"That's the remarkable part of it, Bob," he answered. "Miela herself didn't thoroughly understand either the basic principle or the mechanism itself when she started down here."
"Good Lord! And she ventured—"
"Tao was already on the point of leaving when she conceived the idea. He had already made one trip almost to the edge of the earth's atmosphere, you know, and now was ready to start again."
"That first trip was last November," I said. "Tell me about that. What were those first light‑meteors for?"
"As far as I can gather from what Miela says," Alan answered, "Tao wanted to make perfectly sure the light‑ray would act in our atmosphere. He came—there were several vehicles they had ready even then—without other apparatus than those meteors, as we called them. Those he dropped to earth with the light‑ray stored in them. They did discharge it properly—they seemed effective. The thing was merely a test. Tao was satisfied, and went back to arrange for this second preliminary venture in which he is engaged now."
"I understand," I said. "Go on about Miela."
"Well, she and her mother went before the Scientific Society, she calls it—the men who own and control these vehicles in the Light Country. They called it suicide. No one could be found to come with her. Lua, her mother, wanted to, but Miela would not let her take the risk, saying she was needed more there in her own world.
"As a matter of fact, the thing, while difficult perhaps to understand in principle, in operation works very simply. Miela knew that, and merely asked them to show her how to operate it practically. This they did. She spent two days with them—she learns things rather easily, you know—and then she was ready."
I waited in amazement.
"For practical purposes all she had to understand was the operation of these keys. The pressure of the light‑ray in these coils"—he was standing beside a row of wire coils which in the semi‑darkness I had not noticed before—"is controlled by the key‑switches." He indicated the latter as he spoke. "They send a current to the outer metal plates of the car which makes them repel or attract other masses of matter, as desired.