"She's a sweet-handling boat—easy like a bicycle," declared Loring as he brought the vessel lightly to a landing upon their return. "We can burn the old one up now. We'll never need her again, any more than a snake needs his last year's skin."
"She's good, all right. Those two hulks must be put out of existence, but we shouldn't do it here. The rays would set the woods afire, and the metal would condense all around. We don't want to leave any tracks, so we'd better pull them out into space to destroy them. We could turn them loose, and as you've never worked a ray, it'll be good practice for you. Also, I want you to see for yourself just what our best armour-plate amounts to compared with arenak."
When they towed the two vessels far out into space, Loring put into practise the instruction he had received from DuQuesne concerning the complex armament of their vessel. He swung the beam-projector upon the Kondalian airship, pressed the connectors of the softener ray, the heat ray, and the induction ray, and threw the master switch. Almost instantly the entire hull became blinding white, but it was several seconds before the extremely refractory material began to volatilize. Though the metal was less than an inch think, it retained its shape and strength stubbornly, and only slowly did it disappear in flaming, flaring gusts of incandescent gas.
"There, you've seen what an inch of arenak is like," said DuQuesne when the destruction was complete. "Now shine it on that sixty-inch chrome-vanadium armor hull of our old bus and see what happens."
Loring did so. As the beam touched it, the steel disappeared in one flare of radiance—as he swung the projector in one flashing arc from the stem to the stern there was nothing left. Loring, swinging the beam, whistled in amazement.
"Wow! What a difference! And this ship of ours has a skin of arenak six feet thick!"
"Yes. Now you understand why I didn't want to argue with anybody out here as long as we were in our steel ship."
"I understand, all right; but I can't understand the power of these rays. Suppose I had had all twenty of them on instead of only three?"
"In that case, I think that we could have whipped even the short, thick strangers."
"You and me both. But say, every ship's got to have a name. This new one of ours is such a sweet, harmless, inoffensive little thing, we'd better name her the Violet, hadn't we?"