"It did. We'll have to get more rigidity or we'll be shaking ourselves to pieces every time we shoot. But this, as I said, is an experimental ship. What we've got to do now is turn in and build a real one, with heavy armor and a lot of new tricks."
"How are you going to know what kind of armor to put on her?"
"That's easy. Steel will keep out any kind of material projectiles they're likely to have, if it's thick enough. It won't keep out the light-ray, but we'll put on a thin lead plating to take care of that, just in case, though I don't think they're likely to try it after the one failure.
"Then inside the steel armor, we'll put a vacuum chamber. That will stop anything but light and maybe cosmic radiation, and I don't think they're up to that, although we'll get a little of the effect through the struts that support the outer wall of the chamber. What I would like though, is a couple of these Lassan thought-helmets. Not that you people are slow on the uptake, but we'd be a lot faster if we had them, and we're going to need all the speed we can get."
They were crossing the flying field as they spoke, making for headquarters, where Sherman presently laid out the design for the second Monitor, embodying the improvements he had mentioned. The engineer who looked it over smiled doubtfully.
"I don't think we can give this to you in less than three or four weeks," he said. "It will take a lot of time to cast that armor you want and to build the vacuum chamber. I assume your own workmen are going to make the internal fixtures."
"Correct from the word go," Sherman told him. "But you better have it before three or four weeks are up. Ben, what do you say we run over to the lab and see if we can dig up something new."
It was two days later when they stood at headquarters on the flying field again. The Monitor had made three more trips, on one of them, flying over the Lassan city without seeing anything more important than the Australian signal station perched on a nearby hill. Meanwhile the army of the federated governments had pushed out its tentacles, searching the barren waste that had been the most fruitful country in the world. East, west, south and north the report was the same; no sign of the Lassans or any other living thing.
"I could wish," said Gloria, "that those lads would stick their noses out. I'd like to try the Monitor on them."