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He lighted the gas, for Lookout Hill was only on the edge of the town and boasted gas, electricity, and all modern improvements, as well as the atmosphere of old New England.

“The Z99 is moored just below us at my private dock,” began the captain. “I have a shed down there where we usually keep her, but I expected you, and she is waiting, thoroughly overhauled. I have signalled to my men–fellows I can trust, too, who used to be with me in the navy–to cast her off. There–now we are ready.”

The captain turned a switch. Instantly a couple of hundred feet below us, on the dark and rippling water, a light broke forth. Another signal, and the light changed.

It was moving.

“The principle of the thing,” said Captain Shirley, talking to us but watching the moving light intently, “briefly, is that I use the Hertzian waves to actuate relays on the Z99. That is, I send a child with a message, the grown man, through the relay, so to speak, does the work. So, you see, I can sit up here and send my little David out anywhere to strike down a huge Goliath.

“I won’t bore you, yet, with explanations of my radio-combinator, the telecommutator, the aerial coherer relay, and the rest of the technicalities of wireless control of dirigible, self-propelled vessels. They are well known, beginning with pioneers like Wilson and Gardner in England, Roberts in Australia, Wirth and Lirpa in Germany, Gabet in France, and Tesla, Edison, Sims, and the younger Hammond in our own country.

“The one thing, you may not know, that has kept us back while wireless telegraphy has gone ahead so fast is that in wireless we have been able to discard coherers and relays and use detectors and microphones in their places. But in telautomatics we have to keep the coherer. That has been the barrier. The coherer until recently has been spasmodic, until we had Hammond’s mercury steel- disc coherer and now my own. Why,” he cried, “we are just on the threshold, now, of this great science which Tesla has named telautomatics–the electric arm that we can stretch out through space to do our work and fight our battles.”

It was not difficult to feel the enthusiasm of the captain over an invention of such momentous possibilities, especially as the Z99 was well out in the harbour now and we could see her flashing her red and green signal-lights back to us.

“You see,” the captain resumed, “I have twelve numbers here on the keys of this radio-combinator–forward, back, stop propeller motor, rudder right, rudder left, stop steering motor, light signals front, light signals rear, launch torpedoes, and so on. The idea is that of a delayed contact. The machinery is always ready, but it delays a few seconds until the right impulse is given, a purely mechanical problem. I take advantage of the delay to have the message repeated by a signal back to me. I can even change it, then. You can see for yourself that it really takes no experience to run the thing when all is going right. Gladys has done it frequently herself. All you have to do is to pay attention, and press the right key for the necessary change. It is when things go wrong that even an expert like myself–confound it- -there’s something wrong!”

The Z99 had suddenly swerved. Captain Shirley’s brow knitted. We gathered around closer, Gladys next to her father and leaning anxiously over the transmitting apparatus.

“I wanted to turn her to port yet she goes to starboard, and signals starboard, too. There–now–she has stopped altogether. What do you think of that?”

Gladys stroked the old seafarer’s hand gently, as he sat silently at the table, peering with contracted brows out into the now brilliantly moonlit night.

Shirley looked up at his daughter, and the lines on his face relaxed as though he would hide his disappointment from her eager eyes.