As the ship remains suspended in air, we are shown a panorama of the whole city. It has been brought right up to us, you might say. So clear is the view that one of the men spotted someone he knew coming out of a building and called him by name to us. We can see the people on the street as though we were looking at them out of a second story window.
Our Martonian friends tell us that all their ships have this apparatus, and should they come into a strange place, this is the way they would observe it first before landing. They would definitely know from this altitude whether the people they were about to meet would be friendly towards them or not. Beneath the ship is a little apparatus, with a receiver in the ship. This they now turn on and through it we can hear people talking and what they are saying.
For instance, there is a man on the street talking and pointing to the ship. We see this through the hatch, while through the receiver we hear what he is saying. We do not understand his words, but the pilot does.
"But," George wanted to know, "how about a place whose people you would not understand?"
One of the scientists answered, "that is easy. It matters not what the language, we would study the vibration of their sound. For the sound of everything carries its own vibration in different pitches for different meanings. Here we have another machine that does that work for us," and he turned on this other machine. Then he gave us a sort of lesson as to its workings and the interpretation of them.
It operates similar to the graph machines we have on Earth. To demonstrate, he selected an individual who was talking to another on the street. We saw the man through the hatch, heard his voice through the receiver and watched the machine registering the pitches of sound. One of the Moonalite boys with us understood the language so he chalked down in his own way the words heard through the receiver. We compared the written words with the graph made by this machine on the pitch basis and they were identical.
This machine is so fine in its performance that while they are travelling, should the ship produce in any part of it a strange vibration that is not supposed to be there, it also registers that and shows where it is. This makes the ships almost foolproof.
If there happens to be a meteor encountered in travelling, the machine warns them of its approach. It seems to be built to distinguish between various types of vibrations and to give the answer as to what they might be. When it warns them of meteors, the pilot immediately throws the repulsing power of the ship into operation, for the body of the ship is equipped with such a power, and since all meteors have a certain amount of metal in them, this power repulses them. According to our informer, the nearest a meteor has ever come to one of these ships was within two hundred fifty miles.
In case of trouble, a picture can be sent from the ship by means of another apparatus they are showing us, to the nearest stopping station or to the planet of the emergency. In other words, the intricate machinery within this big Martonian ship was more than our minds could fathom.
They even have an emergency water-maker. It seems that this water-maker catches the air or atmosphere, similar to a ventilator and then condenses the air into fresh water.