“Poor Stanton,” said Steinholt. “He was born that way, I suppose, and I, for one, am ready to forgive and forget him. And now,” continued the Teuton, “I hope that we didn’t do too much damage to that little boat of the Lodorians. If we could get just a little peep at the inside of it we might learn the secret of its contrivance. And then, my friends, we could do a little journeying ourselves.”
“Have you any theory regarding it?” asked Fragoni.
“Teuxical intimated that it rode the magnetic currents which, of course, flow through all the suns and planets in the universe,” replied Steinholt. “We have been working along that line ourselves, of course, and it probably won’t be very long anyway before we have the solution of interplanetary travel.”
“Those Lodorians would have solved it for us if it hadn’t been for that artificial lightning,” said Lazarre. “That’s powerful stuff, Steinholt.”
“Yes, with that three-thousand-foot Worldwide Tower to hurl it from,” agreed Steinholt, “we can get fair range with it. If the Lodorians hadn’t left the well of their ship open, though, the lightning wouldn’t have done us much good. I was afraid, too, for a time, that we might have trouble in welding that automatic wireless circuit box to the bottom of the ship.”
Dirk, in the meantime, had brought the plane down to within a half-mile 417 of the leviathan, and he was holding it poised there.
“It seems to me,” he said, after scrutinizing the monster for a couple of minutes, “that it is moving in the water. It is!” he exclaimed. “Steinholt! Look!”
Only a comparatively short time had elapsed since the last bolt of lightning had vanished back into the darkness.