Pharaoh's Broker, page 70 by Ellsworth Douglass
<< Return to Title Details & Download71
I said rather sarcastically. "Wait until I have finished and you will see."
I found he had a screw-driver, and I loosened one of the long screws and enlarged the half of its hole toward my compartment. Then I whittled a block of soft wood, so that it would slide smoothly into this half of the hole. Driving the screw home again, I just allowed its tip to enter the end of the block. Then I fastened a piece of stout twine to the cylinder and the other end to the block of wood, which was almost opposite it. Pushing the cylinder half way out, I made the twine taut, and hastening into the doctor's compartment, I thrust in the bulkhead. The air was rapidly escaping. Waiting long enough for all of it to have leaked out, I then unscrewed the long screw, which gradually drew in the block of wood and the twine, and thus pulled the cylinder into the projectile so that there was no connection with the exterior. Then the doctor let in the condensed air to a barometric pressure of twenty-six, and the whole operation was over in a few minutes. My compartment must have been almost a complete vacuum. When it was over, I cried rather triumphantly to the doctor,--
"There, you see, one doesn't need a steam pump to make the water run over Niagara! At this distance from the surface, nature abhors a gas and prefers a vacuum!" He was inclined to be rather sulky at first, but he really did not like pumping any better than I did.
I should say it was about five hours later that we noticed it was growing gradually lighter outside. Mars lost his ruddiness and grew pale in a grey field. Our view of the Earth was also becoming more and more misty.
"We are emerging from the black core of the shadow into the semi-illuminated penumbra," said the doctor. Then he altered his course experimentally, and found a slightly darker path, but it soon began changing again to grey.
"There is no use trying to keep in the umbra any longer. It is growing too narrow. The penumbra will last quite a long time yet, but it will grad