"Nothing—only that I've found how to steer this wild steed!" cried the professor, exultantly.
t was really quite simple, he explained, as he eased up on the lever. In application, it was a development of the gyroscope principle, that a wheel revolving freely within a freely suspended frame tends to make the frame revolve in the other direction.
"You see, the rocket is the freely suspended frame," he went on, "while this lever controls a gyroscopic wheel somewhere. To set it spinning to the right causes us to turn to the left, and vice versa."
"But you almost stood us on our heads, a moment ago! How did that happen?"
"Simply because I threw the lever too far to the right. We are in interstellar space, obviously, where every change of direction involves an adjustment of equilibrium."
And if Stoddard didn't exactly understand, being first a secret service man and only secondarily a scientist, at least he showed his ignorance no further. If the professor could bring this astounding machine back to Earth, that was all he wanted.
Prescott said he could, he thought, providing they had fuel enough left. So for the next few minutes, while the younger man held his breath, the professor labored with the various instruments on that complicated dial.
"Now then, I think we're headed back," he said at length, relaxing. "But we've got to have visibility, otherwise we will land with a velocity of about twenty thousand miles an hour, which is what I figure we're making at the present time."