“It is still rocking with the force of the shock that we gave it,” asserted Steinholt. “You would be rocking, too, if you had been tickled by a bolt like that one.”
“It is rising, I tell you!” said Dirk. “The front end of it is slowly getting higher in the water!”
“You’re right, Dirk,” said Fragoni, excitement straining his voice. “Look! It just dropped back into the water!”
Then, as they watched, the movements of the leviathan became more and more agitated, until it was churning up the waves around it like a wounded and agonized monster of the sea.
Suddenly the front end tilted upward and the monster rose clear of the water. It shot straight up into the air at a speed so terrific that they could scarcely follow it.
“It’s gone!” gasped Fragoni. “Those brainless, mindless automatons must have survived!”
“No,” remarked Steinholt thoughtfully. “I don’t believe that there is any life left on that thing. No one had closed the well when it rose, and it would mean death to go out into space with the ship in that condition.”
“Then what made it go up?” demanded Lazarre. “Can the damn thing run itself, Steinholt?”
“I imagine,” recalled the Teuton, “that our bolts killed every living thing that was on the craft but that, at the same time, they set the mechanism of the monster into action. Ah,” he moaned, “but that is too bad. We could have learned much by an examination of the interior of that liner of the air.”