Anderwelt," I said, watching the doctor as I spoke. There was indecision
in his face.

"Suppose I allow you, say, ninety per cent.?" he said at last.

I was signing the cheque Flynn had brought me. "Done!" I cried, handing
it over. He scanned it carefully, and after a long time said,--

"Mars is nearest to the Earth on the third day of next August.
Fortunately Chicago is a good place to do things in a hurry. The
projectile must be ready to start early in June, but its construction
and its first trip must be kept a profound secret."

The doctor must have been hungry since noon. He began munching a chicken
sandwich. The cold planked whitefish tasted quite as good as smoked
herrings, perhaps, and strawberry short-cake in March was a luxury which
he evidently appreciated.

CHAPTER III

Structure of the Projectile

A few weeks later I received a letter from Dr. Anderwelt asking me to
call at his rooms on the West Side that afternoon, as soon as the market
had closed. He desired to exhibit and explain the drawings of the new
projectile and talk over the preparations for the trip. I had been so
engrossed with every sort of worry that I had thought but little of the
doctor and his grand schemes of late. But now I was anxious to know what
progress he was making. Sometimes I felt that I had been foolish to put
any money into the thing; but the doctor's idea of reversing gravity was
so simple and so elemental, that I marvelled it had never occurred to
scientists before.

After the market I hunted up the street and number the doctor had given
me, and found a little, dingy boarding-house, lost among machine shops
and implement factories, near the west side of the river. In a
third-floor back room, with one small window looking out on dark, sooty
buildings and belching chimneys, Dr. Anderwelt was thinking out all the
incidental problems, and preparing for all the emergencies that might
arise on a trip of some forty million miles, through unknown space, to a
strange planet whose composition was unguessed.

The walls of the room were soiled and bare, except for blue-prints of
drawings from which the projectile was being built in neighbouring
foundries. There were but two plain, hard chairs in the room. The doctor
sat on one with a pillow doubled up under him for a cushion. He was
bending over a draughting board, which was propped up on the bed during
the day and went under it at night.

Three flights of steep stai