“Afraid? Oh, no!”
The passageway widened. “Here is Jim,” I said. “Jim, stay with Dolores. She wants to show you this . . . this thing we’ve come to see.”
We entered a room some thirty feet square. Dr. Weatherby switched on the lights. There were furniture, rugs, small tables of apparatus, instruments, and banks of vacuum tubes on tripods standing about, with wires in insulated cables connecting them. The cables littered the floor, like huge snakes.
Dr. Weatherby drew aside a portiere which cut off a corner of the room. Lying on a large table, flooded with a vacuum light from above, was a model of this building we were in. It was about two feet wide, by ten feet long—the same dead white, uncanny-looking structure. A thought sprang to my mind. Was this building we were in itself the projectile? I think I murmured the question, for Dr. Weatherby smiled.
“No. Here is a small replica of the vehicle.”
He unbolted the roof of the model. Resting inside was a tiny, dead white object some six inches long, cigarro-shaped, but with a pointed end and blunt stern. It rather suggested the ancient sub-sea vessels.
It had fin-shaped projections, like very small wings for its slow transit through air. A tiny tower was forward, on top, and there were bull’s-eye windows lining the sides and in every face of the octagon tower.
Dr. Weatherby pointed out all these details to us, speaking in his low, earnest voice. “I’m wondering, Leonard, and you, Jim, if you’re familiar with Elton’s principle of the neutralization of gravity?”
“No,” I said, and Jim shook his head. “Not in detail.”
In 1988 Elton perfected it. I knew of it only as an electronic stream of radiant matter which when directed against a solid substance, destroyed—or partially destroyed—the attraction of that other substance for the earth.