“Alice?”
“No,” she repeated. “We’ll come back, Len.”
Dr. Weatherby called us. And Jim shouted, “This infernal checking! Len, come here and do your share. We’re going at dawn. Don’t you know that?”
I shall not forget the first sight I had of the vehicle. It lay in the great main room of the workshop. A hundred feet long, round like a huge cigarro, a dead white thing, lying there in the glow of the blue tubes.
Even in its silent immobility, there seemed about it a latent power, as though it were not dead, but asleep—a sleeping giant, resting quiescent, conscious of its own strength.
And there was about it too, an aspect almost infernal in its sleek, bulging body, dead-white like bloodless flesh, in its windows, staring like bulging, thick-lensed eyes. I felt instinctively a repulsion, a desire to avoid it. I touched it finally; its smooth side was hard and abnormally cold. A shudder ran over me.
But after a time these feelings passed. I was absorbed in examining this thing which was to house us, to bear us upward and away.
Within the vehicle was a narrow corridor down one side. Corridor windows opened to the left. To the right were rooms. Each had a window opening to the side, a window in the floor beneath, and in the roof above.
There was a room for Jim and me, another for Dolores and Alice, and one for Dr. Weatherby. An instrument and chart room forward, with a tower room for keeping a lookout, and a galley with a new Maxton electronic stove, fully equipped. And other rooms—a food room, and one crowded with a variety of apparatus: air purifiers, Maxton heaters and refrigerators, piping the heat and cold throughout the vehicle. There was a score of devices with which I was familiar, and another score which were totally strange.