us Weight

It was the doctor himself who gave the name Space Fever (now so
generally adopted) to the peculiar malady from which he suffered in that
long period when weight was very slight or nothing at all. A little
reflection on the physiological bearings of the conditions we were
passing through, will serve to explain the illness.

For the period of a month, owing to the impossibility of effort, there
was scarcely any wasting of our bodily tissues, and very little need for
oxydization of the blood. The limbs, which the heart really works
hardest to serve, did scarcely any labour and needed very little blood.
But the heart had its stubborn habits the same as the other muscles. It
is a high-pressure engine, and there is no way of slowing it down
materially. It kept up its vigorous pumping and driving just as if the
great muscles of the limbs had wasted and needed building up, and just
as if it had the task of forcing the blood through those parts of the
body usually compressed by its weight or strained by the effort of
carrying it. The result was much the same as if your heart now should
suddenly begin to beat much too fast, the blood was heated into a state
of fever, which naturally increased as we lost weight, culminated at the
dead-line and began decreasing as soon as we commenced having a weight
toward Mars. It was only my fortunate invention of a method of exercise,
and my religious adherence to it, which saved me from a similar attack.

But many things happened before the doctor recovered consciousness. The
Moon had re-appeared on the other side of the Earth-spot, the light
about us had grown less dazzling than sunlight on Earth, and the
temperature had fallen to four degrees. It was perhaps two days after
passing the dead-line that, as I was gazing carefully out of the forward
window, I saw far to the right of us a large circular patch of faintly
redder light in the general curtain of white. Its size quite startled
me, for it was rather larger than a full moon, and I had expected Mars
to re-appear as a very bright star before we could distinguish any disc
with the naked eye. This misapprehension probably arose from the fact
that I had thought the dead-line about half way between the two planets,
which upon reflection I saw to be impossible, as it must be much nearer
the smaller planet.

The outline of the planet was not clearly visible yet, but I could not
have missed seeing that red glow long before, had it