Explore "The Prince of Space" by Jack Williamson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Two days later Bill jumped from a landing heliocar, presented his credentials as special correspondent, and was admitted to the Lakehurst base of the Moon Patrol. Nine slender sunships lay at the side of the wide, high-fenced field, just in front of their sheds. In the brilliant morning sunlight they scintillated like nine huge octagonal ingots of polished silver.
These war-fliers of the Moon Patrol were eight-sided, about twenty feet in diameter and a hundred long. Built of steel and the new aluminum bronzes, with broad vision panels of heavy vitrolite, each carried sixteen huge positive ray tubes. These mammoth vacuum tubes, operated at enormous voltages from vitalium batteries, were little different in principle from the "canal ray" apparatus of some centuries before. Their "positive rays," or streams of atoms which had lost one or more electrons, served to drive the sunship by reaction -- by the well-known principle of the rocket motor.