At last the flickering lights behind could be seen no longer.
But the Red Rover continued in a straight line, at the top of her speed, for many hours, before she turned and slipped cautiously toward the secret City of Space. She reached it in safety, was let through the air-lock. Once more Bill looked out upon the amazing city upon the inner wall of a spinning cylinder. He enjoyed the remarkable experience of a walk along a street three miles in length, which brought him up in an unbroken curve, and back to where he had started.
It took a week to refit the Red Rover, in preparation for the voyage to Mars. Her motor ray tubes were rebuilt, and additional vitalium generators installed. The precious metal taken from the Triton was built into new batteries to supply power for the long voyage. Good stocks of food, water, and compressed oxygen were taken aboard, as well as weapons and scientific equipment of all variety.
"We start for Mars in thirty minutes," Captain Brand told Bill when the warning gong had called him and the others aboard.
CHAPTER VI
The Red Star of War
The Red Rover slipped out through the great air-lock of the City of Space, and put her bow toward Mars. The star of the war-god hung before her in the silver-dusted darkness of the faint constellation of Capricornus, a tiny brilliant disk of ocherous red. The Prince of Space, outlawed by the world of his birth, was hurtling out through space in a mad attempt to save that world from the horrors of Martian invasion.
The red point that was Mars hung almost above them, it seemed, almost in the center of the vitrolite dome of the bridge. "We are not heading directly for the planet," Captain Brand told Bill. "Its orbital velocity must be considered. We are moving toward the point that it will occupy in twenty days."
"We can make it in twenty days? Three million miles a day?"