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A Plunge into Space was first printed in 1890 and continuously reprinted until 1910, earning the enthusiastic plaudits of Jules Verne. On the return trip they discover a stowaway --a Martian girl. The life-support systems of the ship cannot accommodate and extra passenger, and each crew member has some essential skill for bringing the ship safely to earth. The drama builds with enormous tension to a fateful climax as the girl becomes the key to life -- or death -- for the space voyagers. This edition features a foreword by Jules Verne, the only foreword that Verne ever wrote. In the book, Henry Barnett discovered how to control the ethereal force after 20 years of experimenting, "which permeates all material things, all immaterial space" and that combines electricity and gravity: "...I have discovered the original and essence of that law which, before me, never man did ought but name, or, at best, did but chronicle its known effects -- the law which makes that universe of worlds a grand well-ordered army instead of helpless mob of mutually destroying forces; when I tell you that within this ragged room, there stands a man who -- grant him but ten years of human life -- could sway a star in its course, could hurl a planet from its path? Man, I have discovered the mightiest secret of creation. ...I have discovered the origin-of-force!" Barnett succeeds in his experiments and a large, black and globular spaceship called the "Steel Globe" is secretly built in an inaccessible region in Alaska. "A spiral staircase wound round the interior circumference of the globe. This staircase, or rather sloping path, had one very curious feature. The handrail was duplicated, so that if by any superhuman means the enormous bulk could be turned upside down one could walk on the underside of the spiral... Across the center of the Steel Globe a commodious platform swung like a ship's lamp. On this a very large telescope was fixed... the platform was literally packed with astronomical ins