I noticed a slender lever, with a corrugated disc at the top, rising out of the floor in the bow of the ship. It occurred to me that it was the control lever. I took hold of it and gingerly pushed it back. Great jets of purple gas rushed past the transparent walls about us, and the ship slid backward on the ground. The sensation of motion was most alarming. The illusion of the transparency of the bow of the ship was so perfect that it seemed almost as if we were hanging in space a few feet in front of the mouth of an open tube. It was impossible for me to realize that I was surrounded by solid walls of metal, until I touched them. I think the wonderful telescope worked on much the same principle as television apparatus--that is, that the rays of light were picked up, converted into electrical impulses, amplified, and then projected on the metal wall, which served as a screen. [Illustration: It was holding my rifle, turning it and feeling it with its slender finger-like tentacles. When the gun went off, it took a grotesquely half-human attitude of surprise.] * * * * * Battle In the Air I returned to my experiments with the lever. The control was relatively simple. The vessel was propelled forward when the lever was pushed forward, and reversed when the lever was pulled back. Slipping the little disc up or down raised or lowered the prow, and twisting the thing accomplished the steering in the horizontal plane. By the time my cautious experiments had revealed all of that, Melvar had pointed out three slender crimson craft, wheeling low about us, and evidently preparing to land. I pulled the knob up, and pushed it forward all the way. A pale red beam shot ahead. The black landscape dropped away from us, and we hurtled through the air of the night. I was amazed at the lack of any great sensation of motion, and that the jets of gas, for all their appalling roar without, were barely audible within the cylinder. Still the fore part of the ship was transparent from within, so that we had the oddest sensation of floating free in space. I saw that the three ships had fallen in a line behind us, and were following at the same terrific pace. When we had reached an altitude of perhaps a mile, I twisted the knob to bring the helm about, and we shot over the Silver Lake, which lay like a white desert of moonlit sand beneath us, standing out sharply against the dark plain around it. In a moment we had gone over it, and over the low hills beyond, and into the bank of purple mist. I had hoped to have time to land and have the vessel on the ground below, but I looked back and saw that our pursuers were gaining swiftly, and that slender twisting rays of bright orange and green were darting toward us from the hurtling arrow-like ships of red.