"Himmel! Am I dreaming?" exclaimed Max.
"No, you're wide awake. Don't stare like that, man!"
"Der Teufel, but how is she driven?" demanded the scout, staring with wide-open eyes from Spitzer to the professor, and from the latter to his mechanic, who had stood by all this while, with arms akimbo, silently amused at the bewilderment of the two strangers.
"Listen," began the Rittmeister. "I cannot explain everything now--time will not permit--but you shall learn all these things before many days are over."
"Yes, go on!"
"The professor has spent years on this series of inventions, both in the workshop and the laboratory, and each discovery has been co-ordinated and fitted into the scheme. The greatest of all his discoveries is the fact that he has been able to discover and to harness an unknown force to drive the motors of the Scorpion."
"A highly compressed gas, I suppose," interposed Max, who had taken a science degree at Bonn.
"Certainly, it is a most highly compressed gas, extracted at great pains and labour from the elements. The formulæ for this wonderful new element exist only in the still more wonderful brain of the professor. It has not been committed to paper even, in its final terms and ratios, so that, even should this machine be captured, which it certainly shall not be whilst I am its pilot, it could not be used, once the present supply of this Uranis, as we will call it, is used up."
"That is why the engines are so small, then?" ventured Max.
"Precisely!"