At ten she weighs nothing; that is to say the R. Force exactly
counteracts gravitation. At eleven she begins to rise. At a hundred she
would be hurled away from the earth like a shell from a twelve-inch gun,
or even faster. Now, watch."
He took up the speaking-tube. "Is she all tight everywhere, Andrew?"
"Yes, my Lord," came gurgling through the tube.
Then Redgrave slowly turned the wheel till the indicator pointed to
twenty-five. Zaidie, all eyes and wonder, saw a vast sea of glittering
white spread out beneath them, an ocean of snow with grey-blue patches
here and there. It sank away from under them till the patches became
spots and the sunlit clouds a vast, luminous blur. The air about them
grew marvellously clear and limpid. The sun blazed down on them with a
tenfold intensity of light, but Zaidie was astonished to find that very
little heat penetrated the glass walls and roof of the conning-tower.
"What an awful height!" she exclaimed, looking round at him with
something like fear in her eyes. "How high are we, Lenox?"
"You'll find afterwards that the _Astronef_ doesn't take any account of
high or low or up or down," he replied, looking at the dial of an
aneroid barometer by the side of him. "Roughly speaking, we're rather
over 60,000 feet--say ten miles--from the surface of the Atlantic.
That's why I asked Andrew whether everything was tight.
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