Their steel bodies bristled with scores of long tapering tubes, twenty feet high, and pointing in all directions, like the throats of siege guns.
"Just look at them! Just look!" excitedly sputtered the neighbor to my right, while I was wondering what these engines might be. "If there's not the lightning-spitters!"
"The lightning what!" I demanded.
"Lightning-spitters!" he cried, his voice barely audible above the rumbling of the machines. "Of course, you've heard of them! One of the most remarkable inventions of modern times!"
Even as he spoke, a blade of orange electricity shot from one of the machines, darting to the ceiling in a swift zigzag, and was succeeded instantly by blades of green and crimson light, while miniature thunders rolled.
Now all at once I understood the nature of the machines! They were the source of those lightnings which had wiped out whole armies in the battle cavern, before the dazzled eyes of Clay and myself! They were the same lightnings that had threatened us both, and that might, for all I knew, have taken Clay's life!
"Of course, those are only toy lightnings, for demonstration purposes," my portly neighbor rambled on, while other shafts of colored light shot harmlessly upward. "But these same machines have wiped out whole armies!"
"What's the principle behind them?" I asked.