“Bodies!”
They crowded around his gruesome find and caught their first glimpse of the invaders from space. Anatomical details could not be distinguished since the bodies had been caught under a rain of crushing beams, but they saw that they were not too different from both Terrestrians and Venerians—though their blood seemed strangely pallid, and their skin was of a ghastly whiteness. Evidently they had been assembled before an unfamiliar sort of instrument panel when catastrophe struck; Morey indicated the dials and keys.
“Nice to know what you're fighting,” Arcot observed. “I've a hunch that we'll see some of these critters alive—but not in this ship!”
They turned away and resumed their examination of the shattered mechanisms.
A careful examination was impossible; they were wrecks, but Arcot did see that they seemed mainly to be giant electrical machines of standard types, though on a gargantuan scale. There were titanic masses of wrecked metal, iron and silver, for with these men silver seemed to replace copper, though nothing could replace iron and its magnetic uses.
“They are just electrical machines, I guess,” said Arcot at last. “But what size! Have you seen anything really revolutionary, Wade?”
Wade frowned and answered. “There are just two things that bother me. Come here.” As Arcot jumped over, nearly suspended by his ray pistol, Wade directed his light on a small machine that had fallen in between the cracks in the giant mass of broken generators. It was a little thing, apparently housed in a glass case. There was only one objection to that assumption. The base of a large generator lay on it, metal fully two feet thick, and that metal was cracked where it rested on the case, and the case, made of material an inch and a half thick, was not dented!
“Whewww—that's a nice kind of glass to have!” Morey commented. “I'd like to have a specimen for examination. Oh—I wonder—yes, it must be! There's a window in the side up there toward what was the bow that seemed to me to be the same stuff. It's buried about three feet in solid earth, so I imagine it must be.”
The three made their way at once to where they had seen the window. The frame appeared to be steel, or some such alloy, and it was twisted and bent under the blow, for this was evidently the outer wall, and the impact of landing had flattened the rounded side. But that “glass” window was quite undisturbed! There was, as a further proof, a large granite boulder lying against it on the outside—or what had been a boulder, though it had been shattered by the impact.
“Say—that's some building material!” Arcot indicated the transparent sheet. “Just look at that granite rock—smashed into sand! Yet the window isn't even scratched! Look how the frame that held it is torn—just torn, not broken. I wonder if we can tear it loose altogether?” He stepped forward, raising his pistol. There was a thud as his metal bar crashed down when the ray was shut off. Then, as the others got out of the way, he stepped toward the window and directed his beam toward it. Gradually he increased the power, till suddenly there was a rending crash, and they saw only a leaping column of earth and sand and broken granite flying up through the hole in the steel shell. There was a sudden violent crash, then a moment later a second equally violent crash as the window, having flown up to the ceiling, came thumping back to the floor.