It was Dr. Marlin who spoke and Whitely beside him, nodded. "Three more days," he said, "and we'll be starting."
We four, Marlin and Whitely and Randall and myself, were standing on the flat roof of the great World Government building, that gigantic cylindrical white structure that looms two thousand feet into the air at the center of the new world-capital, New York. All around us there stretched the colossal panorama of New York's mighty cylindrical buildings, each rearing skyward from its little green park, extending as far away as the eye could reach, many of them rising on great supporting piers out of the waters of the rivers and bay around the island. In the late afternoon sunlight above them there swirled and seethed great masses of arriving and departing aircraft, unfolding their helicopter-vanes from their long hulls as they paused to rise or descend, seeming to fill the air, while away to the south the great Singapore-New York liner was slanting smoothly down toward the great flat surface of the air-docks. Yet it was to none of these things, nor to the masses of humans that swarmed and crowded in the city's streets far beneath us, that we four were giving our attention at that moment, for we were gazing intently at the great object that stood on the roof before us.
That object was a great gleaming metal polyhedron that loomed in a supporting framework beside us like a huge ball-like faceted crystal of metal. This great faceted ball of metal, though, was fully thirty feet in diameter, and here and there in the great, smooth, faceted, plane-surfaces of it were set hexagonal windows of clear glass, protected by thick raised rims of metal around them. There were also set in six of the facets six round openings a foot in diameter, one of these being in the faceted ball's top, one in its bottom, and four at equi-distant points around its equator. In one of the flat facet-sides, also, was a screw-door of a few feet diameter that now was open, giving a glimpse across a small vestibule-chamber inside through a second open screw-door into the great polyhedron's interior. That interior seemed crowded with gleaming mechanisms and equipment, attached to the inner side of the great metal shell.
Marlin was contemplating the great thing intently as we stood there on the roof beside its supporting framework. "Finished—in three more days," he repeated. "Everything's ready for the last generator."
"That will be done in two days more," said Randall, beside me. "Everything else at the World Government's laboratories has been suspended in order to get these generators ready for us."
"They've worked fast to get three of the generators in the flier already," Marlin acknowledged. "Especially since Whitely here, in directing them, had only his own first crude models to work on."
"Lucky we are to get the generators completed and the space-flier finished in the month we estimated!" I exclaimed. "If the whole world hadn't centered its energies on the space-flier's completion we'd never have done it—and even so it's been a tremendous task."
It had, indeed, been a period of tense and toiling activity for Marlin and Whitely and Randall and me, that time of four weeks that had elapsed since Marlin had proposed his great plan to the World Congress. In those weeks all our efforts, and all the efforts of the world too, it seemed, had been concentrated upon the building of that space-flier in which we four, first of all men, were to venture out into the great void, to flash out to Neptune in our attempt to halt the great ray that was spinning our sun ever faster to its destruction and to ours. For each day of those four weeks the rotatory speed of the sun had grown ever greater, its rotatory period decreasing by an exact four hours each day. The instruments of Dr. Whitely, too, showed that the mighty force-ray was still playing unceasingly from Neptune upon the turning sun's edge, spinning that sun ever faster. Already the terrific pressure of that great ray had lowered the sun's rotatory period to 18 days, 4 hours, and in hardly more than a hundred days more, we knew, would have brought the sun's rotatory period down to that critical figure of one hour at which it could no longer hold together, at which it would divide into a double star and plunge Earth to doom and wreck the solar system.
And with that knowledge, all the world had sought to aid in the construction of our space-flier. Dr. Marlin had directed that construction, aided by his assistant, young Randall, whom I had met for the first time and had found a sunny-haired fun-loving fellow of my own age. And it had been Dr. Marlin who, after consultation with the world's greatest engineering authorities, had chosen for the flier the form of a great polyhedron. Such a form, it had been found, could resist pressure from within and without much better than the spherical form that had been at first suggested, and it was realized that this power of resistance would be necessary. For upon venturing out from Earth's gravitation-field into gravitationless space, the very interior stresses of such a space-flier would tend to explode it unless it was braced against those stresses. Also the space-flier was to be shot out through the void and maneuvered in that void by the pushing reaction of its own great force-rays against the Earth or other planets, and though that force would thus hurtle the flier out at terrific speed, it would also crumple the flier itself unless it were strong enough to withstand the force-ray's terrific pressure.