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[The Blog of Phileas Fogg: 1883 onwards] October 6th 1885

From: Harry Hayfield <harryhayfield~at~googlemail.com>
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:34:57 -0700 (PDT)
To: jvf~at~gilead.org.il

If there are two things that I am fed up about with this mission, it's
seeing the sunrise every two hours or so and this "microgravity"
however as I could do very little about the first element, I decided to
see what I could do about the second. And the idea came to me whilst I
was asleep as I was dreaming about the train journey to Florida. At one
point in the journey, there was a very extreme bend to the left and I
remember being pushed to the left so today I looked in the various
cupboards and drawers and found (to my amazement) a pair of ski poles,
and two boots with some magnets on the soles.

Asking Passepartout to don the boots, I positioned the ski poles and
asked Passepartout to hold the poles and start walking slowly and then
speed up (if he could manage) as fast as possible. After about half an
hour of so, he'd managed to get up to a slow jog and I checked my box
of tricks to see if my idea was working and was shocked to read that it
had detected a rather large rock heading straight for us. Now, as you
know I am not one to panic normally, but with that rock aiming right at
us, that's percisely what I did. "RUN! I shouted. Passepartout took a
deep breath and slowly but surely started to speed up. As I watched the
figures on the box of tricks, Barbicane woke up (from an extended
sleep) and said "Limey, what are you doing?". When I showed him what
was happening, he shouted "RUN" as well, but it all seemed to no avail.
This box was recording that we would impact in 30 seconds and then
something remarkable happened. Passepartout let go of the ski poles and
mustering all his strength jumped forwards about 3 feet. The sudden
change in momentum caused the Columbiad to move down about 20 feet and
the rock missed up by a matter of inches.

Well, as you can imagine after that scare we all needed a rest. So
Passepartout (now back in his ordinary shoes) served a pot of tea and
whilst it floated a little, it didn't float as much. I checked the box
of tricks and it was now reporting gravity was 0.3 times normal so it
was clear that I was on the right track but to create our own gravity
we'd need someone like Samson or Hercules. Passepartout offered his
apolgies to which I responded "Cheer up, I'll call you Little Hercules
if you would like!"

--
Posted By Harry Hayfield to The Blog of Phileas Fogg: 1883 onwards on
7/18/2009 10:11:00 PM

Received on Sun 19 Jul 2009 - 00:35:06 IDT

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