On and on in those hours we shot, until it seemed to me, seated there at the controls, that always we had flashed thus through endless realms of tenantless space. For now but a few asteroids were sighted by our watching eyes, and the eventlessness and strange tension of our rush onward through space made it seem like a strange flight in some unending dream. On and on, with Marlin and Randall and Whitely watching ceaselessly about me, on with the throbbing of our generators beating in my ears in unhalting rhythm. Behind us Earth's bright white star was steadily growing smaller, but still our great force-ray, stabbing ceaselessly back from our flier with colossal power, was sending us racing on faster and faster with its huge reacting force. But our start from Earth, days, hours, before, the great mission upon which we were speeding outward to Neptune, these things I had forgotten, almost, as the dream-like quality of our onward flight gripped me.
But as we raced still onward, as Jupiter's mighty sphere loomed greater and greater to the right ahead of us, my bemused faculties were shaken into wakefulness by the necessities of our situation. By that time we had passed out of the dangerous asteroidal region, and with their watch no longer necessary Whitely and Randall, after preparing for us all a quick hot meal from the thermos-cans in which all our food supplies were packed, had taken to their bunks for some much-needed sleep. Marlin sat beside me as we rushed on, his astronomical preoccupation holding him to a contemplation of the great planet, despite his own weariness. And weary enough he was, and I too, since for almost forty-eight hours we had been flashing through the perils of the asteroidal belt. It was now the beginning of the fifth day since our start from Earth, and already for a hundred hours we had been flashing at tremendous and mounting speed through the airless void. Like Marlin, though, I forgot my weariness in the spectacle of giant Jupiter, to the right and ahead.
For it was a spectacle of magnificence, indeed. Swinging like a giant disk of soft white light in the blackness of space to our right, Jupiter spun amid its four greater moons, the smaller moons being of diameter too small to be seen with unaided eyes even thus close. But of the giant sphere of Jupiter, of that great sphere's surface, nothing was to be seen. For all the mighty planet's surface was covered by the colossal masses of great clouds that enclosed it, floating in its dense atmosphere and encircling it in great belts, the mighty cloud-belts that for long have been to astronomers the most characteristic feature of Jupiter's surface. So that, though Marlin with the aid of the telescope, sought to gain a glance through some opening in the clouds at the great planet's surface, he failed in the attempt.
In a moment, however, he concentrated his attention upon the one visible feature upon the mighty world's surface, the great red spot that we could plainly see now as a pink area beneath the shrouding clouds, in the planet's southern hemisphere. At sight of it, Marlin had prepared and trained his spectroscope upon it, but after observations of a few moments he raised his head, perplexed. He glanced about him for a moment, then seized the bolometer, which by virtue of its new "shielded" principle was able to record accurately the amount of heat radiating from any one point of a planet or star, as well as from the whole planet or star. But upon checking its reading for a moment, after turning it toward the pink area of the great red spot, Marlin straightened from it also, shaking his head.
"It's strange, Hunt," he said, turning toward me. "It's always been believed that the great red spot is a part of Jupiter's surface still molten and flaming, but the spectroscope and bolometer show that it can't be."
"Strange enough," I admitted, gazing myself toward that glowing pink area on the mighty planet. "If we could but stop and explore the planet—but we must keep on toward Neptune."
"We must keep on," Marlin repeated, "but some day it may be, if we can save the solar system from the doom that hangs over it now, we'll come back here to Jupiter, will see for ourselves its surface."
By this time the great planet was almost directly to our right, its giant cloudy white sphere seeming to fill all space, despite the fact that it was more than fifteen million miles from us, and its four big, greater moons revolving about it. Hours before I had shot a force-ray toward the great planet from our flier's side, to counteract its growing pull upon us, but now as we came level with it, were passing it, that pull upon us was so enormous that it was only with a force-ray of immense power that I was managing to keep the space-flier from being drawn inward. Passing thus close, Jupiter's stupendous cloud-belted sphere was an awe-inspiring sight, whirling at immense speed also, since the great planet, more than a thousand times greater than Earth, rotates upon its axis at hardly more than a third of Earth's rotatory period or day, its day being less than ten hours. And passing it thus, too, the great red spot upon its lower half was an even greater enigma, for that gigantic pink oval was, we knew, fully thirty thousand miles in length, greater by far than all our Earth.
It was with awe that Marlin and I, and Whitely and Randall who had awakened now to relieve us, stared toward the gigantic monarch of the sun's planets as it dropped slowly behind on our right. A side-ray of colossal power it had taken, indeed, to hold us out from the great world's pull, and only slowly could we decrease that ray's power as we moved farther out from it. But now at well over four million miles an hour, we were flashing out beyond Jupiter's orbit, and ahead there was gleaming brighter to the left the yellow spot of light that was Saturn, the last planet that we must yet pass before reaching Neptune, since Uranus was in conjunction in regard to Neptune, being far on the other side of the solar system from us. And as Randall now took my place at the controls, I pointed toward the little yellow-glowing, ring-circled disk of Saturn ahead and to the left.
"Keep the flier heading straight toward Neptune, Randall," I told him. "We're going to pass Saturn uncomfortably close as it is, and we don't want to take any chances with it."