Unconsciously they gripped each other’s hands an instant as they realized the seriousness of their plight. Should the gyrostats stop, the Sphere would plunge to its doom!
Frantically Robert tortured his mind for a possible solution, or a reason for the unexpected interruption. The altimeter already indicated that they were falling at a steadily increasing speed. The formerly tiny ships below were no longer tiny. The water seemed to be rushing toward them at a terrific rate. Robert remembered afterward a sudden inane conjecture as to how big a splash they would make.
It was at this moment his numbed senses returned to him. Cursing himself silently for a rattle-brained idiot, he spun the wheel madly, thus adjusting the vertical position of the disk. To his tortured mind it seemed an eternity before it finally pointed toward the zenith.
Their downward rush was noticeably checked, but the lift of the disk was not equal to the weight of the Sphere. They continued to fall at a dangerous rate. The altimeter registered but two thousand feet!
Fully recovered now from his former temporary inertia, Robert jammed over the switch which connected the disk to the powerful storage batteries. This was the reserve that he had not ventured to utilize before. Thus the lift of the Sphere should have been increased more than four-fold, and its descent checked at once.
As the switch swung over, the gyrostats stopped completely. In a flash the explanation of it all occurred to Robert. The batteries were exhausted!
6
The world was rudely shaken from its customary lethargy.
Having lapsed into a monotonous, smooth-running order of events, the public had long since resigned itself to such. Not since the Great War had newspapers had such an opportunity. Even the steady development of trans-Atlantic and trans-continental air traffic had become commonplace.
Of the myriad readers, perhaps none was so keenly interested in the article which appeared on the front page of every paper in the United States on the morning of the eighteenth as Henry Simms.