The greatest marvel of all, it penetrates the so-called fog around planet Venus for it brings any heavenly body so close to one's view that, regardless of fog, the body itself is clearly visible. And one thing is definite from what we have seen, Venus too is heavily inhabited and seems to have more water than any of the others.
It makes us feel as if we are in a dreamland to be seeing these heavenly bodies with this type of telescope.
After a most interesting and informative evening at the observatory, we had a few hours rest before morning arrived.
According to arrangements made yesterday, we have returned to the airport where we are greeted by the pilot and crew members of the big Martonian ship. In response to our many inquiries concerning the various instruments we had noticed in their ship, these men had promised to show us the ship inside and out and to explain the workings of these instruments.
The ship is some distance across the field from the place of our meeting but it doesn't take us long to reach it. It is really a giant. You might call it a floating village for it has everything, the finest of everything in it.
The ship itself is built of a very light material, yet sturdier than steel. This material is found on planet Mars and is alloyed with other material for strength and endurance. It resembles aluminum, as we know it on Earth.
All of the instruments in the ship are made mostly of silver alloyed with some other material, but we cannot understand what it is. They are willing to tell us but we cannot get it. The interior of the ship is exquisite, surpassing in beauty and comfort our luxury planes of Earth, yet it is a Martonian freighter bearing some passengers from Mars to the Moon.
One instrument being explained to us is what we might call an all-seeing eye which is part of the radar equipment as we know it. This 'eye' can see for five thousand miles ahead and can detect any kind of storm, any object, or any elemental condition that might be approaching in space, including heavy fog which it can also penetrate.
There are four engines each of which resembles a machine gun more than anything else. The jets which are the exhausts are large and these also resemble the barrel of a gun. The pilot touched a button on the instrument panel and started the motors. When these were in operation we could scarcely hear them, they were that quiet. The chamber, which resembles the chamber of a machine gun, is a large cylinder type, yet very small in comparison to the rest of the ship. This cylinder, we are told, contains pellets about half the size of a pea. Once getting into the main chamber of the engine these pellets explode and propel the ship. Each one of these cylinders carries enough fuel to propel the ship for three rounds trips from Mars to the Moon and back. Yet the weight of the fuel for all four engines, according to our weight, would not be more than five hundred pounds.
We were curious to know if these weren't some sort of atomic power pellets, telling them that on Earth we have just come into some knowledge of atomic power.