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There were a hundred huge tractors with double fuselage and a wing spread of 200 feet, driven by four 500 horse-power motors. I visited aviation centers where these machines were delivered for tests, and found the places swarming with armies of men training and inspecting and testing the aeroplanes.
The low rumble of the idling engines was barely audible as they descended the long ladder. There was no resemblance whatever to the interior of a flying machine; rather, it suggested some great power house, where the energies of half a nation were generated. They entered directly into a vast hall that extended for a quarter of a mile back through the great hull, and completely across the fuselage.
He waited.... Presently swish! They were circling in the opposite direction to Tam, which meant that the object passed him at the rate of one hundred and forty miles an hour. But he had seen the German coming.... Something dropped from the fuselage, there was the rending crash of an explosion and Tam dropped a little, swerved to the left and was out in clear daylight in a second.
He saw rows of lighted windows, each cased in shining metal; a V-pointed pilot-house the same where the still figure had dropped over the sill of the open window a high-raised rudder of artful curve, vast as the broadside of a barn; railed galleries running along the underbody of the fuselage, between the floats and far aft of them.
The fog grew thicker and darker and he returned again to the outer edge because there would be no danger in the center. Gently he declined his elevator and sank to a lower level. Then suddenly, beneath him, a short shape loomed through the mist and vanished in a flash. Tam had a tray of bombs under the fuselage something in destructive quality between a Mills grenade and a three-inch shell.
A long, gliding, sticky, serpent-like coil came from behind and caught me round the waist, dragging me out of the fuselage. I tore at it, my fingers sinking into the smooth, glue-like surface, and for an instant I disengaged myself, but only to be caught round the boot by another coil, which gave me a jerk that tilted me almost on to my back.
"Jus' broke little small," Tomaso's brother's voice came pleadingly from behind Johnny. "You can feex him easy. She's fine airship, you bet!" Johnny turned and looked at him pityingly. "Say, where do you get that stuff?" he inquired. "A hell of a lot you know about airships bringing me off down here to see this! Say! where's the fuselage at?" he abruptly demanded.
We glanced into the sky at the shrapnel puffs, and immediately discovered two enemy aeroplanes flying lower than they had ever done before. We could almost see the observers leaning over the fuselage to spy out if the British on Helles were up to the monkey tricks they had played at Suvla.
They now set to work equalizing the gas supply in the wings of the Sky-Bird and reducing that in the fuselage to the proper pressure for perfect equilibrium, which they were able to get by the use of the pressure-gauge and a little figuring.
"When this airplane is safe at Sinkhole, and you've brought me every darned thing that's been packed off, I'll pay you the rest of the fifty. There's more," he added meaningly, "that's missing. The fuselage ain't all." The brother of Tomaso seemed unhappy.
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