"Those ships may go on to the moon! They may become minor satellites themselves!"
"You saw the red machines dealing out the dope?"
"One of them. Who could it—"
"It's our job to find out. We better head back for the mine, to see what's happened there."
The trim little machine skimmed smoothly over the level sea, and easily took the air. We flew southwest. It was not many hours before we sighted land that must have been the lower tip of Lower California. In an hour more we were flying over Mexico, the most ancient, and paradoxically, the least known country on the continent.
We flew over a broad plain checkered with the bright green of fields, over ancient cities and mean adobe villages, and over the vast forests of pine, cut with twisting canyons, that cover the slopes of the mighty mountains that rose before us. As we went on, the green valleys of the rushing mountain streams grew narrower; and the grim wild peaks that rimmed them, higher and more frequent. Sheer jagged summits rose above steep, forest-covered slopes. We were reaching the heart of the Sierra Madre range.
At last the vast bare conical mountain loomed up to the north of us, that Bill told me was Mocolynatal—the place of the hidden radio station. Its sheer black slopes tower fifteen thousand feet above the sea. From its appearance, it was not hard to guess that it had a crater of considerable dimensions.
The mountain crept around to our left, as we flew on toward the mine. Suddenly Bill shouted and pointed toward the peak. I looked. Above the dark outline of the cone, a huge globe of blue light was rising, flaming with an intense brilliance that gave a ghastly tint of blue to all that desert wilderness of peaks! Like a great moon of blue fire, it rose swiftly into the sky! It dwindled, faded, was gone!
I felt the hair rise on my neck. I was glad that our plane was swift and far away. If it was a human power with which we had to deal, I thought, it must have made strange advances. And then I remembered the strange noises upon the ether—sounds more like the stridulations of great insects than the voices of men!
"That has happened twice before," Bill said. "But I didn't tell anybody about it in the States. It's too damned unbelievable."