“However, we finally learned to regulate the thing. And now you see this car is furnished with a Helium screen, which, once put into the nongravitating state, is adjusted and regulated by the voyager, who sits inside this small non-conducting chamber, well provided with stored oxygen for breathing. Of course, many experiments were made before Bronson’s last attempt to reach Mars.”

“But how,” I asked, “can a traveler subsist in so small a space through such a long journey?”

“Oh, it isn’t long,” was his answer. “It takes about five hours to reach the limit of the earth’s atmosphere. When that has been passed, the screen or shield is so adjusted that the car attains to a speed of one hundred thousand miles per second, there being no friction in vacuous spaces to retard its progress. Now, the whole distance to Mars being forty-eight million miles, it should take the stellar car, at the rate of one hundred thousand miles a second, only four hundred and eighty seconds to traverse it. Four hundred and eighty seconds are only eight minutes. But when the car reaches the atmosphere of Mars, the screen must be molecularly rearranged again, so as not to resist too greatly the attraction of that planet. The car must descend through the Mars atmosphere slowly, by ordinary flotation-shutter apparatus.”