"Now you can say it, Doll; there's no spy ray on us here. What a break—what a break!" exulted DuQuesne. "The old fossil swallowed it bodily, hook, line, and sinker!"
"It may not be so good, though, at that, chief, in one way. He's going to watch us, to help us out if we get into a jam, and with that infernal telescope, or whatever it is, the Earth is right under his nose."
"Simpler than taking milk away from a blind kitten," the saturnine chemist gloated. "We'll go out to where Seaton went, only farther—out beyond the reach of his projector. There, completely out of touch with him, we'll circle around the Galaxy back to Earth and do our stuff. Easier than dynamiting fish in a bucket—the old sap's handing me everything I want, right on a silver platter!"
VIII.
Six mighty rotating currents of electricity impinged simultaneously upon the spherical hull of Skylark Two and she disappeared utterly. No exit had been opened and the walls remained solid, but where the forty-foot globe of arenak had rested in her cradle an instant before there was nothing. Pushed against by six balancing and gigantic forces, twisted cruelly by six couples of angular force of unthinkable magnitude, the immensely strong arenak shell of the vessel had held and, following the path of least resistance—the only path in which she could escape from those irresistible forces—she had shot out of space as we know it and into the impossible reality of that hyperspace which Seaton's vast mathematical knowledge had enabled him so dimly to perceive.
As those forces smote his vessel, Seaton felt himself compressed. He was being driven together irresistibly in all three dimensions, and in those dimensions and at the same time he was as irresistibly being twisted—was being corkscrewed in a monstrously obscure fashion which permitted him neither to move from his place nor to remain in it. He hung poised there for interminable hours, even though he knew that the time required for that current to build up to its inconceivable value was to be measured only in fractional millionths of a single second.
Yet he waited strainingly while that force increased at an all but imperceptible rate, until at last the vessel and all its contents were squeezed out of space, in a manner somewhat comparable to that in which an orange pip is forced out from between pressing thumb and resisting finger.