"All ready?" the Prince inquired.
"Ready," each man returned.
"Fire!"
Bill pressed the red button. The tube drove heavily backward in his hands, and then was but a light, sheet-metal shell. He saw a little gleam of white light before him, against the right blue globe, a diminishing point. It was the motor ray that drove the torpedo speeding toward its mark.
Great flares of orange light hid the two azure spheres and the white dome between them. The spheres and the dome crumpled and vanished, and a thin haze of bluish smoke swirled about them.
"Good shooting!" the Prince commented. "This motor torpedo of Trainor's ought to put a lot of the old fighting equipment in the museum—if we were disposed to bestow such a dangerous toy upon humanity.
"But let's get over and see what happened."
Grasping ray pistols, they sprang to their feet and plunged down the rocky slope. It was five miles to the river. Nearly two hours later it was, when the five men slipped out of the mesquites, to look two hundred yards across an open, grassy flat to the wall of green trees along the river.
Three great heaps of wreckage lay upon the flat. At the right and the left were crumpled masses of bright silver metal—evidently the remains of the globes. In the center was another pile of bent and twisted metal, which had been the domed building.