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"Spaceboy" Roger smiled "you made the Arcturus unit look like three old men in a washtub counting toes!" "Congratulations, Corbett," said Tony Richards of the Arcturus crew, offering his hand. "That was really fast maneuvering out there." "Thanks, Tony." Tom grinned, running his hand through his brown curly hair. "But I have to admit I was a little scared. Wow!
Although it is established that our sun is approaching the constellation of Hercules at the rate of more than 126,000,000 miles a year, and although Arcturus is traveling through space at the rate of fifty-four miles a second three times faster than the earth goes round the sun, yet such is the remoteness of those stars that no appreciable change is evident to the senses.
Stevens and Nadia Newton meet with thrilling experiences galore in this concluding instalment. What Went Before: The Interplanetary Vessel Arcturus sets out for Mars, with Breckenridge as chief pilot, carrying on board, besides its regular crew and some passengers, the famous Dr. Stevens, designer of space ships and computer.
When he turns on the visiplate, he is horrified to find that a mysterious ray of unparalleled power has neatly sliced the Arcturus in several places. Nadia and Stevens are completely separated from the rest of the crew and passengers of the ship, so they get into a lifeboat, which is equipped for a limited amount of space travel.
"Maskull will sleep throughout the journey?" "And you too, if you wish, my altruistic friend. I am pilot, and you passengers can amuse yourselves as you please." "Are we off at last?" asked Maskull. "Yes, you are about to cross your Rubicon, Maskull. But what a Rubicon!... Do you know that it takes light a hundred years or so to arrive here from Arcturus? Yet we shall do it in nineteen hours."
By meridian altitude of sun, camp is in latitude 33 degrees 90 minutes 49 seconds South. 12th. Packed up and followed on the tracks of the party, and at ten miles found them camped on a branch of a creek which runs into Duke of Orleans Bay. Brackish streams plentiful: scrubby, sandy country. By meridian altitudes of sun and Arcturus, camp is in South latitude 33 degrees 51 minutes 35 seconds.
But he missed, leaving Astro unprotected against the three members of the Arcturus unit. With his defense gone, Astro kicked at the ball frantically but just grazed the side of it.
The heavens were glorious with stars, Arcturus and his host, the Pleiades, Orion, and all those worlds that shine out when ours is dark; but I did not care for them. Let them shine: they could not shine into me. I tried with feeble effort to lift my eyes to Him who is above the stars, and yet holds the sea, yea, the sea of human thought and trouble, in the hollow of His hand.
We can appreciate how small that is when we reflect that it is about equal to the apparent distance between the heads of two pins placed an inch apart and viewed from a distance of a hundred and eighty miles! Assuming this estimate of the parallax of Arcturus, let us see how it will enable us to calculate the probable size or light-giving power of the star as compared with the sun.
There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible pictures of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, as October's hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint light gleaming here and there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and the Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar the ancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railway locomotive.