"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 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. "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." * * * * * A cry from Inga startled them and they saw that she was looking skyward, with terror in her eyes. They followed her gaze and there, streaking through the black clouds, they saw a long trail of white fire.