ful, and there was a softness about her features that reminded him of girls he once had known. To him she seemed a link to the past.
They found they had several things in common. Like many sailors, his ultimate desire was a home, a garden in the country, to say nothing of a wife as well. He gave her a sketch of his career, and she told him quite frankly of her thwarted ambitions. He was just a little surprised, until he learned that this was an age of plain speaking, which left no room for mock modesty or simpering coyness. He thought it would be wise, however, to withhold from her his intelligence-rating. If she knew, she would be looking for signs of imbecility, he thought.
Soon an enormous pontoon was constructed of small, boat-like units that fitted together into the shape of a huge doughnut nearly a mile in outside circumference. Tons and tons of pipe were laid down by freight airships, and men and machinery assembled the pipe in the enclosed lake in the centre of the pontoon.These pipes were in a ring almost touching, and reached to the bottom of the ocean. More pipes formed an inner ring. Now a hundred refrigerating ships lit down on the pontoon, and coupled up with the pipes. After several hours, there was a wall of ice fifty feet thick enclosing a circular space of three hundred feet and extending right to the bottom. Was the space in the middle pumped out? No, two beams of electrical energy were directed into it from the sky, and the water left the great ice tube in huge columns of vapour. Machines hovering above fanned away the steam, so that it would not fall in a drenching, tropical rain on the operators.
All this time Roger Wells, the ancient man, watched and observed and grew accustomed to all these strange, new wonders.
His host in the pleasure yacht was very kind. He even sent to the New York zoo, and had some animal flesh sent out for his guest to eat. However Roger decided to turn vegetarian when he noticed the horror of his host's children when they saw him eat 'dead animal,' as they put it.
He was able to grasp his true position when he tried to match his wits with these children of eight, ten, and twelve. After showing the youngest how to play chess with an improvised set, he was able to beat him twice, but never again. The doctor had rated him at twenty-one units of intelligence; now he wondered if that was not too high.
Spectators had come from all over the world to witness the rescue of Number Two projectile. The work was well in hand, and since twenty-four hours had not yet passed since the disaster, there was no alarm felt for the safety of the prisoners.
All that night the sky was bright as day with search-lights. Toward morning the men in charge became anxious, for a great storm was brewing over the north pole, and in spite of the fact that a fleet of airships were trying to head it off by every known method, it continued to swirl southward. Hence the feverish activity to complete the work before the storm broke.
By noon the next day the storm raged while these super-men stood by, helpless.
The greatest shock of all came when Miss Morgan sent out a message informing them, that, for some reason, the medicine chest was not aboard, and therefore they were without the chemicals that would suspend animation when the oxygen supply was gone.
The last chance had failed. They could not possibly be rescued in the remaining time before the oxygen was exhausted.
Now, for once, the old-world man saw consternation on the faces of these modern marvels. Death from accident was more or less common, but the thought of a lingering death from suffocation was something that seemed to upset them completely.
UP to the present he had simply watched, and tried to absorb all that he saw. In this overwhelming emergency his brain began to function costructively again, for quick thinking is second nature to a submarine officer.
His thoughts ran along many lines. Why could they not run a pipe down to supply air? Not with such a sea running, and even if they could, the boring and joining to the chilled steel projectile would be almost impossible under such pressure. Then he thought of the air blast. Surely the blast of air capable of stopping the projectile would be able to blow it backwards until it reached the water, and floated to the surface. All in vain. The compressed air had all been used in a final effort to stop the projectile on its fatal plunge.
All this time the little pleasure yacht had been suspended in mid air by a powerful air tug which had picked her up at the first signs of bad weather. This seemed a very unnautical proceeding to the old world man, in fact, as unnautical as steam to his grandfather who had commanded a frigate in sailing days.
"Surely," he thought, "there must be some way out with the marvellous inventions and equipment available. Could it not be blasted out with one of his rusty old torpedoes?" No, reason told him that it would blow the people in the projectile to pieces, if it reached them at all.
He called Miss Morgan from the little room where he could see and talk to her as privately as if they were really alone together. She spoke with regret that she would never meet him in the flesh, or even see his picture, for the projectile was not fitted for receptive vision.
Then they talked long and earnestly of the might-have-beens of life, always working around to the house and garden in the country where happy children laughed and played. "Goodbye," he said at last, "we have missed happiness in this world by a hair's breadth, perhaps we shall gain it in the next world."
Down on the storm-tossed ocean, the engineers fought the elements with dogged perseverance. Tons and tons of oil had been poured on the troubled waters, more ice barriers had been frozen, but time was slipping by, and they were making little headway.
After he switched off from talking to Miss Morgan, the ancient man sat with his head in his hands thinking of the lottery of life: one day up, the next down. One day free as air, the next confined in the deepest
