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 desperately practical things. Who manœuvered the effigy?

Not the girl herself, I realized on second thought. For this mechanical airplane must have been kept in the air, above the clouds, while she was speaking with us on the sea. However perfect the mechanism under the dummy, it could have sustained the plane in the air only under the constant direction of the operator of the radio control. The girl could not have been the operator. She could not have manipulated radio controls while she was talking to us. There must have been another person operating the radio controls; and those controls and this other person must be in a third airplane.

He must have been hiding above the clouds with his mechanical slave circling him like a satellite until he sent the effigy down to attack us after I had followed the girl into the sky. So her rôle, then, was that of a decoy? Had she decoyed first, in her own person, Selby and Kent and drawn them into a situation to be destroyed, in one sudden dash, by her effigy?