"There's something funny about it," interrupted Burke. "Suppose you started at the poles and drove the Ring toward the equator, how would you keep up with the increasing surface-velocity of the earth?"
"Why," answered the master of the Ring, "it's the—the—let me see—it must be the atmosphere that would drive you eastward all the time."
"Of course!" exclaimed Rhoda. "What a lot of sillies we are! It's perfectly simple. You don't need any spiral orbits or anything else. All you've got to do is to bring the Ring down into the upper atmosphere and hover at a fixed elevation until we are swept along at the full speed of the earth."
Burke, who was lighting his pipe, paused and pursed his lips.
"Wouldn't we be coming down into a terrific wind?" he inquired. "Fourteen hundred feet a second! My word! Some blow!"
"Depends on the latitude, of course," answered Bennie. "We've got to run around the earth as we descend, or else we'll be on the dark side—that is, the night side—when we land. Believe me, I want light for that!"
"Quite right!" agreed Atterbury, who had joined the group. "Just look at the earth now, will you?"
They all craned their necks to follow his gesture. Through the observation-window, the shining crescent of the globe seemed to fill the whole sky. Burke pressed the control-lever, and they swung leftward, boring through space toward the invisible black wall where the earth's shadow reached out among the stars. Nearer and nearer it drew, then—darkness. Steering by the steady gleam of the friendly planets, as a coasting steamer steers by the distant bead of light that marks the headland, the Ring soared on, bursting at length into full sunlight again.
They were now comparatively close above the earth and, in going around it, had gained the incidental advantage of having acquired the velocity of the planet in its journey around the sun. Only the problem of descent remained. But it was the most serious of all their problems—how to lower themselves in safety into that swirling, boiling mass of vapor that was shooting by so fast as to seem little more than a hideous blur, and left them sick and dizzy at the sight of it.
And now, as they sank lower, the blur disintegrated into flying banks of cloud, shot through and through with flashing lights and darting shadows. Poised there, as they were, in space, it was a terrifying thing to watch this fearful rush of the earth's surface from west to east. Could they ever manage to break safely into the circumambient atmosphere and go whirling along with it? How—how, without having their delicate machine wrenched and torn in pieces?