nice it would be to have a little home of her own, in the country, with a garden and happy children around her. But the husband? That was the sticking point. She could not reconcile herself to the idea of a husband with a mentality of only twenty-three out of a possible hundred units of intelligence. Her beauty was most striking in spite of the severity of dress demanded by the strenuous, mechanical age, and many men had looked at her and regretted the barriers.
She pressed the button that showed that she was all ready, and immediately the starter, below in his office, pulled the trigger. A slight jar was the only effect of that gigantic air blast, so well did the shock absorbers and antigravitators do their work. These shock absorbers depended on the wonderful resilient qualities of rubber foam, a substance similar to, but many times lighter than, rubber sponge. The inner casing of the projectile rested on many layers of this aerated material; each succeeding layer taking up the pressure when the preceding ones had been pressed almost flat. Thus the action really resembled that of a man jumping off a very high building into a succession of blankets, each absorbing its share of the shock before letting him go through into the next. Besides these appliances there were cushions several feet deep in which the occupants sank completely out of sight when the gun was fired, and then came slowly up again.
Henrietta Morgan had not bothered to look at the tension gauge before entering the projectile; nor was she aware of any difference, as the great shell hurtled up into the blue sky, leaving the world many miles beneath, a dull, blue surface, with no clear detail visible.
The first and second air blasts from the rear end to increase the velocity, went off at their appointed times before she realized that conditions were abnormal. Suddenly she noticed that the hands of the velocity gauge were jammed against the end of the scale. Her first thought was that it was broken, but a glance at the altitude and temperature gauges convinced her that they were far higher up than usual. She switched on the position indicator, only to find that it was out of order. Glancing back into the passenger compartment, she saw that she had two women and three men in her charge, besides the registered mail. Bending again to her switchboard, she turned the miniature wheels that, by remote control, actuated the resistance rings that projected through slots in the shell out into the cold, rarefied air. Pressing some little buttons, she called New York and Chicago, and asked for position; the answer astonished her.
She was already over New York, three minutes ahead of time.
Viciously she shot out two inches of resistance ring, all round. A whirring shriek was followed by a grinding tear as the vanes were carried away. There were emergency vanes of course, and she turned the spare dial. There was no response; the emergancy vanes were stiff from neglect. The human element again! They could still be turned out by a hand wheel in the passenger compartment: "Please turn that wheel quickly." Alas for her peremptory intonation! Human nature was much the same, after two hundred years.
"Young lady, if you are in such a hurry, come and turn it yourself."
She had disturbed the man just at the climax of a good yarn, when no man likes to be interrupted. Jumping into the saloon, she twisted the big wheel with might and main. Glancing out through the forward port hole of quartz glass, she was horrified to see water where blue sky should have been. The projectile was heading earthward with frightful velocity. The broken vane had done it. Springing back with lightning agility, she hit two buttons simultaneously. One operated the forward air blast to check the speed, the other an S. O. S call. A fraction of a second later, they struck the water with an ear-splitting crash, and dived to the bottom, where they glanced sideways off a great rust and weed encrusted object, and continued their journey a hundred feet into the mud of the Atlantic bottom.
THE big, rusty object rolled slowly, first to port and then to starboard. The writhing coil of an ancient telegraph cable fell away from its propellor, where it had held it fast so many years. A few bubbles rose; and slowly at first, but with increasing speed, the great object came to the surface.
A ray of sunshine shone through a heavy, glass porthole that had been kept clean for two hundred years by the little sea snails industriously licking the slime off the glass. The light flickered on the gray face of a man in uniform, who had lain there for two centuries in a state of suspended animation. His friends had known him as Roger Wells, back in the year nineteen seventeen when the Great War was in full swing.
He opened his eyes, sat up, and jumped to his feet. As he did so his clothes fell off him in rags. His features twitched with pain. Damn his old enemy, the rheumatism! Twenty-five out of forty years at sea had put lines of care about those clean cut features. The Great War culminating in his swift dive to the bottom to avoid being rammed, had ended his career, so far as that age of strife was concerned.
How he and his imprisoned crew had worked to free the submarine from that all-embracing, telegraph cable wound tightly around the propeller and over the conning tower! It was only after several days that he had swallowed the deadly narcotic given to him by a doctor friend in reserve for such a time. The doctor had never tried the effect of hydrogen on this new drug. The escaping fumes from the battery of the submarine mingled with the gas in the man's lungs formed a new substance akin to that isolated in the bodies of tiny rotifers by a scientist of nineteen seventy five. These little wheel animalcules had long puzzled the world by their power of remaining dormant in a dried up state for years, and blossoming into full, active life when placed in a drop of water under the microscope.
Lieutenant Commander Roger Wells put his hand to his brow and looked puzzled. He sat down, and surveyed the pile of rags that had been his clothes. He picked up a handful of the crumbly material of
