d as well as propelled; and in order to
accomplish this it would be necessary to command the direction of the
apergy at pleasure. My means of doing this depended on two of the
best-established peculiarities of this strange force: its rectilinear
direction and its conductibility. We found that it acts through air or
in a vacuum in a single straight line, without deflection, and
seemingly without diminution. Most solids, and especially metals,
according to their electric condition, are more or less impervious to
it--antapergic. Its power of penetration diminishes under a very
obscure law, but so rapidly that no conceivable strength of current
would affect an object protected by an intervening sheet half an inch
in thickness. On the other hand, it prefers to all other lines the
axis of a conductive bar, such as may be formed of [undecipherable] in
an antapergic sheath. However such bar may be curved, bent, or
divided, the current will fill and follow it, and pursue indefinitely,
without divergence, diffusion, or loss, the direction in which it
emerges. Therefore, by collecting the current from the generator in a
vessel cased with antapergic material, and leaving no other aperture,
its entire volume might be sent into a conductor. By cutting across
this conductor, and causing the further part to rotate upon the
nearer, I could divert the current through any required angle. Thus I
could turn the repulsion upon the resistant body (sun or planet), and
so propel the vessel in any direction I pleased.

I had determined that my first attempt should be a visit to Mars. The
Moon is a far less interesting body, since, on the hemisphere turned
towards the Earth, the absence of an atmosphere and of water ensures
the absence of any such life as is known to us--probably of any life
that could be discerned by our senses--and would prevent landing;
while nearly all the soundest astronomers agree in believing, on
apparently sufficient grounds, that even the opposite hemisphere [of
which small portions are from time to time rendered visible by the
libration, though greatly foreshortened and consequently somewhat
imperfectly seen] is equally devoid of the two primary necessaries of
animal and vegetable life. That Mars has seas, clouds, and an
atmosphere was generally admitted, and I held it to be beyond
question. Of Venus, owing to her extraordinary brilliancy, to the fact
that when nearest to the Earth a very small portion of her lighted
s