rock which curved unexpectedly and fell away into a vast basin. Turning to retrace her path, she discovered that the peak which she had climbed was no longer visible and that she had lost all sense of direction. To the north, to be sure, her passage was barred, but there was nothing to indicate whether the Ring lay in any one of three directions. Puzzled by the disappearance of the peak, she sprang blindly across the plain, running back on what she fancied was the right course. But the Ring was nowhere to be seen! It had vanished absolutely. And then she recalled the fact that Bennie had told her that the supply of liquid air carried in the cylinders of their vacuum armor would last not much over an hour. Her wrist-watch told her that she had been wandering forty-five minutes. She had only fifteen minutes more in which to find and return to the Ring—a bare quarter of an hour in which she could support life in this hostile environment. A horrible, suffocating death awaited her—was clamped about her head!