The old inventor's cracked voice answered over the wire. "I'll be with you at once!"
Nelson left the bridge and met Androka on the way to the room in the superstructure from which he operated the rays for the destruction of electric equipment.
The old inventor's eyes were blazing with an almost maniacal light as he fiddled with various levers and batteries. From high above them, in the fighting top of the steel foremast, came the humming of a powerful dynamo as the apparatus built up its tremendous voltage.
Through a skylight in the roof of his workshop, Androka sighted the hovering plane. He spoke into the telephone. In the turret top of the foremast, a weapon that looked like an old-style trench mortar was suddenly uncovered.
Androka said a few words in German into the speaking tube and watched, as the huge mouth of the weapon swung toward the hovering plane.
There was a flash, a shower of sparks; rays darted from the muzzle of the weapon in the mast turret. But the dynamic force that had blasted three navy bombers into helpless wreckage had no effect on the strange craft that hung suspended in the sky over the Comerford.
And then it seemed that the powerful rays struck something—something afar off that picked them up like a handful of thunderbolts and hurled them back. There was a report, like the blowing out of a giant fuse. The whole hull of the Comerford shuddered, as if from the impact of a powerful electric shock. The vessel quivered from stem to stern. Lights dimmed, went out.
For fully ten seconds, there wasn't an atom of power on board the Comerford. She was stricken as if with a paralysis of her electric force.
Then the dimmed lights began to glow again.