Javan and the other doctors softened beautifully, and actually expanded into a self-satisfied body of patronage and allegiance. The Professor was “shown through” the Capitol, and he threaded its maze of compartments, saw its Council Chamber, enriched with gold, hung with gaudy rugs, and found there the as yet unoccupied clumsy and incalculably valuable gold throne which we had seen shaking and rattling in the procession, itself a relic of some old time, when this isolated kingdom had had a king, but was young compared to that still more remote time when “the stranger” taught that king’s progenitor the miracle of making gold.
From it now, under the aegis of its hideous device, the rearing Crocodilo-Python, our dear Professor was to dispense justice to the Radiumopolites. Of a truth it was an almost inconceivable denouement. What would, what could, the Professor’s colleagues at the University say, and by what insupportable hypothesis could they explain this transmutation?
And there was to be a Coronation! Oh yes. Javan and the rest of the Fathers had conspired successfully there; indeed the fuss of its preparation and the importance of their parts in its conduct had now really made them inanely jubilant over the whole revolution in state affairs.
Hopkins and I walking eastward along the broad highway over which we had entered Radiumopolis, out into that fair Valley of Rasselas which was again stirring with the field life of the advancing spring, talked rather earnestly of our predicament, for, after all, predicament it was. How were we to get home and tell our story? We were to be made a good deal of here but—could we escape? Goritz had become eager to return with his gold “souvenirs” (never inquired for), with his radium, with the secret of making gold, if he could learn it. That was yet concealed and, much more important, so were the tubes. Those balloons, the radium-lit cave in the Deer Fels. And there was the great ethnic wonder of the people themselves, the marvel of the Stationary Sun, the radium country! It was impossible to reconcile ourselves to a lifelong immurement in this monotony. Science must break through into this chrysalis of wonders. It was our bounden duty to bring her here. But literally we were captives; the hocus-pocus of our descent from the sky would not let us demean ourselves in ordinary ways (in spite of past precedents of the vulgarity on the part of heaven-descended kings) and we began to see we had prepared a dilemma for ourselves which might end more fatally than the enmity of the little doctors had threatened.
Now all was changed, and like flies in honey were we hopelessly entangled. Perhaps the most fortunate of us all was Spruce Hopkins himself, who frankly loved Ziliah; but even he wanted to “vamoose” and take his bride with him, for he thought she would “take the edge off the jolliest swell ladies anywhere.” The Professor, now the joke was over and our necks safe, was sick to death of his role, and only extracted a comforting morsel of pleasure from it in its possibility of opening to him the few but very peculiar secrets of physics and chemistry which the Faculty of Radiumopolis monopolized—monopolized too, we learned, by a rigid system of verbal transmission. And then our thunder! It wouldn’t last for ever; and our celestial powers would fail conclusively in creating cartridges on demand, owing to the unscrupulous fondness on the part of the Radiumopolites, which was having easily foreseen and disastrous consequences. Our supply was shrinking fast. We adopted the expedient of delegating the role of Thunderer to the Professor, which saved shot, or at least extended the usefulness of our arsenal. The peaceful nature of the Professor was, however, so far exasperated by the improvident urgency of his subjects that he confessed to a murderous inclination to shoot them at the same time. If any one of us got away he would need his gun and ammunition and much more—a stock of provisions too, and transportation. We both felt pretty blue.
Hopkins: “One of us must make a break soon.”
I: “Well you certainly can’t. Your family’s here now.”
Hopkins: “Ziliah’s a sport. She might just prove to be the guy to put light in flight. Besides I could tell her some things about the way we live in New York that might increase her desire to travel.”
I: “But we came from Heaven!”
Hopkins: “Yes, I know—we’re the angelic sort. Say, if I wanted to desert Ziliah—and I don’t—I could play up the Lohengrin gag. Get her to ask questions, get mad about it—and quit.”