With the space-flier's form decided and the plans for it drafted, work upon it had begun at once. At the World President's suggestion, it was being set up on the great flat roof of the World Government building. From over all Earth had come the world's most brilliant engineers and scientists to aid in its construction, for the world lay still beneath the great shadowing wing of fear that had been cast over it, when the peoples of Earth had learned first of the doom that Neptune and its beings were loosing upon the solar system. So that though the world's first wild panic had subsided, it had been replaced by a waxing realization and dread that had made the peoples of Earth and their representatives offer to us their help in this plan of ours, which alone held out any chance, however slender, of escape from the annihilation that was nearing Earth. Laboring ceaselessly day and night therefore, in picked crews of workers that every few hours replaced each other, Dr. Marlin and Randall and myself and our eager workers had swiftly brought the great space-flier's metal shell into being.
That great crystal-like shell, at Dr. Marlin's suggestion, had been made double-walled, the space between the two walls being pumped to as complete a vacuum as possible so that vacuum might insulate the flier's interior from the tremendous differences in temperature that it would meet in space. For where the sun's heat-radiations struck the flier in space it would be warm, hot even, but those parts in shadow would be subjected to the absolute zero of empty space. Each of these thick double walls, in turn, was itself built up of alternate layers of finest steel and of non-metallic, asbestos-like insulating material, pressed and welded together by titanic forces into a single thickness. And the great faceted wall-sections of the flier, when in place, had been so welded and fused one to the other by the new molecular-diffusion fusing process, that the great ball-like faceted flier might have been and was, in fact, a single and seamless polyhedron, its strength enormous.
In one of the flier's facets was the round screw-door, admitting one through a small vestibule-chamber, and then through a second hermetically-sealing door into the flier's interior. In that interior, all the flier's mechanisms and equipment had been attached directly to the inner side of its great crystal-like ball, with hexagonal windows, made double and of thick unbreakable glass, here and there in the walls, between the mechanisms. Just inside one of those large windows, at what might be called the ball-like flier's front, were ranged on a black panel of several feet in length the space-flier's controls. The most central of these controls were six gleaming-handled levers which controlled the flier's great force-rays, shooting them forth from any one of the six ray-openings in its sides, to send the flier hurtling through space by reaction, or to use against asteroids or other objects as a great weapon. Supported from the wall in front of those levers was a metal chair that swung on pivots and on sliding pneumatic shock-absorbing tubes, a metal strap across it to hold its occupant in it. And the occupant of that chair, with the six force-ray controls before him, thus controlled the flier's flight through space, and could, if necessary, use its great rays as weapons.
To the left of those controls were the recording dials and switches of the four great generators. Those four gleaming cubical generators themselves were attached to the other side of the flier's hollow interior, along with the marvelously compact and powerful Newson-Canetti batteries. Operating from those batteries whose power-stores were almost exhaustless, the generators, when turned on, would generate the great force-vibrations which, of a wavelength higher than that of light vibrations, exerted a terrific pressure or force beside which the pressure of light was as nothing. These vibrations were carried by thick black cables running between the flier's double walls to the projecting-mechanisms inside the six ray-openings, and from those openings the great force-vibrations were released as great force-rays by the operator of the flier's six controls. These great force-rays, we had found, almost equalled the speed of light itself in the velocity with which they shot out from the flier's ray-openings.
In front of the generators' recording dials and switches was suspended a metal chair like that of the control-operator, while between those two was a third chair before which, on the control-panel, were ranged the instruments recording the space-flier's conditions of flight. There was a space-speed indicator, working by means of ether-drift, a set of dials that accurately recorded the gravitational pull of celestial bodies in all directions, inside and outside temperature recorders, inside and outside air-testers, and beside others the controls of a number of the necessary mechanisms attached at different points inside the hollow faceted ball of the flier. Among these were the controls of the flier's air-renovator, which automatically removed the carbon-dioxide from the flier's breathed air by atomic dissociation and replaced it with oxygen from the compact tanks of compressed liquid-oxygen; the controls of the heating-mechanism, which beside its own heating coils was to utilize the heat of the sun on the flier's side in space; and the control of the hooded lights set above the flier's control-panel and mechanisms.
To the right of the control-operator's chair, too, there was a fourth similar chair before which were ranged on the control-panel a compact but extremely efficient battery of astronomical instruments. There was a ten-inch refracting telescope, its lens set directly in the big hexagonal window over the control-panel, the tube of the telescope, thanks to the new "re-reflecting" principle, being but a score or so of inches in length. There was also a small but efficient spectroscope similarly mounted, a micrometric apparatus for accurate measurements of celestial objects, and a shielded bolometer for ascertaining the radiated heat of any celestial body.
These four metal chairs, suspended there in front of the long control-panel and with the big hexagonal window before and above them, were mounted all upon special shock-absorbing tubes of pneumatic design which would enable us to withstand the pressure of our flier's acceleration upon starting, and the pressure also of its deceleration upon slowing and stopping. Seated in them, we would be able to look forth over the space-flier's controls into the void before us, and since gravitation would be lacking in the flier, once out in space, metal straps across them would hold us in them. Here and there among the mechanisms that lined the ball-like flier's interior, too, were hand-grips by which we could float without harm among the mechanisms and equipment, while the metal bunks attached at one point to the flier's interior were provided with metal straps to hold us in them during sleep.
Ranged among the mechanisms, that lined the flier's interior, were the cabinets that held our stores and special equipment. Among these were ample stores of food in thermos-cans, kept hot thus and obviating all necessity of cooking, the tanks of compressed water, and the extra liquid-oxygen tanks. Also attached to hooks on the walls were the four space-walkers that had been constructed for us to enable us to venture outside of the flier into airless space, if necessary. These space-walkers were cylindrical metal structures seven feet or more in height and three in diameter, tapering at the top to a smooth dome in which were small vision-windows. Each held a small generator of force-vibrations, and an equally small air-renovator. There were two hollow metal jointed arms that extended from the upper part, and on entering the cylinder and closing its base-door one thrust his own arms inside those hollow metal ones. They ended in great pincer-claws that could be actuated by one's own hands inside, while the space-walker itself was moved through the void by its generated force-vibrations being shot out from a small ray-opening in the cylinder's bottom.
Standing inside the hollow, ball-like polyhedron of the flier, therefore, its mechanisms and equipment extended all about and above and beneath one, attached rigidly in every case to the flier's inner surface. That equipment, those mechanisms, indeed, had taxed all the powers of the great World Government laboratories to provide in the short time that was ours, but by a miracle of effort it had been done. And now, as we four gazed up toward the great gleaming faceted thing, resting beside us there in its framework of metal girders, we knew that there remained only the last of the four great generators to be completed, and that in two days more, as Randall had said, that too would be completed and installed and the space-flier would be ready for its final tests and for the start of our great trip. Looking up at the great thing towering there beside us in the waning afternoon sunlight, I was struck with a sudden realization of the stupendousness of the task that we had set ourselves; of the thing that lay before us.