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Abruptly Arcot gave a great shout. "That's their surprise! They're ready far ahead of the time we expected! If all that armada gets in the air, we're done! Down, Wade, to within a few hundred feet of the ground, and close to the field!" The Solarite flashed down in a power dive down with a sickening lurch.
Below them they saw only a mighty sea of roaring red flames a hell of blazing gas that roared like a score of bombs set off at once. The Solarite was sitting down on her rocket jets!
It was finally decided that the Kaxorian construction camp was about 10,500 miles to the southwest. The Solarite was to start an hour after dark. Travelling westward at their speed, they hoped to reach the camp just after nightfall. The Solarite sped swiftly toward the southwest. The sky slowly grew lighter as the miles flashed beneath them. They were catching up with the sun.
"I say the city. No one should destroy anything so magnificent." Not a dissenting voice was raised, so Arcot sent the Solarite nearer. "But what in the world can we do to that huge thing?" Fuller's voice came eerily out of the emptiness. "It has perfect invulnerability through size alone."
It seemed some monstrous black bat flying there against the sky, but down to the sensitive microphone on the side of the Solarite came the drone of the hundred mighty propellers as the great plane forged swiftly along. Just how rapidly these giants moved, Arcot had not appreciated until he attempted to overtake this one.
Under Arcot's guidance the ship from Earth, still invisible, returned to the approximate spot where they had destroyed the invulnerability of the Giant. Then suddenly, out of nothing, the Solarite appeared. In an instant a dozen of the tiny two-man planes darted toward it. Just that they might recognize it, Arcot shot it up a bit higher with the aid of the keel rockets at one-third power.
The Solarite gave a violent lurch as it shot vertically aloft at tremendous acceleration. Arcot reached over swiftly and snapped the switch of the microphone. There burst in upon them the familiar roaring drone of a hundred huge propellers. No slightest hum of motor, only the vast whining roar of the mighty props. "Another one! They must have been following the first by a few minutes.
In an instant they had put on every last trace of power, and at their top speed they were racing west, away from their tiny opponent in the only direction that was open to them. But it was useless. The Solarite could pick up speed in half the time they could, and in an instant Arcot again trained his beam on the mighty splotch of light that was a fleeing plane.
Gently the heavily laden Solarite rose from the hangar floor, and slowly floated out into the bright sunshine of the early February day. Beside it rode the little ship that Arcot had first built, piloted by the father of the inventor. With him rode the elder Morey and a dozen newsmen. The little ship was badly crowded now as they rose slowly, high into the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere.
We can have a blazing sun, with nine planets circling it, the Earth indicated conspicuously; and below it the word SOLARITE." It was shortly after noon when the newly christened Solarite left on its first trip into space.