The specialists, headed by Chief Technician LaVerne Thorndyke, had been waiting strainingly for that word for minutes. Now they literally flew at their tasks, in furious haste, but following rigidly and in perfect coördination a prearranged schedule. Every control and lead, every bus bar and immaterial beam of force was traced and checked. Instruments and machines were dismantled; sealed mechanisms were ruthlessly torn apart by jacks or sliced open with cutting beams. And everywhere, everything and every movement was being photographed, charted, and diagramed.
"Getting the idea now, Kim," the chief technician said finally, during a brief lull in his work. "A sweet system——"
"Look at this!" a mechanic interrupted. "Here's a machine that's all shot to pieces!"
The shielding cover had been torn from a monstrous fabrication of metal, apparently a motor or generator of an exceedingly complex type. The insulation of its coils and windings had fallen away in charred fragments; its copper had melted down in sluggish, viscous streams.
"That's what we've been looking for," Thorndyke declared. "Check those leads! Alpha!"
"Seven-three-nine-four!" And the minutely careful study went on until: "That's enough; we've got everything we need now. Have you draftsmen and photographers got everything down solid?"
"On the boards!" and "In the cans!" rapped out the two reports as one.
"Then let's go!"
"And go fast!" Kinnison ordered, brusquely. "I'm afraid that we're going to run out of time as it is!"
All hands hurried back into the Brittania, paying no attention to the bodies littering the decks. So desperate was the emergency, each man knew, that nothing could be done about the dead, whether friend or foe. Every resource of mechanism, of brain and of brawn, must needs be strained to the utmost if they themselves were not soon to be in similar case.