Arcot had left a small radio receiver with Tonlos in Sonor before he started on this trip, and had given him directions on how to tune in on the Solarite. Now he sent a message to him, telling that the plane had been brought down, and asking that a squadron of planes be sent at once.
Wade and Arcot were elected to make the first inspection of the Kaxorian plane, and clad in their cooling suits, they stepped from the Solarite, each carrying, for emergency use, a small hand torch, burning atomic hydrogen, capable of melting its way through even the heavy armor of the great plane.
As they stood beside it, looking up at the gigantic wall of metal that rose sheer beside them hundreds of feet straight up, it seemed impossible that this mighty thing could fly, that it could be propelled through the air. In awed silence they gazed at its vast bulk.
Then, like pygmies beside some mighty prehistoric monster, they made their way along its side, seeking a door. Suddenly Wade stopped short and exclaimed: “Arcot, this is senseless—we can't do this! The machine is so big that it'll take us half an hour of steady walking to go around it. We'll have to use the Solarite to find an entrance!”
It was well that they followed Wade's plan, for the only entrance, as they later learned, was from the top. There, on the back of the giant, the Solarite landed—its great weight having no slightest effect on the Kaxorian craft. They found a trap-door leading down inside. However, the apparatus for opening it was evidently within the hull, so they had to burn a hole in the door before they could enter.
What a sight there was for these men of Earth. The low rumble of the idling engines was barely audible as they descended the long ladder.
There was no resemblance whatever to the interior of a flying machine; rather, it suggested some great power house, where the energies of half a nation were generated. They entered directly into a vast hall that extended for a quarter of a mile back through the great hull, and completely across the fuselage. To the extreme nose it ran, and throughout there were scattered little globes that gave off an intense white light, illuminating all of the interior. Translucent bull's-eyes obscured the few windows.
All about, among the machines, lay Venerians. Dead they seemed, the illusion intensified by their strangely blue complexions. The two Terrestrians knew, however, that they could readily be restored to life. The great machines they had been operating were humming softly, almost inaudibly. There were two long rows of them, extending to the end of the great hall. They suggested mighty generators twenty feet high. From their tops projected two-feet-thick cylinders of solid fused quartz. From these extended other rods of fused quartz, rods that led down through the floor; but these were less bulky, scarcely over eight inches thick.
The huge generator-like machines were disc-shaped. From these, too, a quartz rod ran down through the floor. The machines on the further row were in some way different; those in the front half of the row had the tubes leading to the floor below, but had no tubes jutting into the ceiling. Instead, there were many slender rods connected with a vast switchboard that covered all of one side of the great room. But everywhere were the great quartz rods, suggesting some complicated water system. Most of them were painted black, though the main rods leading from the roof above were as clear as crystal.
Arcot and Wade looked at these gigantic machines in hushed awe. They seemed impossibly huge; it was inconceivable that all this was but the power room of an airplane!