"Lowell Howard Morrow - Islands in the Air" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrow Lowell Howard)

CHAPTER I. An Astounding Plan
"WE CAN control the laws of gravitation and perform new miracles."

My good friend, Professor Gustave Steiner, was speaking, and for that reason I pondered his
remarkable words.

"Such an attainment would overshadow all else in the realms of science," I observed casually.

"Already the problem has been mastered," asserted the professor solemnly.

I gave him a startled look. He gazed back with calm assurance, stroking his pointed beard as was his
way when discussing a serious subject. Had his astounding declaration come from any other source I
would have treated it as the idle mutterings of a diseased mind.

"Has been mastered?" I repeated incredulously.

The professor nonchalantly lit a cigar, puffed silently a moment and eyed me speculatively.

"Absolutely mastered," he answered finally. I stared. "But it will take capital to perfect the system," he
added timidly.

I understood the professor. He reversed the time-honored maxim by having more brains than money. Still
I could not help reasoning that this time his mighty intellect had slipped a cog. How could one upset the
basic law of the universe? It was impossible, absurd. However, the savants of two continents did
obeisance to Professor Steiner. The furore caused by his lecture on cosmic energy, delivered at
Heidelberg, was still fresh in mind.

"I see, my boy, that you doubt my claim," he went on presently.

"It is so astonishing."

The professor smiled tolerantly. "It is not astonishing when you know how to harness the forces of nature,
my boy." He rubbed his hands together gleefully. "A few known principles well chosen, an
opportunity--and there you have it."

"And you have overcome the gravitational pull of mother earth?"

"Nothing of the kind my dear boy; I have but neutralized it."

"Why, man alive," I cried, "such a thing would send this old globe wobbling through space like a drunken
man--leaderless and beyond control."

"Precisely. But I propose to control gravitation locally."

Again I stared. Was the professor going crazy? Was he breaking under the strain of overwork? I recalled
his sister Greta's remark to me that she feared some day he would lose his mind, inasmuch as both his
father and his grandfather had ended their days in a mad house. But as I gazed steadily into his calm blue
eyes I read no sign of insanity there. Nothing but steadfast confidence.