Maneuvering for the kill. Fascinated, silently I watched as again we were heading for Rollins' ship. And within me a vague, desperate thought was growing: There are things through which one has no right to live. If only I could contrive it.
Jerome was absorbed at his controls, his range-finders and his calculations. My hand touched Brenda's arm where she sat beside me. I whispered:
"Brenda, we may not live through this."
"I know."
"I mean, if we were to die, to help that other ship."
She stared at me, and then at her father. Jerome had called the old man, ordered him to the mechanisms of the vessel's invisibility, where he sat checking the dial-readings of his intricate apparatus.
Briefly, its operation involved three scientific factors: De-electronization, thus to create around any metallic object a barrage of magnetic field of a new type to any previously developed; color-absorption, by which there can be no reflected light from the de-electronized object; and the Albert Einstein principle of the natural bending of light-rays when passing through a magnetic field. In effect then, the total color-absorption into the de-electronized object would make it, when viewed externally, a nothingness to see. A blankness, like an outlined dark hole. But that in itself is not invisibility—merely a silhouette. The background would be blotted out, so that the invisible object would be perceived by the background it obscured. The magnetic field, however, by natural law which Einstein discovered, bends the light-rays from the background, around the intervening object. The background thus seems complete. The intervening object has vanished!
Simple in theory; but it was an intricate little apparatus here which now old Professor Carson was attending. I stared at him as he bent so earnestly over it. His beloved brain-child.
For that moment Brenda tenderly regarded him. And then she turned to me. Her eyes were misted.
"Whatever you think best," she murmured.