Five minutes later our trim little machine was rolling forward with the "windmill" spinning. It swept smoothly upward, Bill moved into gear the device that brought down the mast, and soon we were over the cold gray Pacific, with the city fading into the haze of the blue northern horizon.
Bill was flying the ship, and my thoughts turned back to Dr. Vernon and his daughter. The Doctor was a pudgy, explosive little man, who thought, ate, and breathed science. His short, restless figure always bore the marks of laboratory cataclysms, and his life had been marred by the earlier lack of success in perfecting the terrible machine to which he was devoting his life. I had always thought it strange that a man so mild and tender-hearted should toil so to build a death-dealing instrument, and I wondered what he would do with it now if he had it completed.
It was five years since I had seen Ellen. She had been but a spritely, elfin girl. I remembered her chiefly as having been instrumental, one day at a party, in getting me to drop myself into a supposed easy chair, which turned out to be a tub of ice water.
CHAPTER II
The Menace of the Mist
The little Camel-back plane was a wonder. The soft whispering hum of the turbine engine belied its tremendous power. The slender, white metal wings cut the air at the rate of two and a half miles per minute. Presently we saw a smudge of smoke where the blue sea met the bluer sky ahead, and soon the little machine had dropped on the deck of a destroyer.
The sister vessel was four or five miles to starboard. The two ships were plowing deliberately along, at about ten knots, keeping some twenty-five miles behind the tramp steamer they were shadowing. One of the officers took us up on the little bridge, and we learned that the little ships were keeping track of the tramp with their radio equipment.
The radio man took us in and let us listen to the calls between the tramp and some point far ahead. Those were the strangest sounds I have ever heard. Thin, stuttering, stridulating squeaks and squeals! Even allowing for distortion in transmission, it was hard to imagine what might make them.
"That's something talking," Bill said. "And human beings don't make noises like that."