The meaning of the circumstance that it was made in the likeness of the girl—that it was her effigy—could not then come to me. I could not think of that at all. The fact that it was not the girl, but her effigy, was more than enough.
The principle of the mechanism, now that I realized it was a machine, of course was familiar to me, I, myself, had taken part in tests of contrivances aimed at the perfection of mechanical control which now I witnessed.
I had seen mechanical controls installed in the cockpit of a navy airplane; but a living pilot had sat beside the mechanism. I had seen the pilot take his hands from his levers, after the plane was in flight, and give over the controls to the mechanism; and I had watched the airplane fly and turn to right and left and climb or dive at the direction of a radio operator on the ground or in an accompanying airplane. But the movements of the
