University of Toronto Schools - Twig Yearbook (Toronto, Ontario Canada)

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THE T WIC such a trip. He worked unceasingly in his spare time, mixing liquids and solids, liquids and liquids, testing and developing and balancing chemical equations. When his friends learned of his idea they considered him at first as joking, but when they dis- covered that he was in earnest they decided that he must be insane to believe and attempt to foster such a foolish notion. From that date forward, John offered no fur- ther confidences to his friends. One eve- ning, while working late, he happened to be testing a liquid, which he believed pos- sessed all the qualities necessary for the required fuel. He applied a current with an electromotive force of about one hundred volts and kept his eyes glued to the meter- dial in front of him. Was the hand moving or was it just his imagination? No, he was sure of it now, the hand was slowly ascend- ing the dial. The fuel was a success. A giddy feeling of exaltation swept over him, almost causing him to faint. For two whole years he worked upon the development and building and testing of the rocket. He considered the usefulness and advantage of a gyroscope, the best dimen- sions for his craft, a method of avoiding meteorites and numerous other problems un- intelligible to the non-scientific mind. At last after these years of great toil and after great expense, only possible through the wealth of his father, the rocket was com- pleted. John was an impulsive chap and whenever he set his mind on doing some- thing he always attempted it as soon as pos- sible. It was thus that he made his calcula- tions for a direct trip to the planet of Mars. When Mars and the Earth are in what the astronomer calls direct opposition to each other, they are the nearest possible in the elliptical path of each. The distance at this time is approximately thirty-five million miles. Probably a clearer idea of the dis- tance may be realized by the reader if it is stated that it would take a train, travelling at the speed of a mile a rninute, seventy-six years to reach this planet. This position occurs every fifteen to seventeen years and, 40 as the opposition near perihelion was not far distant Ca matter of three monthsl, john Westerby planned to leave then on his momentous voyage. The date was set and final arrangements as to certain positions ol constellations and the likelihood of meteo- rites in the plotted path through space were made with considerable exactness and patience. The eventful day dawned and after last minute preparations as to the fitting of his oxygen suit, food and the adjusting of the miniature telescope mounted within the rocket, John said good-bye to his parents and climbed into the impressive-looking ship of space. flt might be mentioned here that the reason john's parents so readily acquiesced to the voyage was because they were of the opinion that the ship would never leave the ground. They were entirely mistakenj The metal door clanged shut. Did the closing of this door signify the clos- ing of the book of life for this poor mortal, or was it the beginning of a scientific ex- periment ever afterwards to be renowned in the history of the world? At precisely nine p.m., john lighted his instrument panel and closely watched the flickering motion of the numerous needles on the circular dials. spread out in neat array, directly in front of him. Due to the peculiar system of indirect lighting, the inside of the ship appeared to its sole occupant as a ghostly shape, unreal and almost impossible in its fantastic design. For just about five seconds or less, John was afraid he might lose his nerve. He was attempting something never before done by many trying to explore The Almighty's Uni- verse. Was he breaking some powerful law of God? It was a horrible thought, project- ing icy drops of perspiration upon his brow. This feeling soon left him, however, and he steeled himself for the trip ahead. I-le turned the ignition switch and adjusted the electromotive force to one hundred volts. Now the big moment was at hand. Slowly, very slowly, he allowed the peculiar-looking lever in his right hand to move backward. A giddy, sickening sensation assailed him,

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THE TWIG On the Death of Autumn j. N. EMERSON The dreary autumn creeps And seeps Into my soul. And yet my heart still beats And leaps Beyond control. l see the autumn glowing red. But even then, when melancholy, dead- What remains? The sordid stains- Dead leaves, And reeking smoky hres- The funeral pyres Of Autumnis beauty. l roam throughout this month of mists O'er marshy lands, Where gently drifts The sultry breeze. Where now are nature's lovely gifts, When sweeping gale, and wind uplifts The falling leaves? Her glowing beauty, her gold, her red Seem glorious, yet to entomb a dead And ageing life, whose charm has fled, Whose rosy cheeks reveal gaunt glaring eyes Which seem melancholy, sadg she yet denies That death has come. Cold and grey, the days prolong, Autumn sings her dreary song Throughout the bare-limbed trees. The cold and frost pervade the air. The lone, gaunt birds just sit and stare Waiting for the colder blasts of winter, Slowly, slowly, day by day The colours dull, the leaves decay. The shroud of Autumn, lean, forlorn, Contains a corpse, then Nature-born, Comes Winter. The month of mists is dead. Oct. I935. A Voyage Into Space WILLIAM E. GRIEVE iispace can be adequately defined as be- ing a complete Vacuum, between the sun, the planets, the stars, the nebulae, etc., declared the eminent professor from his prominent position on the platform of the large lecture hall. His audience, composed of the astronomy students of the great Uni- versity, were intensely interested and, for once, all were paying extraordinary atten- tion to the speaker. lf it were possible, the professor's if was greatly accented by his sharp, piercing voice, 'ito reach a posi- tion almost completely unaffected by the pull of gravity of our planet, the ever in- accessible space would thus have been reached. Man would fulfil one of his greatest ambitions-to travel into the un- known and return-bearing, most likely, a completely new insight into the annals of astronomy. At this point one member of the audience seemingly lost interest in the lecture. i-le began to ponder upon an extremely large subject, yet directly related to one of the smallest words in the English language, the ever important wif . Ulf! if! if! The word was running in the mind of this student, like the constant hum of a high-pitched dynamo. The following few weeks his friends noticed that he wasnit his usual self. l-le seemed worried and, whenever anyone asked him if he was in any trouble or anything was wrong, he always made a denial of it. john Vvesterby, for that was the boy's name, was a clever student in the subject of chemistry, and one quite interested in the co-related subject astronomy. l-le possessed a labora- tory of his own and he usually consumed his spare time conducting experiments devised primarily by his own ingenious mind. He realized that the only factor standing in the way of a trip into space was that of fuel. No fuel had as yet been invented that possessed the extreme power and the com- pactness needed to propel a rocket at such tremendous speed as would be necessary for

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THE T WIC a terrific pounding noise battered his ear- drums and he suddenly lost consciousness. When he regained his normal senses a glance through the porthole at his left side proved to him that he was out of the earth's atmos- phere. He was so delighted and enthralled by the amazing vista presented on the other side of the portholes that for some time he forgot to shut off his motor. Once inside this vacuum the rocket would continue to travel at exactly the same speed as when it entered, unless, of course, it came in contact with some material substance. Thus there was a useless Waste of the valuable fuel. He was outside the earth, staring down at our world, which resembled a luminous whirling marble against the satiny black void, staring down at the whole Solar Sys- tem, whose lighted spheres swung in their orbits about the blazing yellow-white ball that dwarfed them all by its size and fierce brilliancy. Fascinated, he found himself in the midst of blazing star-clusters, whose myriad suns stared out at him like the jewels of some radiant tiara, with an in- communicable ecstasy he peered into the abysses of vast gaseous nebulae, all cloudy- shaped and mysteriously glowing, passing him at hair-raising nearness. The spell- bound rapture he felt had mounted almost to a delirium, but gradually he began to realize his actual position and surroundings in a more worldly-accepted sense. Terrified, John realized that the rocket fuel was still being exploded in the tubes. He had used a tremendous amount of his precious fuel He could never reach the earth again. He might get to Mars, but he would there be doomed. As the full extent of his plight began to sweep over him, he became a rav- ing maniac, tearing his hair and carrying on in a most inhuman fashion. He was brought back to a more normal appreciation of the situation, when he saw through the front porthole that the little planet of Mars appeared to be rushing at him at a terrifying speed. He fought down the impulse to faint and applied the two reverse rockets with full power in each. By 41 slowly gauging the fuel supplied to these rocket-tubes he stopped the terrific speed at which the ship had been travelling, and made a very successful landing on a rocky plateau. He had reached Mars. ln one week and six days he had travelled thirty-hve million miles. It seemed incred- ible and yet it was true. Yes, it certainly was true. There he was stranded upon ax dead planet, or at least it appeared dead. He decided that there would be no advant- age in remaining in the ship and moaning over his plight, so adjusting his oxygen-suit, he stepped onto the land of Mars. For two exciting weeks he explored the surrounding land, existing upon his fast-diminishing food supply. From what he had seen on his approach and from his numerous explora- tions, he ascertained that a large proportion of the surface was a wide desert interspersed with huge rocky plateaus, similar to the one had come to rest. badly distributed, to the frozen polar on which his rocket-ship The water supply was most of it being confined caps. The astronomer's uvenetian canals were not canals at all, but streaks of white rock crystal. Rainfall was very scanty and practically non-existent over large portions of the planet. The air was very thin and dry and much like that on the highest moun- tains on earth. The weather was constantly cold and John imagined that the winters would probably be about twice as long as the terrestial fthe Martian period of revolu- tion at a mean distance of liiln million miles from the sun is 687 days, although the daily revolution, in twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes, and the axial inclina- tion is almost the same as the earth'sJ. Al- though Mars' diameter is only 4,216 miles, John found that the gravity pull was ap-- proximately the same as on our own planet. Considering this fact, he decided that the density must be extremely great, as had been hinted at by the astronomer's spectroscope. Here was proof, but of what good was it? He was doomed. The Solar Universe is C-od's greatest creation, but it was evidently not meant to