"Pardon me, Jack," was Edmund's reply, "but I'd rather keep that for a
surprise. You shall know everything in good time; or at least everything
that you can understand," he added, with a slightly malicious smile.

Feeling a little more interest than the others, perhaps, in the
scientific aspects of the business, I asked Edmund to tell us something
more about the nature of his wonderful invention. He responded with great
good humor, but rather in the manner of a schoolmaster addressing pupils
who, he knows, cannot entirely follow him.

"These knobs and handles on the walls," he said, "control the driving
power, which, as I have told you, comes from the atoms of matter which I
have persuaded to unlock their hidden forces. I push or turn one way and
we go ahead, or we rise; I push or turn another way and we stop, or go
back. So I concentrate the atomic force just as I choose. It makes us go,
or it carries us back to earth, or it holds us motionless, according to
the way I apply it. The earth is what I kick against at present, and what
I hold fast by; but any other sufficiently massive body would serve the
same purpose. As to the machinery, you'd need a special education in
order to understand it. You'd have to study the whole subject from the
bottom up, and go through all the experiments that I have tried. I
confess that there are some things the fundamental reason of which I
don't understand myself. But I know how to apply and control the power,
and if I had Professor Thomson and Professor Rutherford here, I'd make
them open their eyes. I wish I had been able to kidnap them."

"That's a confession that, after all, you've kidnapped us," put in Jack,
smiling.