Free The Red Journey Back by John Keir Cross Page B

longer than the one in the old Albatross ,
even allowing for the improvements in the Comet . As it was, it still was a little longer, because of all kinds of
complicated difficulties about the orbits of Earth and Mars being elliptic and
not absolutely circular, and things like “aphelions” and “perihelions” nosing
in to mess things up a bit.  . . . Anyway,
I don’t really know anything about all this, except that I’ve heard Dr. K. and
the others talking about it and seen them working the whole business out with
adding machines and such (and I looked up the words themselves in a scientific
dictionary, so the spelling’s all right at least).
    We
had a hectic time getting ready. There were endless conferences and sessions
with Dr. K., who had, of course, agreed wholeheartedly to the rescue expedition
idea, once all the facts had been put before him, and was almost as excited as
old J.K.C. himself, both by the thought of seeing his rocket in full blast and
by the thought of going to Mars for the first time. For our part, we were
desperately keen to get started for the sake of Uncle Steve and poor old Doctor
Mac: it wasn’t as if we knew what was what up there in Mars, you know—we had
simply no idea; except, of course, that something pretty serious was afoot, and
that somehow we were the only ones who could do anything about it. Maybe it was
even too late—we didn’t know that either: we just felt we had to get going.
    And
because we were all so eager, things were arranged in double-quick time. We had
barely a week in Chicago before the whole business was cut and dried and we
were ready to start. Dr. K.’s men had been working all around the clock on the
last touches to the Comet —the
place was such a den of activity as I’d never seen in my life before. Of
course, because of the rush and turmoil, there were a hundred and one little
improvisations—Dr. K. didn’t have time, for instance, to complete his own
apparatus for feeding us on the journey (he’d worked out a real master plan for
dealing with this side of things), so we had simply to make do again with
Doctor Mac’s old “toothpaste” method—that is to say, normal food being
impossible to handle in a spaceship because of the lack of weight, we had to
feed from concentrates which were made up into paste form and packed into
plastic tubes, just like toothpaste tubes, and you simply put the nozzle thing
into your mouth and squeezed  . . .  ! Still,
we didn’t mind this in the least: it was like old times for one thing, and for
another it made us feel that Doctor Mac was somehow with us in spirit at least
on this bigger job than his own old pioneering effort.
    So
everything was somehow arranged at last. For the last few days before the take-off
we all moved out of Chicago altogether—went to live in the workmen’s huts miles
out in the open country, close to where the rocket itself was.
    I
ought to say at this stage who exactly was going, I suppose.
    Well,
naturally, there was Dr. K.—that was an absolute must. And ourselves—another
must, because of Uncle Steve’s last message, the whole reason for the voyage at
all (I mean Jacky and Mike and Yours Truly, of course). Then there was
Katey—Katey Hogarth; for our parents had made her promise to go, to look after
us (as if it made a pennyworth of difference!). Dr. K. wasn’t very keen on the
idea—quite charming and all that, full of old-world courtesy and such; but you
could see that women in spaceships just wasn’t his idea of what was what—it
wasn’t, as he put it, “a true feminine occupation, my dear.” But when Mike’s
mother and father joined in, and said that they wanted Katey to go too, or they’d
hold back on permission for Mike to go, well, there was nothing else for it,
and Dr. K. had to give in.
    We
wanted one more. Dr. K. half considered taking one of his assistants; but most
of them were married men, with vast families, and besides, if anything did happen
to us in