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Stevens explained that these projectors were used in turning the vessel and in dodging meteorites when necessary, and they went on through another almost invisible door into a hall and took an elevator down to the main corridor. "Well, you've seen it, Miss Newton," Stevens said regretfully, as he led her toward the captain's office.
H. A. Newton makes some astounding estimates on this subject that the orbit of the earth is filled with meteorites, about 250 miles apart, making a group of about 30,000 in a space equal to that of the earth. If such calculations are reliable, the query must arise, How much effect can such a meteoric shower every day in the year exert on the orbital motion of the earth, in retarding its velocity?
Both meteorites and stone hatchets, as well as all other forms of thunderbolt, are in excellent repute as amulets, not only against lightning, but against the evil eye generally.
Never had the moon shed such velvety, silvery light; never had the stars flashed with such supernatural brightness; nor had meteorites drawn such lines of fiery brilliance across the heavens. The days were hot. In fact, the sun seemed to dart out tongues of fire that threatened to lap up all the water in the mighty river.
Stars glowing brighter and brighter, with their circling planets catching the light in a ghostly fashion as I neared them, shone out and vanished again into inexistence; faint comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of matter, eddying light-points, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred millions of miles or so from me at most, few nearer, travelling with unimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire, through that black, enormous night.
Today we know that the "stones from the sky" were meteorites. Not more than fifty years ago Dr. Simon Newcomb, a world-famous astronomer and the first American since Benjamin Franklin to be made an associate of the Institute of France, the hierarchy of the world science, said, "It can't be."
Tell me, Doctor, how many elements have you discovered in them?" "Nearly thirty," answered the doctor. "And one interesting fact is, that the three elements most common in the earth iron, silicon, and oxygen are also found most widely distributed among the meteorites."
Yet, after all, the dimensions of our earth and its time of rotation, though, relatively to our present means of comparison, very permanent, are not so by any physical necessity. The earth might contract by cooling, or it might be enlarged by a layer of meteorites falling on it, or its rate of revolution might slowly slacken, and yet it would continue to be as much a planet as before.
Instead, of light, though, they send out cones of electro-magnetic waves, which set up induced currents in any conductor encountered beyond our own shell. Since all dangerous meteorites have been shown to contain conducting material, that is enough to locate them, for radio finders automatically determine the direction, distance, and magnitude of the disturbance, and swing a light on it.
"The next thing to do," DuQuesne stated calmly, "is to get the copper off the outside of the ship. That is the last resort, as it robs us of our only safeguard against meteorites, but this is the time for last-resort measures. I'm going after that copper.
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