"You talk as though the whole thing were settled."
"And it is. Everything's worked out. It's only a matter of detail now. That's what I meant when I said everything was decided."
That dubious expression on St. Cloud's features did not lift.
"But won't there have to be experiments, trial trips, or something?"
"Experiments? Great guns, haven't I been doing that? Of course, problems will come up, but, unless I'm greatly mistaken by no means hard ones. Those are all solved. I can send a piece of Quainfanity - which in common parlance would be negative gravity- I can send a piece of Quainfanity out into space. I've done it of course-more than once. The thing now is to go out with it. I tell you, Morgan, I've got this thing down to a T."
"I'm glad of that," returned St. Cloud, "because it is going to take you a long way up. But what's it to be like --this Quainfanomobile thing you are going to make the journey in?
"Imagine a lemon-" "That," put in St. Cloud, is just what I have been imagining."
"A big steel lemon with windows in it. I've even got it named, too; it's the Hornet. And inside I see Morgan St. Cloud, Rider Farnermain inside that steel lemon!"
"Nor me;" St. Cloud told him. "That's what I meant when I spoke of the whole business being settled."
"But I think I do see you," Henry smiled, "Rider and Morgan. However, if you won't come along, then I'll go it alone. You will have plenty of time to make up your minds. None of us has near kith or kin, so that if disaster overtakes us, there will be no one to deluge the earth with tears, or to say thank God as he (or she) hastens to put on mourning. And one thing: not a word of this must get out. You will remember that neither Blimper nor Buttermore is in the house. I saw to that, and I instance it so that each of you will be very careful."
"So it's Cytherea?" said Morgan St. Cloud.
"Aphrodite," nodded Henry Quaintem.
"From something I read somewhere," I remarked, "I got the idea that this planet is in a fix that is simply awful. Why did you choose her?"
"Because she is after all probably the most wonderful planet in our solar system. As for the superior planets, it is extremely probable that not one of them is habitable save Mars; the others, it seems, are nothing but gas. And as to Mars, its rarefied air would cause a Terrestrial much inconvenience, even if it would not render his sojourn there utterly impossible. So there remain only Venus and Mars; Mercury is like the moon, dead. Of course Venus resembles the earth much more than does Mars; indeed, Venus is Terra's twin sister." "
Sometimes, though," St. Cloud observed "twin sisters don't resemble each other very closely."
"Tell me something about Venus," I asked Henry. "You know that my astronomical attainments are not great."
"In the first place, she is well named; she is to us the most beautiful of the planets, the loveliest and the most mysterious and the only one, by the way, mentioned by Homer. Though, with the exception of the moon and the asteroid Eros (or some comet) she of all the heavenly bodies comes the nearest to us, yet is Venus one of the great enigmas and mysteries of astronomy."
"One would think," said I, "since she approaches us the most nearly, that she would be known the best."
"But you forget, Rider," Henry smiled, "that she is Venus! She has a hundred moods and a thousand veils, and a time for each of them all. Galileo, with his little spy-glass, discovered that 'The Mother of Loves imitates the shapes of Cynthia; but since his day men, albeit armed with the most powerful telescopes, have learned but little more-that is, about Venus herself; her orbit of course (the most nearly circular in the solar system) is known, and her volume and mass, with a high degree of certainty. But Venus herself still refuses to unveil-or, rather, wears one guise for one man and a different for the next.
"For instance, to See she is in all the loveliness of youth, a veritable twin sister to the earth; while to Lowell she is wrinkled and lined, stamped with the marks of an age terrible beyond all words.
"Her distance from the sun is sixty seven millions of miles, her diameter is about seven thousand eight hundred, and her sidereal revolution is made in two hundred and twenty-five days-two hundred and twenty-four days and seventeen hours, very nearly."
"Then," said I, "if we were to set foot on Venus-good heavens, I'd be forty years old!"
"That's what you would."
"That settles it," I told him. "I stay here on the earth. I'm not looking for the Fountain of Age. Now, if it was the Fountain of Youth-"
"You'll find that on Jupiter," put in St. Cloud; "you'd be about two years old on Jupiter."
"Better still; take Neptune, Rider," smiled Henry Quainfan, "you'd be not quite two months old there!"
"Oh, this science!" I exclaimed. "No wonder Newton-it was Newton, wasn't it? - when he had made a hole for the big chickens, decided it would be a shame to keep the little chickens from following after, and so made a little hole, too, for them! I can understand it."
"Now," Henry went on, "Venus is certainly Terra's twin sister if she have a succession of day and night on her surface such as we know here, and if the inclination of her axis is at all like that of the earth's. Unfortunately, however, what with the glare of the planet's atmosphere, nothing is certainly known on these points."
"It seems," I observed, "that this planet is indeed something of a mystery."
"Didn't I tell you that she is well named? Those men of ancient times, Rider, were wiser than the men of today-who are forever blowing their own trumpets and pounding their own drums will give them credit for."
"Yes," nodded St. Cloud. "And after all the loudest drum has nothing in it but wind. But you said a true word there. For instance, there's that figure of Nisroch Nineveh which Layard found in the ruins of Nineveh."
Henry nodded.
"Who," I asked, "was this fellow Nisroch?"
"Saturn," St. Cloud told me. "And in this figure, that is-he had a ring around him."
"Suppose it had been a pump-handle or a handsaw."
"Handsaws," St. Cloud said, "are good things, but not to shave with."
"You'll remember, Rider," said Henry Quainfan, "that the planet Saturn is ringed. How did those old boys know that?"
"But-do you think they really did know it?"
"I wish I knew! There's the ring, though."
"But-" "Well?" he queried.
"They would have had to have telescopes to know that."
