Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/406

 sea, he would always say, far clear of all intervening island systems, and he could work up speed indefinitely. He spoke of attaining a twentieth, a tenth, nay, a fifth even, of the message speed: which was somewhat like saying, that the speed of light itself, 186,000 miles in a second, was to be eclipsed as much as that speed, when first made known, eclipsed all other speeds of our then knowledge. White reckoned that six weeks would bestride the vast interval in question, with further allowance for the "slack" at either extremity of the voyage—a rather troublesome case it was, in dealing with our corporate and living bodies, seeing that the said slack involved about as much of precious time as the main voyage itself.

White had made enormous preparations, alike for speed and safety. The outlay upon anti-vis-inertial energy, and anti-momentum energy, was something fabulous; and no wonder that the passage-money ran up even to thousands of energy per head. Another stupendous cost was the vast panoply of cross-electric lines thrown out, forming, in fact, an encompassing cylinder, ever far ahead along the route to the nebula. Even the continuous pay-out of this costly process for the earth's axial motion was an appreciable addition. But in fact every such precaution was taken for safety, regardless of expense, so that the minutest meteoric body, entering within the lines even a billion miles ahead, was almost at once indicated at the pilotage, and by the admirable self-action of that advanced day avoided.

Brown and I, of course, had made up our minds to go on this trip. Indeed, we had other and better