"Very well," I assented, and turned to start the motors. I could not resist a grin at Xenora, who was still regarding me with a speculative smile. She laughed back at me; then was suddenly serious.
"Be careful! The Sleepers of Mutron! They might be alive in the wreck! As long as they breathe, the Lord of Flame rules them!"
I started the generators, and the Omnimobile rolled heavily down across the green slope, and through the fringe of flaming purple trees. In a few minutes we came upon the wreck of the silver car, a great tangle of twisted wreckage, half fused by the electricity, and bent and torn by the fall. It lay in the little open space, with a great tree splintered and smoking under it, and the ground about empurpled with fallen petals. The twisted metal plates gleamed brightly in the light of the scarlet sky.
I stopped the Omnimobile, and we got out and approached the wrecked machine. There was a vast mass of the débris. The globe must have been forty feet in diameter. We spent several minutes in gazing at it from different angles, and then Sam and I climbed into the tangle of bent white plates and massive twisted girders.
The machinery had been too completely destroyed for us to be sure just how it worked. But Sam thought that the shell had carried tanks of water, the gravity of which had been negatived by the emanations from tanks of the same luminous gas which supported the roof of waters, lifting the ship. From the nature of the fragments of electrical machinery we observed, it seemed that the horizontal propulsion was attained by the ionization and repulsion of the helium atoms in the air. The apparatus that had produced the atomic disintegration was too badly wrecked to be identified.
Presently I came upon the body of a man, caught between two twisted bars, and cut half in two. The body was naked. It had a greenish cast that was darker by far than that of Xenora's fair skin. The physique, and the size and shape of the head, showed a race of high intellectual development.
The dead man had a metal frame clamped upon his back. It was twisted and broken, and whatever had been fastened upon his body had been torn away in the crash. And the corpse had upon its back the strange violet stains that had been upon Xenora when we found her!
Presently Sam found another body. It had been half burned up by the arc. It, too, had the metal frame upon it, and the thing the frame was to hold was still clamped to it! The body bore, fastened to the back with those cruel metal clamps, a six-sided bar of blue metal! It was six inches in diameter and two feet long!
"This must be the thing Xenora calls a 'fire-crystal,'" Sam said, "though I don't see any fire about it. It's damned queer!"
"Do you suppose there is machinery in the bar, that generates forces or currents that move the man about like a puppet?"