He arranged the electric heating pads around Alice's body, and inspected the registering instruments.
It had now become necessary to take his bearings. He found to his amazement that instead of being close to Mars, as he had expected, he was moving away from that body.
The two space flyers, although their machinery was not working, had been moving rapidly, due to the gravitational action of the nearest large celestial body. This body was not Mars, however, but Earth. Although, at the time of the encounter with Llysanorh', the two machines had been slightly nearer to Mars, the larger mass, and consequently the stronger attraction of the Earth had overcome the pull that Mars exerted on the machines, and as a result the machines were now being drawn toward Earth.
A glance at the celestial chart revealed to Ralph that Earth and Mars would be in opposition the next day and that he was separated from Earth by twenty-two million miles. He would have to move faster than Earth if he were to overtake that body. Besides, he was twenty-two million miles to the east of the planet.
The Earth was traveling 65,533 miles per hour in its orbit. A simple calculation indicated that, by forcing his space flyer to the utmost, or 90,000 miles an hour, he could not hope to reach Earth in less than fifty days, as he could only gain about 24,400 miles an hour on Earth.
The next important step was to cut loose Llysanorh's machine. He instructed Lylette to get her things from the Martian's flyer. She started to crawl through the connecting tube, and that was the last time Ralph saw her alive.
A loud hissing noise, like escaping steam caused him to rush to the connecting tube, but he was too late. The automatic safety valve had sprung, and the circular door of the connecting tube had been hermetically closed.
The two machines had drifted apart, and as Ralph peered anxiously through one of the windows, he was horrified at the sight of Lylette, hanging by her feet from the circular connecting-tube door of Llysanorh's machine.
The door had closed automatically when the two machines had become disconnected. The air had of course rushed out immediately from Llysanorh's flyer. She had died in a few seconds and her body had become distended to a great many times its normal size. Ralph, nauseated by the terrible spectacle, turned away from it. There was nothing he could do.
Few people realize that it is nothing but the atmospheric pressure that keeps our bodies from falling apart; thus, it is well known that when flying at high altitudes on the Earth, where the atmosphere becomes thin, blood will begin to flow from the mouth, nose and ears.