"How do they get away from it?" he asked.
"Well, I don't know quite," she said. "I'm a sap about stuff like that. All I know is what the guy that was controlling me thought about and let me have without knowing it. But I got this much out of it—that the outside of these fighting machines is coated with this 'substance of life' they talk about some way, so it's a perfect mirror, and reflects everything that hits it, even shells. The coating reflects their light ray, too, but it has to have a lead backing for that. It's no good without the lead. Seems like lead will stop that light-ray every time."
"I wonder how about big guns," murmured Sherman.
"Don't know. I didn't get anything like that in what the boss was thinking. He seemed to imagine the gun he had was the biggest there was."
They toiled on. As they progressed southward the thinning forest and the increasing walls of the cliffs drove them farther and farther toward the river, till they were forced to take to the main road willy-nilly. Along it they could walk faster, but there was more danger. They watched the heavens narrowly for any sign of the four-winged birds, but the skies seemed deserted.
At Kingston they found a filling station, and kicking in the door, located a couple of storage batteries that supplied them with a needed meal. "What do you say to a car?" asked Sherman.
"Maybe yes, maybe no," said the dancer. "It's running a chance, isn't it? Still, we're getting nowhere awful fast this way. Let's try it."
Finding a car in running order was a procedure of some difficulty, and Kingston seemed a weaponless town, though Marta finally did locate one little pearl-handled .25 calibre pop-gun. Sherman eyed it dubiously.
"That's a good thing to kill mosquitoes with," he remarked, "but I don't think it will be much use for anything else."
"Boloney," she replied. "These Lassans are yellow from way back. If I stuck this under the nose of one of them he'd throw a fit. Come on. Let's go."