'That's gone,' said Jack dryly, 'though I intended to reverse the process and bring it back to normal. It's felling down toward the centre of the earth,, now, encountering just about as much resistance from earth and stone as if it were falling through air. I don't think any of us are likely to see it again.'
Professor Eisenstein beamed. The Mirror man put his head in his hands. The other reporters babbled together. Gail Kennedy looked, frequently and uneasily at Professor Eisenstein. 'A telephone rang stridently somewhere. Somebody answered it, out of sight.
'Have I gone nuts ?' the Mirror man exclaimed.
'I don't think so.' Jack assured him. 'If you have, all the rest of us will be nuts, tooa in just a moment. Because what I've showed you is just a preparation for this.'
He turned and pushed aside a curtain. It took nearly a minute to clear the tiling behind it, because the curtain hid a space all of forty feet long, and most of that space was filled with an altogether-extraordinary object.
While Jack thrust at the curtain a distant voice said, evidently into a telephone: 'Professor Eisenstein's secretary? Yes, the prof-'
Noise cut out the rest of it. Gail Kennedy looked puzzledly at Professor Eisenstein. He was abruptly alert and feral. He was listening. His eyes, which had been benign, became quite otherwise. And Gail Kennedy suddenly looked as if she could not believe a thought which had come to her and which she could not dismiss. She stared at Professor Eisenstein in something approaching horror.
Jack turned again to his audience. He had cleared the Mole to view. It was a vessel of riveted steel plates quite ten yards in length and about three yards high. There was a rough approximation to torpedo shape, but the likeness was not carried far enough to keep it from looking more like a military tank than anything else.
Yet even that wasn't a fair description. There were neither tractor treads nor wheels. Instead there was a marine screw propeller in the back and four others mounted vertically where wheels should have been. They made the Mole into something it was quite impossible to classify.
It was plainly designed for travel, but in what medium was not clear. It did not seem fitted for travel in any medium at all. Yet the heavy glass windows and a carefully curved and fitted door which opened inward seemed to imply that the medium was one in which a supply of air for breathing would need to be carried along,
'Here's the ship,' said Jack curtly. In it the field of force I just generated is made use of. There's a generator of that field inside the ship, also a means of alternating the gradually weakening field to restore it to its normal condition. The process is the same as demagnetization.
'I go inside the ship. I start the motors, and these screws try to revolve. They can't. I turn on the force field and the ship becomes like that block of brass. It tries to drop down to the centre of the earth as that block of brass did. But the screws revolve then. And they are coated with a film of radioactive matter somewhat thinner than the paint on this sheet of metal.
It's not radioactive enough to keep them "solid". It's just enough so that they seem to work in a medium about like - like -'
'Mashed potatoes,' put in Professor Eisenstein unexpectedly. 'Much better than water for der screws to work in.'
'Just so,' agreed Jack. 'And now, to save a lot of talk, I'll show you how it works.'
He opened the curved door.
Professor Eisenstein got up and said blandly: 'May I come ? I haff der most implicit confidence.'
Jack stared. Then he said gratefully: 'Thanks! Of course you can come'. To the others he added: I'll put the ship through the same process as the block of brass, only I'll rematerialize it. Please don't stand where I'm going to bring it back. The results would be very unpleasant.'
He ushered the white-haired scientist into the door. Gail Kennedy stood up and opened her mouth, her features queerly twisted. But before she could speak Jack was inside the Mole and the door had closed behind him.
There was a queer roaring noise out-of-doors. It sounded like the popping of many motorcycles. "But those in the machine shop of the American Electric Co. paid no heed. They were giving strict and exclusive attention to the ungainly metal shape before them.
Something rumbled inside it. The screws stirred. Then a ghostly eerie light seemed to envelop it. And in the fraction of a second the solid mass of metal shimmered into insubstantiality. It was transparent - more transparent than any glass. Only its outline could be seen, ghostly and improbable.
The screws, for an instant, seemed somehow more 'solid than the rest. They swept swiftly into motion, into a blur which was like the most airy of froth. The whole ship settled with a speed which suggested falling, until those screws took hold in the solid concrete of the floor.
It was a phantom, then, which remained steady for an instant. Then the tail propeller began to revolve. And slowly, slowly, the apparition, the ghost, the utterly unreal outline, began to move. The tail propeller swept through the concrete of the floor. The whole thing moved forward with a quick gathering of speed which was exactly like a ship getting under way. It reached the wall it went through it. And not one brick, not one grain of mortar, was disturbed. Stunned silence. Then a startled babbling.
A news photographer wailed: 'I didn't flash it! I didn't flash it!'
And then there was a sudden rush of figures at the doors - dark blue-clad figures with service revolvers out and ready.
'Where's the man who calls himself Professor Eisenstein?' barked a police lieutenant, staring around. 'We want him!'
The president of American Electric, no less, stood up indignantly. 'What's all this about ?' he demanded furiously. 'What the devil -'
'Durran!' snapped the cop. 'He knocked Professor Eisenstein on the head an hour ago. Stole his car. One of your men here said Professor Eisenstein was right in here. That must be Durran himself! Where is he?'
Then Gail Kennedy gave a little choked cry. And as she uttered the cry the shimmering, ghostly outline of the Mole rose up through the floor. Somebody leaped to be away from it. It went to the end of the room and out through the wall beyond. And again there was not a brick or a grain of mortar disturbed.
'He's - in that!' said Gail, her throat constricted. 'With Jack! Hide! You policemen! Hide, quickly!'
And for long minutes there was incoherent argument with the police before the ghostly Mok appeared again. Its pointed beak came through the wall to the right. It was a wraith. It was unreal. It was not substance, as we know substance. It came, slowing as it -came, and checked itself by a reversal of its tail propeller. It was still, a hair-raising spectacle to the policemen who had not been prepared for such a sight.
And suddenly an eerie light seemed to envelop it and fade, and its substance thickened and thickened. Its vertical screws, revolving freely in the concrete, found resistance to their movement. They climbed upward, lifting the whole Mole.
And then, as the eerie light grew very faint and died, the Mok became actually solid. It became real, and it was a massive construction of riveted steel plates, unlike anything else that had ever existed on earth. Its solidity came as a shock. The clang of its door as it opened broke a silence of almost superstitious intensity.
Jack Hill came out. 'As you see.' he said quietly, 'it works.' Gail darted forward to him, clutching him convulsively. 'Jack!' she gasped. 'Professor Eisenstein! He's Durran! I thought he'd kill you and take the Mole.
Then a bland voice came from the open door of the earthship. 'In that case, I can drop both my accent and my whiskers."
The man who had been taken for Eisenstein tugged at his face. The identifying sandy whiskers came off. He flung away the white wig. He grinned at the men in the machine shop.