We sat again in our chairs before the control-panel, Whitely to my left, gazing through the big window before us ... soaring past the limits of Earth's atmosphere.
CHAPTER IV
Through Planetary Perils
"Mars ahead and to the left—we ought to pass it in three more hours!"
At my words Marlin nodded. "We won't be bothered much by the pull of Mars," he said.
We sat again in our chairs before the control-panel, Whitely to my left, gazing through the big window before us. Ahead and above and all around us there stretched a great panorama, stunning in its brilliance, the vast panorama of the starry heavens as seen from the airless interplanetary void. Blazing in their true brilliant colors on all sides of us, the hosts of stars were like jewels of light set in the black firmament. And as our flier throbbed on through the great gulf of empty space at terrific speed, its acceleration still pressing us down somewhat in our chairs, we could see now amid the flaming stars dead ahead the far green spot of light that was Neptune, our goal, visible now to our unaided eyes in the clearness of empty space. Nearer toward us and to the right Jupiter was like a brilliant little disk of white light, now, the four white points of its greater moons visible about it. To the left, too, yellow Saturn shone much brighter, while nearer toward us on the left, almost beside us, hung the dull-red little shield, white-capped at its poles, that was Mars.
Behind us, by this time, Earth had dwindled to a steady spot of bluish light that was like a tiny moon, the smaller spot that was Earth's moon gleaming near it. Hardly visible as Earth was in the blinding glare of the great sun that beat upon us from behind, its great corona and mighty prominences appalling in their splendor, yet it was visible enough to show how far from it out into the void our flier had already flashed. For forty-eight hours indeed, our great space-flier had rushed outward at a speed that had already reached over a million miles an hour, and that was steadily mounting still beneath the terrific reaction of our great force-ray, that great pale ray only visible at its ray-opening source, that was stabbing back with colossal power and by the reaction of that push sending us hurtling on at greater and greater speed. Out and out we had flashed, Randall and I relieving each other every four hours at the controls, and already now had almost reached the orbit of Mars, more than fifty million miles outward. Now, as Marlin and Whitely and I gazed out toward it, the red disk of Mars itself was but several million miles from us, to the left and ahead.