“We do not know,” Myles replied, “but there are two conflicting legends. One is that the forerunners of the race came from across the boiling seas. The other is that they sprang, fully formed, from the soil. There is also a legend that creatures like me dwell beyond the boiling seas; and this legend, at least, appears to be borne out by the existence of your Vairkings.”
“Strange! Still more strange!” the prelate declared. “For we have but one story of our origin. The race of Vairkings descended from another world above the skies. Who knows but that we, like you, came from that place which you call the planet—Minos, I think, you said?”
After some further conversation, the conclave was called to order again, and Myles took this as the signal for his departure. He was given a warm invitation to return.
Truly, a new avenue of speculation had been opened up to him by his chance meeting with the Holy Leader. Myles firmly resolved to return again at the earliest opportunity. But, from this time on, events moved with such rapidity that never again did he enter the sacred precincts.
First, he was stumped by his radio tubes. How was he to make a vacuum-pump which would exhaust the air?
The solution, when it finally occurred to him, was absurdly simple; he utilized atmospheric pressure.
He made a glass tube thirty feet long, and sealed his grid, his plates and his lead-wires into one end, closing that end off hermetically. Then he fashioned a piston of waterproof cloth fiber so as to fit into the closed end, almost touching these elements and yet free to move away from them without tearing them. Then he filled the tube with water, and inverted it. But the water did not drop away to a height of about twenty-eight feet, as it would have done on Earth.
Of course not, for this was Venus—Venus of an atmospheric pressure practically equal to that of earth, holding the water up; and yet with a gravity much less than that of Earth, tending to pull, the water down!
But, by lengthning the pipe sufficiently, Cabot finally got the proper balance, the fiber piston was pulled down, and a partial vacuum, practically free of water-vapor had been created. He then sealed off the upper portion of the glass tube with his blow-torch, and had his radio triad.
For these radio tubes, the glass was made according to a special formula. Of this same glass, Cabot fashioned lenses for the goggles which he and Doggo planned to wear on their trip home across the boiling seas.