With some difficulty the motors were cranked again and the plane scuttled madly down the lane of water. With a quick jerk of the joy stick Davis lifted the plane from the water just as the open water ended and the silver sea began. The big plane circled in the air, rising steadily as it circled, and at last headed for the west again, still flying in that incredible appearance of sky above and sky below, with the reflected sun glaring upward just as fiercely as the real sun beat down. III. Nita sat in the seat beside Davis' control chair, pointing to the instruments one by one. "And that's the inclinometer," she repeated, "to tell you the angle at which the plane is climbing or descending. That's the barometer, which reads--let me see--seventy-four hundred feet. We're over a mile high, aren't we?" "We are," said Davis, "though by the looks of things we are ten thousand miles from anywhere." The silver sea was still beneath them, and they still seemed to be floating in a universe of air. Nita paid no attention. "And that's the compass dial, and that----What did you call it?" "An anenometer," said Davis again, smiling. "It's the speedometer of the air--or the patent log, whichever you like to call it." "You only have to learn one syllable," said Nita. "They all end in ometer. It's convenient that they're named like that." Davis smiled. "I never thought of that before, but it is convenient." "But how do you balance the plane?" Nita demanded. "In straightaway flight it balances itself," Davis explained. "It's one of the new inherently stable designs. For turning, the wing tips work automatically. We've a gyroscopic affair that attends to them." Nita subsided for a moment, then demanded further information. "What's that lever for? To change speeds?" Davis laughed. "Well, no. We haven't but one speed forward and no reverse----" "You're making fun of me!" "That's the joy stick," said Davis, chuckling. "We dive and climb with it. Pull it back and we go up. Push it forward and we dive." "Mmmmm," said Nita interestedly. Her father took his cigar out of his mouth long enough to join in Davis' chuckle at Nita's absorbed air. "Don't talk to the motorman, Nita," he said. "He may run past a switch." Nita turned around and smiled at him. The car was rather crowded with seven people in it. Gerrod was looking curiously at a bit of the silvery jelly, with which he had filled several pails before leaving the yacht. He took a bit of it between his thumb and forefinger and rolled it back and forth speculatively. It seemed faintly granular to the touch, but at the slightest pressure underwent a change that felt like crumbling, and was nothing but watery liquid. "I'll bet anything you care to name," he said thoughtfully, "that this is just a mass of little animalcules with little silvery shells. The silvery shells would account for the reflection we see."