The nose of the pictured plane tilted over, diving down for the surface of the sea.
"Now!" snapped Kleig. "Don't wait!"
Instantly the moving pictures on the screen reduced their speed, and the plane appeared to stop its sudden seaward plunge and to drop down as lightly as a feather. The wings of the thing moved forward slowly, folding into the body of the dropping plane.
"They fold forward," said Kleig quietly, "so that the speed of the plane in the take-off will snap them backward into position for flying!"
No one spoke, because the explanation was so obvious.
Slowly the airplane went down to the surface of the sea, with scarcely a plume of spindrift leaping back after she had struck. She dropped to ten feet below the surface of the water, a hundred yards off the starboard beam of the Stellar, her blunt nose pointing squarely at the side of the doomed liner.
"Now," said Kleig hoarsely, "watch closely, for God's sake!"
The liner rose and fell slowly. Out of the nose of the plane, which had now become a tiny submarine, started a narrow tube of black, oddly like the sepia of a giant squid. Straight toward the side of the liner it went. Above the rail the Secret Agents could see the pictured form of Prester Kleig, hand upraised. The black streak reached the side of the Stellar.
It touched the metal plates, spreading upon impact, growing, enlarging, to right and left, upward and downward, and where it touched the Stellar the black of it seemed to erase that portion of the ship. In the slow motion every detail was apparent. At regular speed the blotting out of the Stellar would have been instantaneous.