The haunting thought was never very far away: “Should either one of us be killed--what then?”
One day Stern voiced his fear.
“Beatrice,” he said, “if anything should ever happen to me, and you be left alone in a world which, without me, would become instantly hostile and impossible, remember that the most scientific way out is a bullet. That's my way if anything happens to you! Understand?”
She nodded, and for a long time that day the silence of a great pact weighed upon their souls.
CHAPTER IX
PLANNING THE GREAT MIGRATION
Stern rigged a tripod for the powerful field-glasses he had rescued from the Metropolitan Building, and by an ingenious addition of a wooden tube and another lens carefully ground out of rock crystal, succeeded in producing (on the right-hand barrel of the binoculars) a telescope of reasonably high power. With this, of an evening, he often made long observations, after which he would spend hours figuring all over many sheets of the birch bark, which he then carefully saved and bound up with leather strings for future reference.
In Van's set of encyclopedias he found a fairly large celestial map and thorough astronomic data. The results of his computations were of vital interest to him.
He said to Beatrice one evening:
“Do you know, that wandering black patch in the sky moves in a regular orbit of its own? It's a solid body, dark, irregular in outline, and certainly not over five hundred miles above the surface of the earth.”
“What can it be, dear?”