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Title: Cities in the air

Author: Edmond Hamilton

Release date: August 1, 2024 [eBook #74171]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Stellar Publishing Corporation, 1929

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CITIES IN THE AIR ***





                           Cities in the Air

                          By Edmond Hamilton

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Air Wonder Stories November, December 1929
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


    _Here is one of the most extraordinary stories that it has been
    our good fortune to read. For sheer audacity in construction,
    excellence in science and breath-taking adventure, this story
    undoubtedly stands in the foreground of science air-fiction stories
    of the year._

    _The recent advances in aeronautics where airplanes have been in
    the air for weeks at a time without coming down to the ground,
    point the way for tremendous achievements in the generations to
    come._

    _City life today is a conglomeration of structures close together.
    We have buildings now that house as many as 40,000 people at one
    time and soon we will have single business buildings that will
    house 100,000 and more individuals at the same time. Furthermore,
    every doctor will tell you that living at the surface of the earth
    is usually unhealthy because of the dust and the high density of
    the air, which gives rise to most pulmonary diseases, particularly
    consumption, colds and the like. At high altitudes such diseases
    tend to disappear. Therefore physicians usually send their
    afflicted patients to the higher altitudes._

    _You may be sure that conditions such as are described by the
    author of this marvelous story will come about sooner or later._

    _We also know that this story will arouse a great storm of
    discussion among our readers, due particularly to the audacity of
    the author in picturing his ideas as to future aviation--which by
    the way will not seem so fantastic two hundred years hence as they
    might seem now._


"Captain Martin Brant, of American Federation Air-Cruiser 3885!"

As the high clear voice rang through the bridge-room of my racing
cruiser, I turned toward the distance-phone from which it issued.
Pressing a stud beneath the instrument I answered into it.

"Captain Brant speaking."

"Order of the First Air Chief to Captain Brant: You are informed that
the European and Asiatic Federations have combined in alliance to
launch a great and unexpected attack upon the American Federation. The
European Federation fleet of five thousand air-cruisers is now racing
over the Atlantic toward New York and other eastern cities, while the
Asiatic Federation fleet of the same size is heading over the Pacific
toward our western coasts. All American cruisers patrolling east of
the Mississippi, including your own, are ordered to head at full speed
toward New York, where our eastern squadrons are assembling to meet the
European Federation fleet. Upon arriving there yourself and all other
squadron commanders will report at once to the First Air Chief."

The clear voice ceased, and I turned from the distance-phone to meet
the startled eyes of Macklin, my first officer, who stood at the
cruiser's wheel beside me.

"Head eastward--full speed, Macklin!" I cried to him. "It's war at
last--war with the European and Asiatic Federations!"

Instantly Macklin swung over the wheel in his hands, and as he did so
the whole long bulk of our cruiser swung likewise in mid-air, curving
up and backward to race eastward above the green plains, the descending
sun at our backs. A moment more and the cruiser's long torpedo shape,
gleaming and unbroken metal save for the rows of portholes and the
raised, transparent-walled bridge-room in which we stood, was splitting
the air eastward at a speed that mounted with each moment. I reached
for the order-phone, and as Hilliard, my young second officer, answered
from the motor-rooms beneath, I informed him briefly of what had just
been told me. Then there was a muffled cheer from the hundred-odd
members of our crew, beneath, and a few minutes later the drone of the
great motors had reached to an even higher pitch, and we were racing
through the sunlight high above the earth at more than a thousand miles
an hour.

Standing there with Macklin in the bridge-room as we shot eastward,
though, my thoughts were grave enough despite the exciting quality of
the news we had just heard. War!--the war that we of the American
Federation had expected, had feared for decades. It had not been more
than thirty years since the third Air War of 2039. Three mighty nations
alone now shared the world between them; the American Federation,
comprising the whole North and South American continents, with New York
as its capital; the European Federation, which included all Europe
west of Caucasus and all Africa, its center at Berlin; and the Asiatic
Federation, which held all Asia and Australasia for the brown and
yellow races, with Peking as its capital.

And though for three decades now there had been peace between them,
it had been an uneasy peace dictated by the fact that each feared to
attack another lest he be attacked by the third. The great navies of
air-cruisers of the three mighty Federations had patrolled the air in
ceaseless vigilance, their air-forts ever watchful. Lately, however, it
had become apparent to all that a rapprochement had taken place between
the European and Asiatic Federations, and such an alliance could only
mean an attack upon our own, the American. So we had stood even more
vigilantly upon the watch, and now that for which we had waited had
come at last, and the two great Federations had launched their two
mighty fleets upon us.

Gazing ahead, as our cruiser drove onward, I was as silent as Macklin,
at the wheel beside me, and as young Hilliard, who had come up into the
bridge-room from beneath. Far beneath us the green plains were rolling
swiftly backward, as our motors hummed their unceasing song of power.
Those great electric motors drew their current in limitless quantities
from the electrostatic or atmospheric electricity surrounding
the earth, by means of great transformers that changed it from
electrostatic to current electricity to give us a power that could hurl
us forward with almost unlimited endurance and speed. Connected as they
were to our great horizontal tube-propellers, which were set in the
cruiser's walls and which moved it forward by drawing immense volumes
of air at vast speed through themselves from ahead, those motors could
fling us on at more than a thousand miles an hour. This utmost force,
as our indicators told us, was shooting us eastward now.

Beneath us the green plains had given way to the great tumbled folds
and peaks of the Alleghanies. Somewhere to the south lay Pittsburgh,
and to the north Cleveland and Buffalo, but being headed directly to
New York, we therefore did not see them. Beneath us we could make out
in swift flashes of vision masses of the air-traffic between those
cities, great passenger-liners and bulky freight-carriers and slender
private craft, but in our own military-craft level there moved only a
few cruisers like our own racing eastward toward New York in answer to
the alarm. With these, however, there was small danger of collision.

Now the Alleghanies had dropped behind and we were rocketing over the
rolling, pleasant countryside that lies between them and the eastern
Appalachians. As we shot on I gazed downward, over the green and silent
and empty landscape rushing beneath us, and wondered momentarily what a
citizen of fifty years ago would have thought to see this once-populous
land over which we were speeding lying as lifeless and deserted beneath
us as it was now. Then it had given way to the greater folds and ridges
of the Appalachians, and then, as we shot on and over their tumbled
masses, Macklin lifted his hand from the wheel to point ahead.

"The air-forts!" he said.


                            On to New York

Swiftly they were looming before us as we rushed on toward them, giant
domed cubes of dull metal, each five hundred feet in width, that hung
in a great, curving line in mid-air before us, five miles above the
green land. At intervals of five miles they hung, floating motionless
there in a great grim chain or ring, the metal sides and dome of each
bristling with great heat-guns like those of our own cruisers, and
with narrow openings from which the occupants could gaze forth. Each
of these great air-forts, we knew, was suspended thus high above the
ground by the gravity-repelling effect of the cosmic rays. It had been
but fifty years since the machinery had been discovered which directed
the great power of the cosmic rays to overcome the force of gravity.
It had been found that the rays could be collected and their power
concentrated in the structures that they were to support. Dynamic
towers were used for the collection of this great limitless energy.

In a great ring they hung before us, the line of them curving away
vastly to right and left, a great ring that encircled and defended New
York, as air-forts hang in rings about all air-cities for defence. Then
as we drove toward the nearest of these great fortresses of the air,
there came from the distance-phone before me its sharp challenge.

Swiftly I replied to that challenge and then we were driving past the
air-fort, past the openings in its walls through which we could see
those inside standing ready at the great heat-guns. We heard faintly
their cheers as we flashed past them toward the east; we cheered
ourselves somewhat by the sight of the air-forts. They could maneuver
in space in any direction, though at only a fraction of the speed of
the air-cruisers. They would form a stubborn defence for New York, we
knew, though incapable of meeting alone a swift invading fleet. But
now far ahead, as we rushed within the mighty ring of the air-forts,
we glimpsed the gray gleam of the Atlantic's vast expanse, stretching
away to the east, the green, irregular coastline, the narrow little
island, between a larger island and that coast, that had been the site
of the New York of fifty years before. Green and deserted as all the
countryside behind us it lay now, but I glanced at it only, looking up
as there came a low exclamation from Hilliard, beside me.

"New York!"

Full before us lay the mighty city, now, waxing with each moment
greater as we raced on toward it. The air about and beneath us
was filled with the great swarms of cruisers like our own and of
merchant-traffic that was converging from north and west and south upon
it. For the moment we three gazed toward it, forgetful of the peril
that had brought us to it. We were caught and entranced as always by
the splendid and superb beauty of this New York. For it was a New York
immeasurably different from that city upon the earth, that decades ago
had born its name. It was a city, not of the earth, but of the air.

It was a city whose close-clustered spires and towers and pyramids
had been gathered together upon a vast metal disk-like base, and hung
suspended five miles above the green earth! It was circular in form and
of five miles diameter, the colossal metal base or disk upon which it
rested more than a thousand feet in thickness, the metal buildings and
towers that rose from that base and were integral with it soaring for
five thousand feet farther upward! A colossal city floating there in
the air, with its streets and buildings swarming with activity, with
thronging hordes, and with great masses of fear-driven craft speeding
through the air toward it from all directions.

A city of the air! Suspended by huge batteries of great electrostatic
motors in its base, motors that drew the exhaustless energy of earth's
atmospheric electricity from countless slender pinnacles that soared
from the central plaza; whence the current was conducted along cables
within the pinnacles to the giant motors beneath. The cities too were
suspended by the gravity-repelling quality of the collected cosmic
rays. To this had mankind come, at last. The flimsy airplanes of a
good century before, with their little endurance records of weeks and
months in the air, had given way to the great electric-driven cruisers
which drew their power from the static about them, and which could stay
aloft indefinitely. And then had come the great air-forts, held aloft
in the same way, and finally, when the great air-wars had made life
upon the ground so unsafe as to approach suicide, then had come the
construction of giant metal cities, on huge metal bases, that contained
enough great motors and tube-propellers to hold themselves in any
direction at moderate speed.


                         The Great Conference

Such now were all the cities of earth; Chicago, San Francisco, Buenos
Aires, Berlin and Tokio. Great cities that hung always in mid-air,
usually near the sites of those vanished cities of earth from which
they had gained their names. But the air-cities could move from place
to place now and then for better climate or defence. These great cities
held within them all the world's population; the earth beneath being
used only for the mining of metallic ores and the minerals used in the
creation of the synthetic foods and fabrics now universal.

The great cities were each protected by a ring of air-forts, and also
by great batteries of heat-guns set within their own walls. A hundred
of such huge air-cities there were in the American Federation, holding
in their colossal masses of clustered sky-flung towers an average
of five million inhabitants each. And in the European and Asiatic
Federations combined, I knew, there were more than two hundred mighty
cities of the air.

Now, though, it was the huge air-city of New York that held all our
attention, and as we rushed closer toward it I saw that above it, above
the panic-driven masses of air-craft that were swirling down to take
refuge within it, there hung squadron upon squadron of cruisers like
our own, over two thousand in number, hanging there in grim, motionless
ranks, as though unconscious of the swarming, fear-driven activity in
the huge city beneath them. From every quarter other cruisers were
arriving to join those squadrons, cruisers that came like our own from
patrols over the green inland plains, from above the icy Labrador
wastes, from over the jungle-bordered Caribbean coasts, all rushing to
answer the call to arms. As our own ship neared the city, we headed
down toward the central plaza.

"Straight down to the central plaza, Macklin," I said. "The First Air
Chief will be there and orders are to report to him first."

Macklin had already slowed our ship's speed, and now as we drove to
a position beside the aspiring central pinnacle, with its clustered
points, the city's static-tower, he turned the power of our motors
completely from our horizontal tube-propellers, into our vertical ones,
which held us motionless in mid-air. Then, as he slowly decreased that
power, we sank smoothly down until in a moment more we had come to rest
upon the smooth central plaza among a score or more of other cruisers.
These rested in a great ring about the plaza's edge, their crews
waiting within them, but at the center of that ring, beside the mighty
static-tower's base, stood a little group of men, the First Air Chief,
Yarnall, and his squadron-commanders.

As our cruiser came to rest I opened the door beneath the bridge-room,
and stepped onto the metal plaza and across it toward that group.
Around the great plaza, I noted, were vast, seething crowds, thousands
upon thousands of the mighty air-city's inhabitants. Other thousands
were gazing down toward us from the towers that soared around us into
the golden afternoon sunlight. These people, watching us and the mighty
fleet hanging grimly far above, were silent, but from beyond them there
came to my ears from far across the air-city's mighty mass, the dull
roar of millions of blended voices, in unceasing, excited shouts. Then
I reached the First Air Chief and the group before him, my hand snapped
to a salute, which Yarnall silently returned. And then, gazing for a
moment in silence from one to another of us, his strong face and gray
eyes grave, he began to speak to us.

"You, the squadron-commanders of our eastern forces," he said, "know
why you have been summoned here, why I, under the orders of the
Federation's Central Council, have summoned here you and all the
cruisers that wait above us. The great European Federation fleet, twice
as large as our forces, is rushing westward over the Atlantic toward
us, and within the hour we must meet that fleet in battle."

He paused, and in the silence that ensued the dull, dim roar of the
great city about us seemed suddenly infinitely remote from our ears.
Then the First Air Chief went on.

"Within the hour we must meet that fleet in battle and as we go out to
meet it our western forces will be going out from San Francisco, under
the command of the Second Air Chief, to meet the Asiatic Federation
fleet racing eastward toward it. And upon those two battles rests now
the fate of our nation. If they are lost, if either of them is lost,
within days our nation will be but a memory, our cities annihilated.
If the two approaching fleets are defeated and beaten back, then we
shall have won for ourselves a respite in which we can prepare to meet
the great enemies that crowd now upon us. So I say to you, the Central
Council says to you, that this battle must not be lost!

"The fleet that we must meet has twice the number of cruisers of our
own, and there have been rumors of some new method being prepared by
them with which to attack us, now or later. We have to aid us only the
air-forts about this city, which have been equipped with a new device.
I have ordered them to move east of the city to lie between it and the
enemy. This great air-city itself, when we go out from it, will move
inland at its highest speed away from the battle, just as Boston and
Charleston and Miami and San Francisco and Los Angeles and all our
great air-cities, north and south. There will be, therefore, none but
our cruisers gathered above and our air-forts massing eastward to fight
this battle upon which the Central Council has staked our fate.

"But great as these odds are against us, this battle must not be lost!
We are the sons of the Americans who fought through the First and
Second and Third Air Wars, who reared this nation out of the blood of
a thousand air battles until now its hundred air-cities hold in their
power a third of all the world. And now that the rest of that world
comes against us, the Last Air War begins. My word to you is this:
Fight only as those men before you fought, and before tomorrow the
European Federation fleet shall have been beaten back--or the last of
our cruisers and our air-forts and ourselves will have perished!"

There was silence as the First Air Chief ceased, and then from us
assembled commanders there broke a great cheer, a cheer that was
taken up by the massed thousands around the plaza and that spread
like fire over all the great air-city about us. Then we all returned
toward our waiting cruisers, the First Air Chief toward his own, and
a moment later his cruiser, with its three parallel stripes of silver
running from stem to stern distinguishing it from all others, was
rising smoothly upward, followed by our own. Upward we shot, a vast
roar coming up to us from the mighty floating city beneath us. Then
our score or more of ships were taking their places each at the head
of its squadron of a hundred ships, while the First Air Chief in his
silver-striped flagship rushed to a position at the head of all. There
we hung, the dull, great roar coming unceasingly up to us from the city
below, and then as an order sounded from the distance-phones of all
the fleet we were moving forward, eastward, out from over the great
air-city, from over the green coastline, out over the gray expanse of
the Atlantic.

With Macklin and Hilliard again beside me as our own cruiser moved
forward at its squadron's head, we three turned to glance back. We
saw New York, its mighty towers splendid against the descending sun,
moving also, but slowly westward and away from us, away from the coming
battle, dwindling to a dark spot and vanishing as we raced on outward
over the gray Atlantic. Now we were racing above the great air-forts
that had massed in a great double line a score of miles out from the
coast, high above the waters. Over these too we sped, at steadily
mounting speed, until with great motors droning, crews shouting as they
ran our heat-guns out from tops and sides and keels, winds whining
shrill about us, our great fleet reached its maximum speed toward that
great oncoming battle by which our Federation was to stand or fall.




                              CHAPTER II


                     The Battle Over the Atlantic

Gazing ahead, Macklin and Hilliard and I stood together in the
bridge-room of our cruiser. The squadron which we headed was at the
lead of one of our fleet's great columns. Far behind us stretched its
ships, flashing forward at uniform speed. Then from the distance-phone
before us came the First Air Chief's voice.

"Squadrons 1 to 6 take up scouting positions!" he ordered.

Instantly the first six squadrons of the two columns, our own one
of the first, leapt forward and out from the two great lines of the
main fleet. Our own and another squadron moved straight ahead, past
the silver-striped flagship of the First Air Chief, until our two
hundred ships had spread out into a great, thin fringe that was flying
forward miles before the main body of our fleet. Two of the other four
squadrons drove to right and left of the fleet, spreading there in the
same way, the remaining two taking up positions high above and far
beneath our two great columns. Thus, with its great lines of scouts
fringing it and protecting it from surprise on all sides, our great
fleet drove on toward the east over the gray and endless plain of the
Atlantic, holding at Yarnall's orders a speed of eight hundred miles an
hour.

The crimson descending sun flaming in the heavens behind us, the great
gray ocean stretching endlessly beneath us, we rushed on through empty
sea and sky. By then Hilliard had gone down to take up his position
with the crew beneath, but Macklin and I still stared into the great
empty vista before us. With the drone of our great motors and those of
the scouts flying beside us, we seemed like a great flight of bees.
Beneath there was no sound now from the crew, a silence that told of
the tenseless, of expectancy. But still before us was no sign of the
great fleet that we had come out to meet, and almost it seemed that in
spite of our certain information as to its course we had missed it,
since already we were some hundreds of miles out to sea. Then suddenly,
as I gazed ahead, I caught my breath, and the next moment had turned
swiftly to the distance-phone.

"Squadron 1 reporting," I said rapidly. "The scouts of the European
Federation fleet are in sight and are heading toward us!"

For there ahead a great line of dark dots had appeared suddenly in the
empty sky, a great fringe of dark dots that were rushing toward us and
that were becoming quickly larger! With each moment that they raced
toward us they became larger, until they had come plain to our eyes
as long torpedo-shaped cruisers like our own. They differed from our
own only in that their bridge-rooms, instead of being raised like our
own, were sunk flush with their upper-surfaces, only their transparent
forward-windows showing. They were the scouts of the European fleet,
and at the same time I saw them they must have seen us, for they
changed their course slightly. So racing straight toward us were five
hundred cruisers opposing the two hundred of our far-flung line. On and
on they came, and I saw momentarily far behind them a great cloud of
other cruisers, the mighty main body of the European fleet. I shouted
the information into the distance-phone. Then the next moment the
speeding line of cruisers before us had rushed straight into our own
onrushing line!

The next moment all the air about us seemed filled with whirling,
striking cruisers, as the two scouting lines met and crashed. In that
first moment a score of our cruisers crumpled and collapsed in headlong
collisions with European cruisers. And then as Macklin threw the wheel
up at my hoarse cry, our own ship heeled over with sickening speed to
avoid two European cruisers hurtling straight toward us. Then as we
rushed by them there came the swift sharp detonations of their great
heat-guns and a storm of shining cylindrical heat-shells rushed from
them toward us. At that moment Macklin swung our cruiser back upward
and over the two rushing European ships, and as there came a word from
Hilliard to the crew, our own keel heat-guns rained down a score of
heat-shells upon the two ships. One of those ships the heat-shells
missed, but the other was struck squarely by three of them.

Instantly there was a blinding flare of white light as the striking
heat-shells burst, releasing upon the luckless European ship all the
terrific heat contained within them, the vast vibrations of radiant
heat. For this was the most deadly weapon of modern air-warfare, these
shining shells in which, by special processes, the vibrations of
intense radiant heat could be concentrated. And as those shells struck
and burst upon the luckless ship below we saw the ship hang motionless
for a moment in the midst of that blinding flare, its metal sides
glowing and fusing. Then we saw it plunge downward like a great meteor
toward the gray Atlantic!

But now our own cruisers were whirling up and backward, back toward
the struggling ships that hung now in a mighty, struggling line. Like
swooping hawks our own craft flashed, diving down upon that battling
line with bow and keel guns raining heat-shells upon the European
ships below, racing down at a giddy angle into that wild melee of
struggling ships and heat-shells that the combat there had become. So
wild and fierce had been the combat in the few moments since we had
met the European scouts that already scores of ships had plunged down
in white-hot destruction toward the ocean. But we had, I saw, well
accounted for ourselves in those moments, since almost twice as many of
the European cruisers had fallen as our own, and they seemed staggered.
Then as our ships leapt like angry birds of prey after them, there came
a quick order from the distance-phone that abruptly halted us.

"Main body of European forces approaching! All front and side
scout-squadrons rejoin our fleet!"


                               Trapped!

Instantly Macklin whirled our cruiser again up and back, and as the
rest of our scout-squadrons turned and leaped back through the air
after us, we saw that the battered European scout-lines were receding
also, racing back toward their own main fleet. That mighty fleet was
in full sight to the eastward now, its five thousand great cruisers
advancing majestically toward us in the familiar battle-formation of
the European Federation--a great ring or hollow circle of ships. On
they came, the scouts taking their place within that circle with the
rest. Then we, too, had fallen back into place at the head of our own
two great columns, the silver-striped flagship of the First Air Chief
before us, and slowly now, with ten miles more of clear air between
them, the two giant armadas were advancing toward each other.

Standing there with Macklin, heart pounding, I gazed watchfully ahead
as our fleet and the European one swept nearer toward each other. We
came each withholding our fire for the moment, since the heat-guns
have but a short effective range. Although outnumbered two to one, we
were moving steadily toward the oncoming giant circle of the enemy.
Then suddenly the ships of the great European fleet, still holding its
circular formation, had leapt steeply upward with sudden tremendous
speed, to slant above us!

As they did so, a quick order rang from the distance-phone and the
two great columns of our fleet had leapt upward also, up to the level
of the other until a split-second more would have seen us crashing
headlong into that oncoming circular fleet. I saw the air before me
filled with gleaming ships rushing lightning-like towards us, heard
another order ring out, and then Macklin had swung our cruiser to the
right and our whole great fleet had divided, one column flashing like
light to the right of the oncoming European fleet and the other column
to the left of it. Before they could change formation or slant down to
escape that swift maneuver of ours, we were flashing past them on both
sides, and then to right and left of them our heat-guns were thundering
and loosing a storm of swift heat-shells.

As those shells struck, as our passing column loosed a hail of them
upon the European cruisers, the air about us seemed filled completely
with blinding bursts of light and heat. Scores, hundreds, of the enemy
ships were withered by that deadly fire from right and left, glowing
and melting and plunging downward like chariots of white fire.

Surprised as they were by our swift maneuver comparatively few fired
upon us as we raced past them, but even those few shells found their
marks among the cruisers of our rushing column. Cruisers of my own
squadron were struck and hanging there glowing and fusing from the
terrific heat released upon them, unable to avoid the fast-speeding
ships behind them which raced headlong into the white-hot wrecks. Then
our columns were past them and as behind us their ships fell thick in
white-hot melting ruin, I turned toward Macklin, exultant.

"We're beating them!" I cried. "Another blow like that one and----"

A cry from the second officer cut me abruptly short, and quickly I
gazed back to where he was pointing, toward the mighty ring of the
European fleet. Our two columns had converged inward toward each
other after that deadly blow, when the great ring-shaped formation of
cruisers behind us had halted abruptly its own forward flight, and
had shot back a great double file of its cruisers between our own two
racing columns! And then, before we could see and forestall its menace,
before we had time to obey the swift command that the First Air Chief
shouted from the distance-phone, that double tongue of ships had split,
each line moving sidewise with terrific force and speed toward our own
two lines, pressing them outward from each other, separating them,
rolling them sidewise and backward in two great enveloping motions.

In that moment I felt our cruiser reel madly as a European cruiser shot
against it, saw Macklin clinging madly to the wheel as I was thrown
down and backward, while about us in that mad moment the heat-shells
were speeding forth from ship to ship to burst in flaring destruction
about us. Then as Macklin swung our cruiser up to a level keel, our
heat-guns beneath detonating now as our gunners worked them like mad
beings, we were fighting the remorseless lines of the enemy that swept
us back and I was aware that our fleet's two columns had been swept
hopelessly apart, that our forces had been fatally divided and that
each division of them was now completely encircled by the outnumbering
masses of cruisers of the European fleet!

Cruisers on all sides of us now seemed to fill the air, enemy cruisers
that tossed about us in a great sea of ships and that made our own
ships the target now of their unceasing volleys. Our column, rolled
together by that irresistible maneuver, had massed into a solid group,
the silver-striped flagship of the First Air Chief just beside our
own. The air around us was livid with flares of blinding light as the
heat-shells broke and burst in unceasing destruction, as the thunder of
our detonating guns seemed to drown all other sounds in the universe.

Not for long could we thus remain the target of these masses of
cruisers that swarmed about and above and beneath us. Our other column
had been swept back and that was surrounded by enemy cruisers and
fighting desperately even as we were. Unless we could join them, and
reunite our shattered fleet, we must inevitably be destroyed. At that
moment the voice of the First Air Chief rang from the distance-phone
before me in a high command.

"Triangle formation!" he shouted. "North at full speed!"

Instantly the ships behind and about us, reforming swiftly and smoothly
even under the rain of shells shifted into a great wedge-shaped
formation, a great triangle of solid ships whose apex was the First Air
Chief's cruiser, and which pointed north, toward the other isolated
and struggling half of our fleet. Then the next moment our great
triangle had leaped forward straight toward the north at full speed,
into the swarming masses of European ships that surrounded us. Our
own cruiser hung just behind the First Air Chief's, just behind the
triangle's apex. Then with a terrific crash we had smashed into the
solid wall of ships before us.

Our cruiser rocked and reeled beneath me as its sharp stem rammed at
full speed into a European cruiser that had swung broadside in an
attempt to escape us. Its side crumpled beneath that awful blow and I
saw it reel back and downward, I felt other rending crashes that shook
our ship wildly as our triangle crashed through the European fleet.
Then suddenly we were through it, had smashed our way by sheer force
through its sea of ships and had reached the second half of our fleet,
joining with it once more. Scores, hundreds even, of our own cruisers
and of the enemy's were tumbling and twisting downward toward the sea,
battered wrecks of metal that had been all but annihilated in our mad
crash through the enemy armada!

Now swiftly our re-united fleet, still almost two thousand strong, were
massing together in a single long rectangle, our flagship speeding to
its head, and as we moved toward the scattered swarms of European ships
about us, that numbered almost four thousand still, they had formed
into a similar formation. Then as our own long rectangle or column
rushed toward them they were racing sidewise at the same speed as
ourselves, so that side by side now our two great fleets sped through
the air, our heat-guns detonating again as we held still to the awful
struggle. Our cruiser seemed to bear a charmed life, since as we drove
headlong through that hail of shining death, behind the First Air
Chief's cruiser, we were sometimes missed by inches only. And now as
Macklin, his eyes steady but burning, held our ship onward with those
about us in this mad running fight of the two great fleets, I was aware
that in that fight they were both slanting steadily _downward_, down
toward the gray Atlantic far beneath!

Fleet hanging to fleet, the air between them thick with shining
heat-shells, down we rushed until we were within yards and then feet of
the ocean's tossing surface! But, still firing at each other steadily,
they were swooping downward still until we were plunging straight
down into the ocean's depths. For these great air-cruisers could move
beneath water as well as through the air. Each opening in them sealed
tight during flight, their air-supplies always automatically furnished
by great tanks of liquid-air, their great tube-propellers sucking water
through them at immense speed even as they did air, and hurling the
cruiser on at a speed which while far less than that in the air was
still great--with these features our cruisers were now down into the
great waters of the Atlantic.

"Hold steady!" I cried to Macklin as we swooped downward, and the
waters rushed up toward us. "Keep in line with the First Air Chief's
ship!"

I saw his hands clench upon the wheel, and then the waters were just
beneath us, were rushing nearer and nearer, while even then our
ships and those about us were loosing their heat-shells upon the
European fleet whose great column was plunging downward like our own.
Down--down--and then with a shock our cruiser had plunged into the
great waters, had rushed beneath the waves, and instantly the light
of sunset all about us had vanished, had given way to the green
translucence of the waters. Through that green obscurity there shot
yellow shafts of revealing light, the underwater searchlights in
the walls of our cruiser which I had snapped on. From all the ships
before and behind us came other brilliant shafts. Our great fleet
still grappled with the European fleet rushing down to our right, our
heat-guns loosing their deadly shells still through the green waters
toward each other's fleet! The great battle over the Atlantic was to be
carried on in the great ocean's very depths!




                              CHAPTER III


                             Under the Sea

Green depths that swirled about us, shafts of yellow light that swung
and stabbed through them, rushing cruisers and detonating guns and
drone of motors and wild shouts--all these merged and mingled in one
great phantasmagoria of strange impressions in those first moments. I
had shot under the ocean's surface in my cruiser many a time before,
but never in battle. And now, with our two great fleets plunging down
into those peaceful depths, all about me seemed for a moment a strange
dream. Then I saw before us, the cruisers of the First Air Chief and
those about him, dark long bulks that gleamed there in the depths
beneath us as the yellow shafts of light struck and crossed them.

Peering downward, figure tensed over the wheel, Macklin was holding
the cruiser behind those rushing ones ahead, and now, looking away
to the right, I could make out the dark, long bulks of the European
cruisers also. And across the gap from fleet to fleet were hurtling
storms of the heat-shells still, shot forth by our great heat-guns
whose valve-breeches made them capable of underwater operation. And
as they burst there broke from them the same great flare of light and
heat as in the air above, little affected for the moment by the waters
about them, destroying in that moment the ships they struck and making
the waters about those fusing ships boil terribly with their terrific
released heat.

But straight downward through those boiling waters swirled and swept
the following cruisers of the two great fleets. As our guns thundered
there in the great deep, as heat-shells raced and broke and flared
about us, I saw schools of fish and strange sea-creatures and denizens,
for a moment in the glow of the yellow searchlights or the flares of
bursting heat-shells. The fish were all striving desperately to escape
from this hell of battle and death that we men had carried down with
us. And still downward--our two great columns were racing, hanging to
each other with fierce, resistless tenacity, raking each other still
with the great heat-guns as we shot lower into the mighty depths!

Finally Hilliard dashed up into the bridge-room from below.

"This can't keep on much longer!" he cried. "The cruiser's walls can't
stand this heat and speed!"

"It'll have to keep on as long as the First Air Chief keeps on!" I
shouted to him, over the drone of motors and thunder of guns. "If the
battle is to end for both fleets here--let it!"

But I saw even in that moment that Hilliard was right, and that the
walls about us, the transparent metal of the windows, had become
searing to the touch. Not only had we raced through areas of water
boiling at terrific temperatures from heat-shells that had burst in
ships there, but our own immense speed was producing by its friction
with the waters a heat that was almost softening the cruiser's walls.
Yet I saw that still the First Air Chief's cruiser was rushing deeper
and deeper before us, and that still the great column of our own fleet
and that of the European fleet were following locked in that colossal
death-grip, their heat-guns thundering still toward each other.

I could see too that the cruisers of the European fleet were suffering
far more than our own in this awful undersea battle, since there in
the green depths, only able to half see each other and to aim their
heat-guns by the uncertain light of their searchlights, their greater
numbers were of but small advantage to them. And our gunners, following
the former orders of the First Air Chief, were concentrating their fire
upon the European column's head, so that when ships were struck there
by heat-shells, changed to motionless white-hot wrecks in the waters,
those behind were unable in the green depths to see them in time to
swerve aside, and so crashed into the fusing wrecks and were themselves
destroyed. It was a maneuver that the First Air Chief had long before
explained to us for use in undersea warfare, and now it was proving of
the highest effectiveness and score after score of the European ships
were flaring and crashing in their opposing column.

[Illustration: Our gunners, following the orders of the First Air
Chief, were concentrating their fire on the European column's head,
there in the ocean's green depths.]

For only a moment more, though, did the two great columns continue
thus, for then the European fleet, feeling the great losses which it
was experiencing in this terrific underwater combat, responded suddenly
to some order, curving sharply upward again. Instantly the First Air
Chief snapped an order from the distance-phone, and instantly our
own great column of ships had turned upward too, had curved upward
through the waters after the racing European fleet like wheeling sharks
after prey, their guns and ours still beating a tattoo of thundering
death there in the great depths. Now as we rushed upward again at
undiminished speed the waters were becoming green and translucent once
more. Then as we flashed up through those green depths, heat-guns
sounding still from fleet to fleet, the cruisers ahead and above us,
and then our own, burst suddenly up from the waters into the sunlit air
once more!


                            Into the Clouds

Surely some battle out of a nightmare was this, in which our two great
masses of cruisers hung still with deadly purpose upon each other.
Macklin and Hilliard and I aware of ourselves now only as infinitesimal
and unreasoning parts of this mighty fleet about us, moved upward,
miles again above the waves. The two rushing fleets slowed, halted, as
though by mutual purposes. Slowed and halted there in two great masses
of cruisers in mid-air, our own to the west and the European one to the
east, and then, with every heat-gun detonating and with the air between
them seemingly filled with shining, hurtling shells, they were hanging
motionless in a mighty death-grip!

The great struggle for its sheer intensity was appalling, as the two
giant fleets hung there unmoving, high in the air, each unheeding its
own danger, intent only upon annihilating the other. I was aware, as
though I were a spectator, that I was shouting hoarse commands into the
order-phone, that in obedience to those commands our gun-crews beneath
were working the great heat-guns like madmen, loosing an unceasing
hail of shining shells toward the fleet opposite, shouting as they did
so even as Macklin and Hilliard were shouting wildly beside me. I was
aware of heat-shells that seemed exploding all around us, of brilliant
and unceasing flares of blinding heat and light that burst in dozens
each second amid either fleet, their cruisers whirling downward now in
score of hundreds.

I know now that that motionless battle there in mid-air could not have
exceeded a few minutes, yet then it seemed an eternity. I was aware
dimly that our ships were falling faster than the Europeans, that
their greater numbers were telling upon us once more here in the open
air, and that but few more than a thousand ships were left to us, no
more than half of our original number. Yet more than twice that number
of European cruisers remained, smothering us with shining shells!
Then suddenly the silver-striped ship of the First Air Chief, that
had swayed beside our own, turned westward, and at the same moment
Yarnall's voice came sharply from the distance-phone.

"Retreat-formation!" he was shouting. "All ships retreat westward at
full speed!"

"Retreat!" My cry was one of incredulity, of mad anger. Retreat--we
were beaten, then, our great battle lost--I was aware of Macklin
hovering in irresolutely over the wheel, of Hilliard almost sobbing in
his rage.

Then despite our fury the sense of discipline was reasserting itself,
and with the First Air Chief's ship at its head, our great mass of
ships was turning, was forming swiftly into a great T, the longer
column or stem of it pointing westward, moving westward at swiftly
mounting speed with the flagship at its head, while the shorter column
or head of the T lay across its rear at right angles. This protected us
somewhat from the European fleet that now was leaping swiftly after us,
triumphant, exultant at our flight. Our stern guns still firing toward
them as they leapt upon our track, we raced westward, on until at full
speed. And now, even as the thunder of guns still came to our ears
from behind, a dull, dead silence reigned over our own ship, and those
about us, Macklin and Hilliard as silent beside me as myself, a silence
of the apathy of utter dismay and despair. For never, surely, had any
American fleet ever thus fled homeward, before, pursued by a conquering
enemy.

On to the westward though we raced still, our rear-guard line of
cruisers now the targets of numberless heat-guns. Still cruisers among
them were being destroyed by the heat-shells, and still, too, they were
striking savagely back to find their marks here and there among the
mass of our pursuers. On and on we rushed, the European fleet closing
gradually toward us, and now we were but a score or so of miles from
the coast, I knew, and should be sighting the great double line of our
air-forts that were hanging far out to sea. It was the one chance of
escape for our outnumbered fleet, I knew, to gain the shelter of those
great forts. And now it was clear that it was with this object that the
First Air Chief was leading our fleet in full retreat westward. But as
we gazed ahead, we saw that though we should have been within sight of
them the great air-forts were nowhere to be seen! Save for a great,
long bank of floating white clouds ahead the sky was completely empty,
and of the air-forts there was no trace!

"The air-forts gone!" I cried. "Our last chance gone!"

"But our fleet's going on!" exclaimed Macklin. "The First Air Chief's
leading us into those clouds!"


                              The Ambush

Gazing ahead, incredulous, I saw in a moment that it was so, that the
First Air Chief's cruiser was flying straight on toward the great long
bank of clouds ahead, leading our whole fleet into their fleecy white
masses. Even as I stared unbelievingly, I saw his silver-striped ship
rush into those clouds and vanish from view, and after it were rushing
our own ship and all those about us, all the long mass of our fleet!
Unable to credit my eyes, almost, I stared, for it was a suicidal
maneuver, to attempt to elude our pursuers in those fleecy masses. They
needed only to surround the cloud-bank and then wait and destroy us
one by one as we emerged again. Yet even as I gazed forward our ships
were speeding into the white masses of vapor, after our flagship, our
rear cruisers still returning the fire of our pursuers. Then as our own
cruiser flashed into them, all things vanished from about us save the
thick masses of cloud-vapor that hemmed us in, that seemed to press
against our windows, curtaining all things else from sight!

I stared forth tensely with Macklin and Hilliard in a vain attempt to
see through those masses, heard the thunder of guns still going off
blindly somewhere in the great cloud-mass behind us, knew that in the
wild heat of pursuit the European fleet had rushed after us into that
great cloud-bank. Then came a swift order of "All ships halt!" from
the distance-phone, and as we came swiftly to a halt there in the
blinding, fleecy masses, motors droning still, we heard the crash of
ship on ship behind us in the cloud-bank as the foremost cruisers of
the European fleet drove blindly into our own, then halted fearfully
themselves, milling confusedly about in fear of further collisions and
with neither fleet firing now in the absolute blindness that held each
ship. Thus the two mighty fleets hung there for the moment blind and
helpless in the huge cloud-bank, and in that moment there came again
the First Air Chief's voice from before us in a swift, shouted command.

"All American Federation ships--_drop_!"

Before the order had ceased to echo Macklin's hand had flashed to the
power-stud, and as the great drone of our motors suddenly lessened our
cruiser dropped downward like a falling stone, plunged downward until
in a moment more it had ripped through the great fleecy mass of the
cloud-bank and into the open clear air beneath it, leaving the great
European fleet for the moment still in it. And in that moment, even as
our cruisers halted their plunging downward fall, there came a great
hissing sound from above as of the hissing of terrific jets of air, and
at the same instant we saw the mighty cloud-bank above breaking up,
disintegrating, its great fleecy masses whirling suddenly away in all
directions, driven away in a moment as though by mighty winds, breaking
away in formless flying vapors! Breaking away to leave clear air where
they had been, to leave the European fleet hanging there, appearing to
our sight suddenly as a confusedly milling mass of numberless ships
above us! And coming to----? on either side of that confused mass of
ships was _the great double line of our giant air-forts_!

"The air-forts!" My cry was echoed in that moment by Macklin and
Hilliard beside me, by all in our cruiser, in our fleet.

The air-forts! On either side of the disorganized European fleet they
hung, in their mighty double line, and as that fleet saw them now
for the first time with the sudden disappearance of the cloud-bank
that had hidden them, it seemed to hang motionless still as though
stunned with astonishment. Then the great heat-guns of the air-forts
had swung toward them, were thundering in swift chorus, were loosing
storm upon storm of heat-shells upon the confused, astounded ships that
swung between them! Were pouring forth in that awful moment all the
concentrated fire of their mighty batteries upon the European ships
caught between them.

The air-forts! And it was between them, between their two mighty lines,
that the First Air Chief had purposely led the European fleet, I saw
now. For _this_, then, was the new device of the air-forts of which
he had spoken to us before our start, this device which enabled them
to surround themselves with a great cloud-bank that kept them hidden
from all and unsuspected by any enemy. Some device for projecting
forth great masses of water-vapor it must be, that had enabled them
to form that great artificial cloud-bank about themselves. And when
the First Air Chief, staking all upon the device, had led the pursuing
European fleet into that great cloud-bank, into that giant ambush of
the air-forts, then with our own fleet dropping down out of it they had
needed only to disperse the artificial cloud-mass about them by means
of great air-jets of terrific power, to disperse the cloud-mass and
to turn all the fury of their great guns upon the European fleet that
hung still dazed there in the withering fire of those suddenly-unmasked
batteries!

For now above us the European ships, whirling aimlessly about in that
terrific fire that raked them from either side, were falling faster
still! Their own shells burst and flared along the sides of the great
air-forts, but were too few in number to cripple or destroy any of
those gigantic, heavily-armored edifices. And at that moment, even
as the European ships strove to mass together to escape from that
great death trap of the air, the First Air Chief's ship was slanting
up toward them, and now we needed no orders to follow as we raced up
after him. Up until our great fleet rushing upward in a single mass was
pouring up before us a third terrific fire of heat-shells which, added
to that of the air-forts on either side, sent blinding death-flares
dancing and leaping over all the mass of ships above us.

[Illustration: And now above us the European ships, whirling about
aimlessly in the terrific fire that raked them from either side, were
falling faster still. And even as they massed together to escape that
great death trap, we were slanting up after them.]

"They're turning!" cried Hilliard. "They're fleeing!"


                               Homeward

Fleeing! Even as our fleet shot up toward them the European ships,
reduced now to hardly more than two thousand in number, and unable to
bear the terrific fire concentrated upon them from three directions,
were soaring frantically upward above the air-forts, up and away to the
eastward, massing together in a close-bunched, irregular formation. And
our fleet had shot up after them, sending a rain of shining messengers
of death among them as we shot after them, pursuing them with bow-guns
firing just as minutes before they had pursued us. Then, broken and
disorganized and incapable of further resistance for the time being,
the great European fleet was drawing away from us as an order from
the First Air Chief halted our wild pursuit. Outnumbered still as we
were by two to one we could not carry the pursuit too far from our
supporting air-forts.

As we halted, we saw the European ships racing on in a struggling
mass, dwindling and vanishing from us quickly against the gathering
dusk eastward. Then our own battered cruisers were turning, heading
back westward, back toward the brilliant, waning sunset, and with our
flagship at our head until we paused above the air-forts. There, with
the wild exultation of victory we three in the bridge-room, Macklin,
Hilliard and myself, and our crew and all the cruiser crews about us,
expressed ourselves in great roaring shouts. And then, once more, there
came from the distance-phone before us the voice of the First Air Chief.

"Cruiser-captains and men of this fleet," he said, "we have beaten back
the first attack of the European Federation fleet. And I have received
but now a distance-phone message from the Second Air Chief, commanding
the western fleet out of San Francisco. He reports that his own fleet,
meeting the oncoming Asiatic Federation fleet, was able after a battle
as terrific as our own to drive it back also, by using the same
cloud-ambush device in the air-forts as we used here. Thus on this day
to west and east we have accomplished the impossible."

He paused, and at his words, his news, a wilder cheer went up from all
our ships and air-forts, hanging motionless there against the crimson
of the dying sunset. But now, his voice solemn, the First Air Chief
went on.

"We have won today, in east and west, but what we have won is but a
respite. The mighty European and Asiatic Federations have gathered all
their forces to annihilate our American Federation. Their great fleets
have been cut in half by these two battles, but so have ours. And they
not only outnumber us still by far, but they can build new cruisers
faster than we. Undoubtedly within weeks, days perhaps, there will come
another mighty onslaught from them, from west and east, an onslaught
for which they have been preparing and are preparing some colossal and
terrible plan or weapon of which we know nothing. It is some unknown
device that it is rumored will enable them to move gigantic forces upon
us. We must stand against them, nor can we hope to surprise them with
the cloud-ambushes used by us today. Yet whatever forces they bring
against us, whatever giant new weapons or terrific attacks they loose
upon us, whatever is the great end of this Last Air War that today has
started, you of the American Federation fleet can be proud always of
the way this first battle was fought and won!"

There was silence a moment and then another shattering cheer. And then,
the First Air Chief's cruiser leading, our fleet was moving smoothly
westward toward the sunset, and toward New York. As we moved on our
watchful patrols were already out from the fleet's main body to north
and south, while behind us the great air-forts, slowly and ponderously,
were following us, spreading into a long single line which with the
ceaseless patrols was to guard us from any surprise attacks or raids.
Already, by now, the dusk was gathering behind and about us, the
sunset's light waning in the west. And by the time that our fleet came
again in sight of New York the great air-city's outline was visible
only as a mass of brilliant lights floating high in the gathering
darkness. The mighty city, as we learned, had begun to move eastward
to meet us upon hearing of the results of the day's battles, and now
glimmered before us like a great mass of brilliant gathered stars, the
giant beams of its searchlights sweeping the night.

Onward and down toward the mighty city shot our fleet, and as Macklin
and Hilliard gazed down with me we saw the cruisers that landed upon
the white-lit plazas across the immense floating city surrounded at
once by joyful crowds, their weary crews carried high on shoulders.
The whole great city, indeed, was rejoicing, though that rejoicing was
not extravagant, being tempered by the knowledge that it was but the
first attacks of the European and Asiatic Federations and that other
and greater attacks might be expected to follow soon. So although the
great city blazed with lights as our fleet slanted down toward it, its
great towers and pinnacles and pyramids seeming like magic palaces of
radiance floating there in the night of the upper air, yet its great
watchful searchlights stabbed and circled still, and there came and
went still high above it and to north and east and south the humming
patrols, on guard now and challenging every craft that approached the
city.

Then our cruiser was landing, and Macklin and Hilliard and I were
emerging from it with our crew, mindless of the shouting crowds that
surrounded every landing plaza, stumbling in our utter weariness
through those crowds to our barracks, to fall into a stupor-like sleep
of utter exhaustion....


                           The Respite Ended

It was the middle of the afternoon when we awoke, more than a score of
hours later. Our quarters lay in one of the uppermost levels of the
great barracks-tower, and as I rose and after dressing joined Macklin
and Hilliard at the window, we could see far out over the air-city's
great expanse. Above us blazed the afternoon sun shining on numberless
patterned windows of all the gigantic metal towers about us. Far
overhead there still hummed and flashed the ceaseless patrols, still
watchfully hovering above and around New York. Beneath, on the city's
landing plazas, there rested still the hundreds of cruisers of our
returned fleet, and now we saw that upon the great central plaza where
our own ship lay there were gathered now some two hundred and fifty
of our twelve hundred and fifty ships, and that about these central
ships were swarming a great horde of mechanics and attendants; caring
for and inspecting their great motors, filling the liquid-air tanks
that supplied constant breathable air, refilling their magazines with
shining masses of heat-shells.

I turned puzzled toward the other two. "Strange that they should be
giving such swift attention to those two hundred and fifty cruisers," I
said.

Macklin nodded, frowning. "And our cruiser among them," he commented.
"One would almost think that--" He stopped short as our door snapped
open and an attendant stepped inside, saluting.

"Captain Martin Brant to report at once to the First Air Chief's
headquarters in the tower," he said, "and all cruiser officers and
crews of Squadrons 1 to 4 to rejoin their ships at once!"

Again he saluted and disappeared, leaving us staring blankly
at each other. Then we were struggling into the tight black
jackets of our uniforms, were striding out in a moment and down
to the great air-city's "ground" level in one of the building's
electrostatic-motored cage-lifts. Through the crowded streets we
strode, seeing now that in all those streets other black-uniformed
men of the squadrons named were pressing toward their cruisers in the
central plaza. Then we three had reached that central plaza, from whose
center rose the mighty electric power-tower, and around which the two
hundred and fifty cruisers rested, all of our first four squadrons that
had survived the battle.

Already, I saw, the crews of those cruisers were taking their places
within them, and as Macklin and Hilliard took up their positions in
our own I strode on across the plaza toward the huge tower's base,
in which were the headquarters of the First Air Chief. Passing
challenging guards at its door, I passed through a few narrow white-lit
ante-rooms, and then had stepped into the great circular room that was
his innermost office. The curving walls of that room were covered with
panel after panel of instruments and switches, which controlled the
vast electrical currents that rushed down from the electric-tower's
tip and transformers to those motors in the city's base. Near the
room's center was the battery of six great switches which controlled
the city's direction of motion, moving it in any direction at will at
slow and ponderous speed, the speed-control's gleaming knob beside
them. And beyond the controls of the great air-city, there stood a
great table-map of the world, upon which a myriad of red circles
automatically showed the position of the world's air-cities.

Behind this table-map, as behind a desk, the First Air Chief was
sitting as I entered, while around the panelled walls there moved
a half-dozen black-jacketed attendants constantly watching and
controlling the flow of current from the power-tower's tip to its
motors. The First Air Chief, as I entered, motioned me silently to a
metal seat before himself, at the great table-map's edge, and then for
a moment contemplated me in silence, as though considering his words
before speaking. Regarding me intently, he began.

"For a second time, Captain Brant," he was saying, "I have summoned you
here to me, but this time alone, and with the two hundred and fifty
remaining cruisers of our first four squadrons summoned also outside.
You are wondering, no doubt, why I have done so.

"The victory we have gained is, as I said, but a respite. We know that
the two great Federations, though beaten back with great losses will
soon be launching another and a far greater attack upon us, one against
which I think we cannot stand. From the European Federation to the
east and from the Asiatic Federation to the west that mighty second
attack will be loosed upon us, with some terrible new weapon or plan
whose nature we cannot guess. For though hundreds of agents have been
sent by us to all the European and Asiatic air-cities, months before
the outbreak of this war even, they have been either captured and made
away with, or have been able to report only that immense preparations
of some sort are going on in those cities, in Berlin and Peking
especially. And the rumors which have reached us through them indicate
that whatever great new colossal weapon or thing they are devising at
Berlin and Peking, it is one which, they boast, will enable them to
sweep all our cities from the air in a single mighty attack.

"You see, then, that to wait for them to develop their great weapon
or plan, to await this terrible attack without action, is but to pave
the way for our own doom. We must strike out to halt them, to cripple
or destroy their great secret plans, must strike at the European and
Asiatic Federations both before they expect us. And that is why I
have called you here to me. For it is my intention to launch a great
raiding attack of our own at both Berlin and Peking. If we can strike
a smashing blow at those two air-capitals, can damage or destroy the
great military preparations within their arsenals, which must hold
their great secret also, we shall have crippled, for the time being,
their plans and shall have gained time for us to learn and counteract
those plans. Even now our two hundred and fifty ships are ready and
wait to start for Berlin, while from San Francisco a similar number
will raid westward to Peking. And it is my order that you, Captain
Brant, shall command this great raid eastward, for your conduct in the
great battle of yesterday proves you worthy of the command. So soon
after that battle, our enemies will never dream of our lesser forces
attacking them, so now is your great chance to strike back at them, to
flash across the Atlantic in a great surprise raid and strike down out
of the night with all your power at the great air-capital of Berlin!"




                              CHAPTER IV


                           A Desperate Plan

For a moment, I think, I stood in stupefied silence as the meaning of
the First Air Chief's breath-taking plan sank into my brain. Then I had
snapped to sudden attention, saluting, my eyes shining. Yarnall was
smiling, too.

"The plan is bold enough," he said, "but it means a chance to strike
a terrific blow at our enemies, to cripple and perhaps destroy their
great preparations that mean doom for us. The two hundred and fifty
cruisers gathered here in the central plaza have been completely
replenished with supplies and inspected while you slept, their
magazines filled with heat-shells, their bomb-slots with mighty
heat-bombs. You can thus start at once, heading straight across the
Atlantic toward the air-city of Berlin. And if you can reach it with
your cruisers, under the cover of darkness and the unexpectedness of
your coming, win through their great patrols and chains of air-forts,
and reach the great air-capital, you will be able to strike a blow that
may yet save us. I know, and you know, Captain Brant, what perils lie
between your cruisers and their goal, but I need not speak of those
perils and need not tell you what hopes depend upon your raid. I need
only give you now a single order--to start at once!"

Five minutes later our two hundred and fifty cruisers, humming like a
great swarm of bees, were rising up into the brilliance of the sky. My
own cruiser leading, the familiar figures of Macklin and Hilliard again
in the bridge-room beside me, I wondered momentarily if ever I was to
return to New York. The mighty city floating there beneath us, its
crowds now watching in wondering silence as we rose from it, its masses
of buildings suspended there between earth and sky like a strange new
galaxy of stars--it was home to me, and it was somberly enough that I
watched it dropping now away from our ships.

Upward we rose, hovered, then shot toward the west, driving smoothly
until the great mass that was New York had dropped out of sight behind
us. Then as I spoke an order into the distance-phone our ships turned,
circling widely to the south, and then moved eastward, out of sight
of New York. It was a necessary maneuver, I knew, to make it appear
that our cruisers had gone westward. Necessary because in New York's
millions there were certain to be European spies who would have
endeavored to warn their capital had they suspected that we were in
reality racing eastward.

And now as we shot out over the Atlantic again, I gave another order
and our two hundred and fifty cruisers massed quickly into a compact
triangle with my own ship at its apex. It was the best formation for
a raiding party, and holding to it our little fleet shot upward now
and onward, onward until we were racing above the great line of our
air-forts hanging miles out over the Atlantic in a great watchful
chain. We had answered their challenge and were rushing on above and
beyond them.

Within minutes they had vanished behind us, and our cruisers were
rocketing forward at swiftly mounting speed, racing onward and upward
until at more than a thousand miles an hour we were rushing eight miles
above the ocean's surface.

As we were rushing toward the east, as fast as the sun was rushing away
from us, the night came upon us swiftly. There came dusk and then the
stars. We were at an altitude at which we would be sighted by almost no
other craft, I knew, an altitude rarely used by any ships. Though the
modern closed-construction and air and heat arrangements of air-craft
made flying at that height practicable enough, it was necessary by
reason of the greater tenuity of the air to use more of the motors'
power to attain the same speed. As we hummed on at that great height,
all sight of the ocean beneath was hidden from us by the great
vapor-layer that lay over it beneath us and only the pale stars above
and the triangle of gleaming cruisers behind were visible to us. Yet as
we shot on, it was not these, our immediate surroundings, that held my
thoughts, but the object of our flight. Gazing beside into the night,
with Macklin silent at the wheel beside me and with all our long ships
rushing close behind, I could not but be aware in those moments of the
desperateness of this raiding attack upon which we were engaged.

To flash across the sea with but little more than two hundred cruisers,
to attempt a raid upon the European Federation's mighty capital
even while a similar raid was made from westward upon the Asiatic
Federation's capital, seemed indeed so desperate as to approach
insanity. Berlin was guarded by a great chain of air-forts and patrols
hanging over the eastern Atlantic; which held within itself, without
doubt, all the great European battle-fleet of thousands of cruisers;
which bore upon itself countless mighty batteries of giant heat-guns.
Could we, in the face of these, reach Berlin, and send our heat-bombs
crashing down upon its great arsenals?


                            Above the Enemy

These were the doubts that assailed me as our triangle of cruisers
throbbed on and on through the upper night, but resolutely I thrust
them away, remembering what our attack, what the crippling of our
enemies' great and mysterious preparations, would mean to our
American Federation. Then I turned as Macklin pointed silently to the
glowing-figured dial of our distance-log, and saw by it that while I
had brooded there at the window we had swept far out over the Atlantic
at our tremendous speed. Within a short time, I knew, the European
coasts would be beneath us, but during all the course of our flight so
far we had sighted no other ships whatever, all merchant-traffic over
the great ocean having been swept from the air by the first alarms
of war, while we were still too far to the west to be meeting the
far-flung patrols of the European Federation forces.

Soon, though, these would be coming into sight, I knew, and the result
of our daring expedition depended upon our success in passing them
unobserved. If we were seen by them, a minute would suffice for the
patrols to give the alarm by distance-phone, and then from all the
European air-cities ahead, from Stockholm and London and Berlin and
Marseilles and a hundred others, numberless patrol-cruisers would be
swiftly converging upon us in answer to the alarm. And the European
battle-fleet itself, we knew, in Berlin, the air-city we had come to
attack, would be swift to answer also, so that never could we hope to
win through if we were but for a moment detected.

But still we were rushing westward through the night, my cruiser in
the lead, and still as Macklin and I peered intently ahead and below,
Hilliard having taken up his station beneath, we could make out nothing
but the chill masses of the great vapor-layer far beneath us, and the
gleaming, rushing shapes of the cruisers behind us. Then, I peered
ahead and down toward the right, with body tense, and in the next
moment had snapped out the green guiding light at our cruiser's stern,
and had uttered a quick order into the distance-phone before me.

"European Federation patrols ahead and beneath!" I warned quickly. "All
cruisers reduce to quarter-speed!"

Instantly in obedience to that order the triangle of rushing ships
behind was slowing, each cruiser swiftly reducing speed, the great
drone of their motors dying to a steady hum. Moving forward thus, as
slowly and silently as possible, I pointed downward, Macklin's eyes
following my pointing finger.

"The patrols!" I whispered to him. "There beneath us--moving
northward!"

Far beneath us indeed they were, a little circle of moving lights that
hung just above the great vapor-layer and that was moving steadily
toward the north, from our right to our left. Some twenty or more
of those white lights there were, moving smoothly along in the same
ring-like formation, and though we could not see the shapes of the
cruisers from which those lights gleamed up through the night, we knew
that they could be only one of the enemy's westward patrols, flying in
the familiar European Federation circular formation. Watching them,
Macklin and I unconsciously held our breath, while from our ship and
from all the ships behind there came no sound other than the low hum of
the motors. Slowly beneath those motors' lessened power our cruisers
were moving forward through the upper darkness, while beneath the
little ring of lights were still holding toward the north. Our presence
far above them was apparently unsuspected by them.

I knew, though, that if they were to turn toward us by any chance the
great cone-shaped cruiser-finders which are set in the sides of all
war-cruisers and air-forts and air-cities, that we would be detected
soon enough, since undoubtedly the patrol-ships beneath carried them
also. Those great cone-like instruments, when turned in any direction
can detect by means of super-sensitive induction-balances the operation
of any electrostatic-motors. Fortune favored us, though, for without
dreaming of our existence there above them the ring of patrol-cruisers,
the circle of moving lights, moved smoothly on to the north while we
held eastward until they had vanished behind us.

Now as I spoke a swift order we were picking up speed again, our
cruisers accelerating once more to their former velocity. I knew that
we must be very near the southwestern coast of England. Our course lay
high above that coast, taking us along a line that would lie midway
between the two mighty air-cities of London and Paris, avoiding both
purposely on our great flight toward the mightier air-city of Berlin.
Soon, I knew, the great air-fort chain that guarded the whole western
coasts of Europe would be drawing within sight, and intently enough
we were peering forth in search of it, but though that must be passed
still we had won through apparently, the outer patrols, without
discovery.

"It's hardly likely that they'd have a second line of outer patrols
out," I said to Macklin, as we peered together through the dim night
from the bridge-room of the rushing ship. "And once we get past the
air-forts we'll have a good chance."

He nodded. "They'll never dream of us making a raid upon them tonight,
and if we aren't picked up by the air-forts' cruiser-finders we can
reach--"

He broke off, suddenly, and at the same moment as he, I gazed down
toward the right. Another ring of moving lights was there in the
darkness beneath, northward, too. But this one had paused for a moment
and was slanting straight up toward us!

"Another patrol!" Macklin's cry was echoed into the distance-phone.

Another patrol--and it had seen us! And then, even as that patrol's
twenty cruisers slanted up toward us, to challenge us, eighty of the
cruisers of the lowest of our great triangle of ships had whirled like
light down toward them, without command or formation, whirled down upon
them massed together like a great striking thunderbolt of gleaming
metal! For they knew, without need of command, that in an instant more
the patrol-cruisers beneath would see and recognize the purpose of all
our racing ships, would instantly with their distance-phones send the
alarm spreading like flame over all the European Federation. And so our
eighty down-rushing cruisers, massed solidly together, fired no guns
and dropped no bombs, but simply flashed downward in a terrific ramming
swoop and in an instant more had crashed their great mass squarely into
the ring of the uprising European ships!

There was a rending crash of metal that seemed to split the air
beneath us, and then in a great shower of wrecked and twisted cruisers
the ships beneath were falling, tumbling down and vanishing into
the vapors far beneath on their headlong fall toward the Atlantic!
All of the twenty enemy cruisers, and about twenty-five of our own
four-score that had crashed down into them, fell thus, annihilated
almost by that terrific collision. It had been the one means, though,
of instantly destroying their patrols without using our heat-guns whose
detonations might give the alarm. And we knew that only that swift,
unordered action on the part of our lowest ships had saved us. Then the
fifty-five survivors had rushed up again among us, and then our ships
that had slowed there for the moment were rushing still on eastward.


                             The Air-Forts

Onward we shot through the upper night, shaken still by that sudden
peril and escape, and then I uttered a warning word into the
distance-phone from our cruiser leading. For now, far ahead, we could
make out great beams of white light that hung in a great row extended
from north to south as far as the eye could reach, and that seemed like
white fingers of light whirling and reaching through the air as they
ceaselessly swung and circled. A full four miles above the earth, and
more than that beneath the level of our own onrushing ships, hung this
great line of restless beams, and we knew it, at once, for the great
line of air-forts that guarded the western approaches of the European
Federation. For the beams we saw were the great beams of the air-forts'
mighty searchlights, and those swinging shafts of radiance were of
such intense brilliance and magnitude that even at our greatest flying
height we could not hope to pass over them undetected.

It seemed, indeed, that to pass them was hopeless, since the air-forts,
hanging above the great layer of misty vapor that stretched beneath,
could instantly detect with those mighty beams any cruisers passing
above them, at whatever height, and could blast them from the air
with their gigantic batteries of heat-guns. To pass beneath the great
vapor-layer was as impossible, since the air-fort chain which the
European Federation put forth here in war-time was a double one, and
its second line hung, farther eastward a little, beneath the vapor
area, watching with its own great beams and guns for any ships passing
there. There remained but one alternative, to pass through the thick
mists of the vapor-layer itself, but that, though concealing us from
the guns of air-forts above and beneath, would be in itself suicide,
since such vapor-layers between the forts were invariably filled in
war-time with floating air-mines, great cube-like metal containers
held aloft and motionless by their own electrostatic-motors and
tube-propellers and which contained a terrific heat-charge which was
instantly released upon any luckless ship that touched them.

But now as our ships slowed at sight of the ominous fingers of light
far ahead I spoke quickly into the distance-phone. "Our one chance is
to go through the vapor-layer," I said, "and use our cruiser-finders to
avoid the air-mines. By going through in a three-ship column we may be
able to make it."

At my order therefore our great triangle of cruisers shifted its
formation abruptly into one of a long slender line, three ships in
width, and then that line with my own cruiser at its head was slanting
sharply downward toward the great mists beneath us. A moment more and
our cruisers had entered those mists, were moving forward enveloped in
them, the great vapor-layer through which we moved hiding all things
from about us, hiding our cruisers even from each other. But though
we could not see them, we knew that the great air-forts hovered ahead
and above us, now, and that the vapor-layer into which we were moving
was one sown thick with the deadly air-mines. So, with Macklin at the
cruiser's wheel guiding it slowly forward at the head of our column
of ships, holding a course eastward through the mists by the compass
and creeping forward now at the same low speed as the ships behind, I
ordered Hilliard, beneath, to swing out the cone-like cruiser-finders
from our ship's sides, and to report instantly any air-mines they
detected before us.

Behind us, too, the cruisers that followed were using their own
cruiser-finders as they crept through the mists after us, at my order;
for though as leading ship we could report to them all air-mines which
we encountered before us, it was necessary for the cruisers behind to
feel their way forward independently, since in the concealing mists
they could not follow exactly upon our own ship's track. Now, though,
listening intently at the order-phone, I waited Hilliard's reports.
And in moments more, as our cruiser-finders' coils picked up the hum
of the enemy's electrostatic-motors a little ahead and to the right,
he reported sharply and I repeated the information swiftly to Macklin,
who instantly swung our ship a little to the left. And still Hilliard
remained with the cruiser-finders, whose super-sensitive coils caught
instantly the electrostatic-motors of the air-mines before and about us.

Onward thus we crept, Hilliard reporting at intervals of every
few moments as an air-mine was picked up ahead, while at my swift
repetition of his report Macklin would swerve our ship to avoid it.
Behind our own craft, we knew, all the scores of our cruisers were
creeping forward through the great vapor-layer in the same manner.
Now we could plainly hear the great, unceasing drone of the mighty
air-forts above, as we crept through the vapor-layer beneath them, and
knew that were we to emerge into any chance opening in the thick mists
about us we would have but short shrift enough from the giant guns of
those forts overhead. Yet still we crept on, praying that none of our
cruisers struck the deadly mines, since a single one striking would
loose a great flare of heat and light from the bursting air-mine that
would betray us all. Even our own ship, as it swerved from an air-mine
that Hilliard had hastily reported, almost ran full onto another one in
the opposite direction, a great cube of metal, holding within it a hell
of condensed heat and death and suspended by its power gained from the
concentrated cosmic trap. And though Macklin whirled our cruiser aside
in time to graze by it it seemed impossible that all our ships could
feel through this field of death without disaster.

Yet still we were creeping onward, through the thick mists, and now
the great air-forts' drone came from behind and above us, as we passed
on beneath them. On and on, feeling blindly forward through that zone
of potential death we went, over the second chain of air-forts whose
motors' sound came up to us muffled through the mists, and then that
too was dropping behind us. For some moments, though, we continued to
feel forward in the vapor-layer, and then I had given the ships behind
the order to rise and at once, as carefully as ever, our cruisers were
feeling their way upward until they emerged at last into the open air
above the mists, a tight steel hand seeming to unclose from about my
heart as we came up from out that terrible zone of death into the dim
starlight of the upper night, the white beams of the upper air-forts
now far behind us.


                             On to Berlin

"Through at last!" I cried to Macklin, as we drove upward. "It seems
incredible that all our ships could have won through that mine-field!"

Macklin nodded. "We'd not have made it had the air-forts there been
using their own cruiser-finders," he said. "But they never dreamed that
any ships would try to get through the mine-sown mists, evidently."

Now I spoke into the distance-phone another order, and our ships were
swiftly forming into their triangle formation, were racing forward
again at rapidly mounting speed to the east, air-forts and deadly mines
and questing outer patrols out of sight. And now, as with Macklin
and Hilliard, who had joined us from beneath after his work with the
cruiser-finders, I gazed forth, I could see that the great layer of
mists beneath us was thinning somewhat as we raced on, knew from that
fact that we had raced from above the Atlantic and now were moving far
above land, since always these mist-layers were far denser above the
sea than above land. That land over which we were now speeding could
only be that of southwestern England, I knew, and even now our flashing
triangle of cruisers was veering further to the south to avoid the
great air-city of London. Then, as we hummed on eastward at the same
great height as before, we made out a great mass of lights far to the
north, a mass of white lights that hung high above the earth and that
glowed toward us like a single soft light through the mists that lay
between it and our eastward racing ships, smaller beams stabbing and
circling from it.

There were needed not the exclamations of Macklin and Hilliard beside
me to inform me of that great light-mass' identity, for an air-city of
that size in this region could be but London. The great city, I judged,
had moved eastward somewhat from its usual position over the center of
southern England and further away from the great chain of air-forts and
mine-fields that guarded it to the west. It was not London, though,
that was our flying force's objective on this night, and we raced
onward with no backward glances toward it, peering ahead with growing
tenseness. Far below us we could glimpse, now and then, occasional
formations of merchant-ships flying toward or away from London, and
convoyed usually by a half-dozen war-cruisers, but these were far
beneath and as we were showing no lights and rushing on at tremendous
speed they did not glimpse us.

No patrols were in evidence now about us, the main reliance of the
European Federation air-chiefs having apparently been put upon
their great outer circle of air-forts and patrols, through which
we had managed to break. Nor, was it evident, did they dream that
the American Federation, depleted as its fleets were despite their
victories in the battles of the day before, would attempt any such
daring attack upon an enemy so superior as we were rushing upon now.

As we fled onward, holding our three-sided formation, I wondered
momentarily what that other American force was now doing that was
heading in the same way toward Peking, and then my wonder passed as
another great glow of white light showed itself ahead and to the
south. It was Paris, we knew, a great air-city as large as London and
outranked in size only by the three colossal air-capitals of the world.
But it was not Paris, either, that was our goal, and we veered now
to the north somewhat to avoid it, flying on at such a great height
and distance from it as to pass far beyond the reach of the great
searchlight beams that swung and circled from it as they had done from
London. Then it too had dropped behind to the south, and regardless now
of the other air-cities that we glimpsed far off in the night, we were
rushing eastward high above what had once been France, were speeding
forward at the same tremendous height on the last lap of our daring
journey.

Now other masses of air-traffic were manifesting themselves far beneath
us, as squadrons of moving lights, but neither Macklin nor Hilliard
nor I, nor any in our ships, were paying attention to these, all our
souls centered on the horizon ahead, on the dim darkness of night that
stretched before us. Gazing out into that darkness, my two friends
beside me, as tense as I leaned, there at the bridge-room's windows as
our droning flight of ships sped on. Nothing dispelled that darkness
but the dim starlight from above, but now, as we gazed forth, we
became aware of a faint light coming feebly toward us from far ahead,
a faint light that seemed like a great, feebly-glowing cloud in the
darkness, and that was intensifying in radiance with each moment that
we rushed toward it. The glowing cloud seemed to sink steadily as we
sped on, seeming to become lower until from our own ten-mile height
we saw at last that it was hanging at a height of four miles from the
earth. And swiftly it was growing in size, ahead and beneath us, until
as we neared it high above, it changed suddenly to our eyes from a
great glowing cloud of light to a colossal circle of uprushing white
radiance, a mighty circular city floating there in mid-air, that was as
huge as New York itself, and that blazed in the night before us as our
own city was wont to blaze.

"Berlin!"

Our three exclamations came together in that moment, exclamations that
must have been echoed then from every watcher in our onrushing ships.
Berlin! In all its stupendous, radiant splendor it hung before and
beneath us, the mighty air-city that was the European Federation's
capital and center, equalled in size only by New York and Peking.
There between earth and stars it floated, its white-lit towers soaring
up from the mighty metal base, all out-topped by the slender central
pinnacle that was the great city's electrostatic tower which drew from
earth's charge its electric power. Around the city's edge there stabbed
and circled the giant white beams of its great searchlights, sweeping
to and fro over the still-thronged streets, in which we knew there
surged the crowding masses of the great air-city's population. And high
above these, moving restlessly to and fro, there came and went the
great network of patrols which guarded the great metropolis of the air
on all sides.

But our own ships, winging more slowly on at our tremendous height,
were never glimpsed by the patrols so far beneath us, never caught at
our great height by the great white beams that came and went below,
and that only occasionally clove the night above. And as my order
brought our ships to a halt, we could make out more details in the
white-lit city floating far beneath us. Could make out, as we hung
there motionless, the great batteries of pivoted heat-guns set at the
central plaza and all around the city's encircling wall, the great
square metal buildings of the arsenals, in two groups at the city's
east and western edges, the central headquarters and arsenals of
all the European Federation's military forces. On the plazas around
those buildings rested long ranks of gleaming cruisers, cruisers that
numbered thousands and, we knew, were those with whom we had battled so
furiously over and in the Atlantic a day before. And it was down toward
these buildings and these cruisers that we gazed now, in that moment
before the city's cruiser-finders beneath could detect us and spread
the alarm.

"The cruisers and military buildings and arsenals below will be our
main objective," I said into the distance-phone as we hung there in
that tense moment, above the shining city. "The city's electrostatic
tower is so closely defended by heat-gun batteries that we could never
get near it, and like all power-towers of air-cities it's of metal
alloys that the heat of our shells and bombs wouldn't affect, so we
can't hope to destroy it and thus crash the city to earth by cutting
off its sustaining flow of power. Our goal must be the cruisers and
arsenals, and we'll attack them in two great swoops, the eastern ones
first and then the western, and if all goes well can then swiftly
escape before the forces below can gather and rise against us!"


                            A Sudden Attack

Now, poised there miles above the great air-city, which was itself
poised high over the earth, our great triangle of ships hung like
so many birds of prey for the moment. Beside me Macklin was gazing
downward as tensely as myself, Hilliard beneath with our waiting
gunners, while under my fingers lay the four rows of white buttons the
pressing of each of which would release from our cruiser's bomb-slots
a portion of the immense heat-bombs they held. Poising there in that
tense moment the whole scene was imprinted unforgettably upon my
brain--the gloom of night about us, the vast radiant circle of the
colossal air-city beneath, the patrols swarming over it, the throngs
that filled its streets, excited no doubt over the beginning of the
long-expected war that was to annihilate the American Federation. Then
I spoke one sharp order into the distance-phone and instantly with all
our motors droning suddenly loud our great triangle of cruisers was
diving straight downward upon the radiant air-city beneath!

Down we shot with dizzying speed in that mighty swoop, down with my
own cruiser flashing foremost and with all our others close behind it,
down through miles of space in a flashing moment, it seemed, until
our hurtling wedge of ships had crashed down into and through the
swarming patrols above the city, had driven like light down through
them toward the eastern mass of military structures and cruisers that
was our goal! From all of our ships no single gun sounded nor from the
patrol-cruisers through which we dropped, so stunned were they by our
great crash downward through them. It was as though for that moment a
tense silence had been enforced upon all the world, a silence broken
only by the drone of our motors as we plunged. Then I was aware in a
swift succession of flashing impressions of the white-lit city's towers
and buildings rushing like light up toward us, of the great square
military arsenals and buildings with the gleaming ranks of cruisers
about them, just beneath us. Then as we plunged to within a half-mile
of those buildings and cruisers my own foremost-flashing cruiser
curved forward and, as our down-plunging ships levelled out behind it,
I pressed swiftly a row of the buttons beneath my fingers. The next
moment our cruiser was swaying from side to side as it rushed on, and
down from it and from all the massed ships behind and about us were
plunging thousands of giant, cylindrical heat-bombs!

Even before those heat-bombs struck, our onrushing ships had curved
like lightning upward again, but the next moment were reeling and
tossing even in the mad upward rush as from beneath came a titanic
merged flare of all the bursting heat-bombs, from which an awful wave
of super-heated air rushed up and overtook us, and beneath whose
terrific released heat dozens of the huge military buildings beneath
had fused and melted. We could glimpse, too, that below a full half
thousand or more of the resting cruisers had perished also in that
giant flare, and that it was as though a whole great area of the
gigantic air-city beneath us had been transformed suddenly by the
released heat of our mighty bombs into a huge crater of white-hot,
melting metal near the floating city's edge! And from all across the
mighty white-lit mass of Berlin, that had reeled itself in mid-air from
that terrific blow, there rose a dull, roaring clamor of millions of
voices that came up to us even over the drone of our great motors and
the rush of winds about us!

Upward at utmost speed we were rushing, and just in time for hardly
had our heat-bombs struck when, despite the utter unexpectedness
of our attack, the great batteries of heat-guns around the central
electrostatic tower that guarded it were wheeling toward us and
thundering as they shot a storm of heat-shells above the white-lit
city toward us. Even as I had said, those vigilant watchers at the
power-tower would have blasted our fleet from the air before we could
have ever got near to the tower itself, but as it was we had struck a
terrific blow at the military arsenals and the resting fleet, and had
flashed upward again in time to escape the blasting guns at the city's
center. But now, through the night above the vast roaring city, the
batteries all around its rim were swinging their pivoted guns toward us
and sending a hail of shells after us while, as all the city's great
searchlights wheeled their beams madly through the air toward us,
the swarming patrols all around us had recovered from their stunned
astonishment and were leaping also toward us!

"One more attack!" over the uproar I was yelling into our
distance-phone as we shot upward through that mad chaos of whirling
beams and ships and shells. "The city's western arsenals this
time--loose the other half of our bombs on them!"

Holding still to our triangular formation in that wild mélange of
sight and sound, our ships levelled out once more, high above the city
again now, and with only a scant dozen having been reached by the hail
of heat-shells that had rushed after us from beneath. Then we were
speeding westward over the tremendous city, high above it, scorning
to stop for the swarms of patrol-cruisers that were dashing toward us.
Those cruisers were rushing with suicidal fury toward us with every
heat-gun detonating, but our own gunners were plying our batteries
even as we dashed forward above the air-city, and on all sides of us
the patrol-craft were flaring and fusing and crashing down toward the
city beneath! Here high over the city, though, the shells of all the
heat-guns that now were booming toward us could not reach us, and
through battling ships and whirling beams and gloom of night we rushed
westward over the giant air-city until in a moment more we were pausing
over the western arsenals, and the western plaza where rested other
massed cruisers of the great European battle-fleet. And then as I gave
another order we were diving once more, down toward those buildings and
cruisers!


                            The Second Blow

This time, though, all the colossal city beneath us was roused and
roaring with fury as we shot downward, and from beneath there slanted
up toward us a terrific hail of shining heat-shells from all the city's
great batteries. Eastward the cruisers that had escaped our bombs there
were rising and forming to attack us, while, even as we shot down, the
cruisers beneath were rising and flinging themselves to one side for
the moment to escape our swooping rush and bombs. But through storming
shells and blinding beams we shot again on our terrific dive, until in
another moment our fleet was levelling again above them and as Macklin
drove our cruiser level before the rest I had pressed the remaining
buttons, had sent our remaining heat-bombs whirling downward with those
of all the ships about me! And then as our ships curved upward again,
our terrific blow struck, the bombs were finding their mark again, were
flaring and fusing with terrific heat and power into another giant mass
of melting metal and awful heat there at the city's western edge.

And now, bombs gone, our cruisers were whirling upward now to escape
from the great city we had struck such two awful blows, to head
westward again over the Atlantic. About us a wild hail of heat-shells
from the guns beneath were rushing upward and dozens of our cruisers
were flaring and falling before we could gain a height again that put
us beyond reach of the batteries beneath. Then we paused a moment,
massing again to head westward, with only a few patrol-cruisers dashing
futilely toward us from about and above us, now. Beneath us the giant
air-city of Berlin lay with two white-hot craters of fusing metal
glowing near its eastern and western edges amid the brilliance of
its myriad lights, the great city hanging still in mid-air with the
great motors in its base untouched by our two awful blows. Through its
streets were rushing panic-mad crowds, and over it were rising the
cruisers of its battle-fleet, striving to form and follow us as the
guns thundered madly toward us and the searchlights wildly stabbed and
circled.

But as we hung there for that moment, massing together again, a wild
triumphant cheer was coming from all in our cruiser and all the
cruisers of our mass. For we had lost but a few dozens of our ships
and had all but destroyed the mighty Berlin arsenals and a thousand of
the European Federation cruisers, had struck a staggering blow at our
enemy. And even as we gathered now we knew that the cruisers rising
from beneath, striving to form their shattered and disorganized and
stunned squadrons, would be too late to pursue us. Westward lights were
gleaming in the upper air, growing larger, and we knew them to be other
patrol-cruisers rushing in answer to the alarm from the city beneath,
knew that even at that moment the great air-forts hanging in a chain
westward would be rushing back to defend Berlin, knew that easily we
could evade them and with their great chain broken could head westward
at full speed over the Atlantic and win back to our own land. We had
succeeded in our daring, insane plan, and our cheers were rolling out
still as we began to move westward above the great, panic-roaring
air-city.

"We did it!" I cried to Macklin as our cruisers leapt forward now. "We
struck a blow this time that they never dreamed we had the power to
strike!"

"And we'll win clear!" Macklin exclaimed, as he sent our cruiser
shooting forward at the head of the others. And Hilliard, bursting
up into the bridge-room from beneath, was crying, "We made it,
Brant--we've destroyed their arsenals and a fourth of their fleet!"

"And now back westward!" I exclaimed as our cruiser shot ahead. "Now
back--_but look there above us_!"

My words had changed suddenly into that wild cry of warning, and as the
others glanced up they saw above that which had brought that cry from
me. Two of the patrol-cruisers of the enemy that were dashing about
us still in futile attack as we started away had drawn back and had
circled upward high above us. And now, without using heat-guns and for
that reason not detected by us until that last moment, they had joined
together and side by side were rushing straight down upon us like a
great single projectile of flying metal! Were rushing straight down
toward our cruiser, that sped in front of all the mass of our cruisers,
identifying it in that way as the ship of our expedition's commander,
and sacrificing themselves to destroy us in a headlong crash in revenge
for our bombing of the city beneath! Even as I had glimpsed them, had
cried out, they were looming just above us, rushing down toward us!

Even as that wild cry had left my lips and as the others had looked up
other cries had come from them, from Macklin and Hilliard. "_Over!_"
I screamed to Macklin as his hands shot to the wheel, and in the next
instant he was whirling the wheel over, to send our cruiser whirling
sidewise to escape that thunderbolt of twin destruction from above.
But in the next moment, before it could answer to the wheel, the
down-thundering ships above had crashed squarely down into our own! We
reeled there with them for a single instant, three twisted wrecks of
metal hanging there in mid-air in that instant, and then theirs and
our own wrecked cruiser were falling, were hurtling crazily downward
through the upper night toward the giant radiant circle of the great
air-city miles below!




                               CHAPTER V


                               Captured

That mad whirl downward of our wrecked cruiser is now to me more of
a memory of some strange and torturing dream than a memory of actual
happenings. Flung sidewise and downward against the bridge-room's
floor as our cruiser whirled over with that mighty crash from above, I
glimpsed Macklin and Hilliard tossed about there with me, rolling over
and over. The black gloom of night about us, the mass of our onrushing
ships above, the colossal brilliant air-city beneath, the two wrecked
cruisers that were tumbling downward with our own--all these things
seemed to whirl about us like some great wheel of swift-succeeding
impressions as we glimpsed them in that mad moment through the
bridge-room's whirling windows.

It seemed but a single brief moment before I glimpsed the great mass
of lights, the soaring towers, of the air-city beneath rushing up
toward us with unearthly speed. Even as I glimpsed it another turn of
the spinning ship had thrown Macklin and Hilliard over again, and this
time I clutched for a hold, found one upon the cruiser's wheel. Then,
with the droning of the still-operating motors and the cries of my two
companions and of the crew beneath loud in my ears, I reached with a
great effort toward the control of the motors, clinging to my hold with
a supreme effort. My fingers found that control, but at the moment
they did so I heard a last hoarse cry from Macklin, glimpsed but yards
beneath us, it seemed, the smooth surface of one of the city's narrow
streets, and then flung over the control, shifting all the power of the
motors from our horizontal tube-propellers to our vertical ones. The
next moment a blaze of light seemed all about us, there was a terrific
crash, and as I was hurled back across the bridge-room by the impact,
my head met the metal wall of it and consciousness left me.

When I came to it was to the realization of someone's hands endeavoring
to revive me. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on a long seat of
metal, with above me the metal ceiling of a white-lit room, and with
Macklin and Hilliard bending anxiously over me. I strove to speak to
them, desisted as my first movement made apparent to me a painful
swelling on the side of my head. And then with their helping arms
behind my back I sat up, looked dazedly about me. Then, the memory of
what had happened rushed suddenly back upon me and I was filled with an
abrupt dismay.

For the white-lit room in which I sat, seeming an ante-room to other
chambers beyond, held beside us three a half-dozen of men in the
green, tight-fitting uniforms of the European Federation's forces,
alike save in colour to our own black uniforms. They were ranged
before us, watching us closely, and there swung at the belt of each a
shining, long-barrelled heat-pistol, one of those hand-weapons that
throw heat-cartridges smaller than the great heat-shells and bombs,
but as destructive and deadly on a smaller scale. These six European
Federation soldiers had their heat-pistols ready beneath their hands,
and were contemplating us intently. And as I saw that, and glimpsed
also through the open door to the right of us a great, smooth-floored
plaza and immense buildings towering up into the outside night,
brilliant with lights, and heard the roar of the crowds that seethed
among those buildings, I remembered all that had befallen us, clutched
Macklin's arm tightly.

"The cruiser fell!" I exclaimed. "I remember the crash, now--then this
is Berlin, Macklin, and we're captured!"

"Captured," Macklin quietly said. "You and Hilliard and I were the
only ones to survive our cruiser's crash, Brant--and we survived only
because we were in the ship's bridge-room, its upmost part, when it
crashed. You had been stunned, and before Hilliard and I could recover
from that crash the European guards had swarmed up over the wreck and
captured us, taking us here to the great central electrostatic tower."

"We three the only survivors?" I repeated. "Then--then all our crew--?"

Macklin did not answer, but as his eyes held mine I read my answer in
them, and as I did so something hard seemed to form in my throat. Our
crew--the hundred cheery lads that had manned my cruiser for long, and
each of whom I had known by name--and all annihilated in that great
crash downward which we three in the bridge-room had alone escaped.
I felt Macklin's understanding grip on my shoulder, and then we were
suddenly recalled to realization of our position as a door in the
ante-room's left side clicked open, another green-uniformed figure
emerging from within. He spoke a brief order to our guards in the
European tongue, that Latin-Teutonic combination of languages which
was universal throughout the European Federation and which I myself
spoke and understood to some extent. Instantly our guards motioned us
to the door from which the other had emerged, and as we passed through
that door before them we found ourselves in a larger and circular room,
white-lit like the first.

It was, I saw instantly, the central control-room of the great
power-tower, of the whole great air-city of Berlin. Like the similar
control-room in the power-tower of New York it held on its walls
panel upon panel of dials and gleaming-knobbed switches, while at the
center of the room were also six great controls that directed the
great air-city's movements through the air in any direction, and the
single power or speed-control. Beside these was another great raised
table-map, this one mounted upon a solid block of metal, with upon it
the red circles of the world's air-cities. And beside that map there
sat now a dozen or more men in the same green uniform as our guards,
though with metal wing-like insignia upon their sleeves. They were,
I knew without asking, the highest Air Chiefs and officers of all
the European Federation, gathered here in the control-room of that
Federation's capital city.


                          The Captors' Threat

For a moment we three faced them in silence, our guards watchful still
behind us, and then the center-most of the seated figures, a swarthy,
black-haired officer with black, probing eyes, whose five metal
wing-insignia marked him as the First Air Chief of the European forces,
spoke to us, in our own tongue.

"You are Captain, First Officer and Second Officer of the American
Federation cruiser which crashed in our streets just as the main body
of your ships escaped," he said, and even at the words my heart raced
with sudden gladness. Our ships had escaped safely back over the
Atlantic, then, as I had known they would! "----and we desire to know,"
the European First Air Chief was continuing, "just what forces remain
to the Americans and which engaged in this attack."

I faced him in utter silence, my own eyes meeting his probing black
ones calmly, and at my silence I saw a contraction of the muscles about
those eyes, a sudden flush beneath his swarthy skin.

"I think it would be best for you to answer," he said quietly, "nor
need you think that silence will help your countrymen in any way. For
though your cruisers struck a great blow at us here in Berlin this
night, though word has reached me that as great a one was struck by
other American ships at Peking, these are but two of the two hundred
great air-cities of our two Federations, but a fraction of our great
forces. And we know that your fleets lost many ships in the battles of
yesterday despite their victories, and desire to know what forces are
left them."

Still in stony silence I stood, my eyes meeting squarely the eyes of
the men before me, while beside me Macklin and Hilliard stood in the
same stiff silence. I saw the European Commander's flush of anger
deepen, saw him half-rise with hand clenched to hurl an order at our
guards, and then he had relaxed back into his seat, was smiling grimly.

"A most unwise course to follow, Captain, you may believe me. I take
it that your officers are as mule-headed? Well, there is no immediate
hurry and a few days of consideration, of meditation, may change your
minds. As a subject for your meditations, you may take my promise
to you that unless you become more communicative at the end of the
fortnight I give you, we shall be forced to use somewhat unpleasant
procedures with you. An earnest consideration of that fact will, I
think, change your viewpoint somewhat."

He turned, snapped an order in his own tongue to the captain of
the guards behind us. "A cell in the one hundredth story for these
three--put them with the other American, and if after a fortnight
they're still stubborn, we'll deal with all four."

Immediately our guards had marched us back to the door through which
we had entered, and across the ante-room beyond through another door
and into a short, broad hall along the sides of which rested the great
tower's lift-cage. We were ordered into one of the cages, our guards
holding their heat-pistols full upon us now, and then as a stud was
pressed and the motors' power was turned through the cage's powerful
vertical tube-propellers, those tube-propellers drove us up with a thin
whistling of air up through the narrow shaft the cages moved in, up
until in a moment more we had stopped and were emerging into a similar
hall on the great tower's hundredth floor. From that hall we moved into
a short corridor that ran the width of the great tower, which at this
height was but a hundred or more feet in diameter, its slender pinnacle
tapering as it rose to its tip, while much of that pinnacle's space was
occupied by the great connections which carried the city's electrical
power down from the mighty tower's tip.

Along that corridor we went, one lined with solid metal doors on either
side, and finally were halted before one of those doors. Then one of
our guards drew from a pocket a small instrument resembling an electric
torch, from which he flashed a tiny beam into a transparent-fronted
little opening in the wall beside the door. At once there came a
clicking of locks, and the door swung open, its locks unbolted by the
beam of light or force, rather, whose vibratory rate was exactly tuned
to affect a delicate receiver tuned to the same frequency, set in the
wall and controlling the lock. These vibration-locks, indeed, had long
ago replaced the old, clumsy keys, and were far safer in that they
responded only to one certain frequency vibration out of the millions
possible, and thus could be opened only by one who knew the correct
frequency. Now, as the door swung open, our guards pointed inside with
their heat-pistols and perforce we stepped within, the door snapping
shut behind us.

We found ourselves in a small, metal-walled cell some ten feet
in length and half that in width, furnished with but a few metal
bunk-racks swung from the walls. At its farther end from us was the
only opening beside the door, a small square window that was quite open
and unbarred, and that looked out over all the colossal mass of the
great air-city of Berlin, a giant field of blazing lights stretching
far around and beneath the great tower in which we were prisoned. Then,
as we gazed about the little cell with our eyes becoming accustomed
to its lack of light, we made out suddenly a figure standing near its
window, a dark, erect figure who seemed watching us for the moment and
who then was striding across the cell toward us.

"Brant!" he exclaimed, as his eyes made out our faces through the dusk.
"Brant--and you were with the ships that attacked the city but now--you
were captured in some way!"

But now my own eyes had penetrated the dusk enough to recognize the
features of the man who was gripping my arms, the keen, daredevil
countenance that I remembered at once.

"Connell!" I cried. "You prisoned here! Then you're the other American
the European First Air Chief ordered us prisoned with. But I had
thought you dead!"

"Dead I might be as well as here," said Connell, suddenly somber. "For
four weeks I have been here, Brant--for weeks before the beginning of
this war. And now that this war has begun I, who alone might save our
American Federation from annihilation in it, am prisoned here with only
death awaiting me, and that in a few days."

I stared at him, astonished. Connell had been one of the cruiser
captains of the American Federation forces for several years, and had
been a friend of my own in those years. A year before he had withdrawn
from active duty, no one knew to where, and finally, but a few weeks
before the breaking forth of this war, our First Air Chief had told
us in answer to our queries that Connell had been sent upon a special
mission, but that since he had not reported for several weeks he had
undoubtedly met death in the course of it. To meet him here, in the
heart of Berlin and prisoned with ourselves, astounded me, and the more
so since from his first words we understood that he had been confined
thus for weeks even before war had burst upon us. But now, motioning
us to seats on the bunk-racks beside us, Connell was questioning us
eagerly as to the course of the combat between the great Federations so
far, and his eyes shone when we described to him that terrific battle
over and in the Atlantic that we had fought but a day before, and that
daring attack on Berlin that he had himself witnessed from his window.

"I saw the European Federation's fleet massing and sailing westward
yesterday," he said, "and knew it was launching its great attack, knew
when it returned disorganized and shattered that the American fleet
had beaten back that attack. But I did not expect this attack you made
on Berlin tonight, and was as astounded as all in the city when you
swooped down with your great bombs. A great blow, Brant--a great and
successful blow against the whole European Federation, yet such a blow
alone cannot halt the menace which it and the Asiatic Federation are
preparing to loose upon our own nation. Such a blow, nor a hundred such
blows, would avail but little in the end against the stupendous plans
and forces that are preparing and massing even now to roll out upon the
American Federation in an avalanche of doom!"


                            A Strange Tale

He paused, and in the dusky cell Macklin and Hilliard and I sat as
silent as himself, gazing toward him in sudden startled surprise. From
far out over the great air-city about us came the droning of rushing
ships and the dim roar of voices from beneath. But Connell was speaking
again--

"You, nor anyone else, knew where I went when I left active service
in our fleet, none but the first Air Chief, who sent me. That was a
year ago, and he told me then that it was evident that the European
and Asiatic Federations were preparing to attack us, and that rumors
had been heard of some mighty new weapon or plan with which, if their
ordinary forces failed, they would completely crush us. Hundreds of
agents, said the First Air Chief, were being sent to the European and
Asiatic air-cities to try to learn the nature of this new weapon, and
I was one of those to be sent to Berlin, as I knew the European tongue
thoroughly. I was to go in disguise, was to endeavor to work myself
into the European Federation fleet, and was then to risk everything in
an effort to find out what this great new plan or weapon was. And so in
disguise, a year ago, I came here.

"Eight months it took me to work my way into the European fleet,
eight months in which I was chiefly occupied in establishing my new
false identity as a European citizen. Then I enlisted in the fleet,
entering the motor-section. Of course, as a cruiser-captain in our own
fleet, all types of motors were perfectly familiar to me, and I had no
difficulty in swiftly rising through various promotions to the status
of under-officer in one of the European cruisers. Then came at last the
opportunity for which I had waited for months, and which I had begun to
despair of ever occurring. I was ordered to report back from my cruiser
to the First Air Chief's headquarters here in Berlin, and when I did
report I was questioned by a board of a half-dozen European officers
on my knowledge of motors and tube-propellers. It must have seemed to
them that I had unusual ability and knowledge for a mere under-officer,
for they informed me that I had proved satisfactory and that I had been
selected to form one of the workers on a great new work that was being
carried out secretly, and ordered me to report to a certain compartment
in the great air-city's base.

"I reported there, eager now as I sensed myself on the trail of that
which I sought, and found that there were whole vast compartments in
the city's great base in which only selected men and certain high
officers of the European fleet were permitted to venture. These were
the compartments in which were placed the giant tube-propellers which
are set horizontally in the great air-city's base, and which when the
power of its great motors is turned into them move the city in any
desired direction. Every air-city in the world has, as you know, these
great tube-propellers that move it about. But as you know too, so
much of the motors' power must be used in the life of the city, that
the horizontal tube-propeller can only move the great cities through
the air at an extremely slow rate of speed. It is a predicament which
cannot be altered, either, by adding more motors, since to add them you
must add to the city's size, and so the problem remains the same.

"But now, as I found when I first entered those compartments, these
European Federation officers and inventors had solved that problem!
They had devised a way that would enable them to send their gigantic
air-cities rushing through the air at almost the speed of a cruiser
itself! They had done this by devising a wholly new form of horizontal
tube-propeller capable of infinitely greater tractive effect on the
air and rotating at a much higher rate of speed. Thus the great air
cities, miles across and with all their towers upon them, could rush
through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, needing only to use their
vertical tubes when they were hovering motionless in mid-air or were
moving very slowly.

"And _this_ was the great weapon, the great plan, of the European and
Asiatic Federations! For I saw at once that it was a great weapon
indeed, a terrific weapon which would enable them to annihilate all
the air-cities and peoples of our own nation. You see what it meant?
It meant that they could gather together all their scores of giant
air-cities, outnumbering our own one hundred cities by two to one,
and could rush over the oceans at awful speed toward our American
air-cities, could fall upon them with all the giant batteries of
heat-guns with which each colossal city is equipped, like our own. And
because our own would not be able to move at that tremendous speed,
because our own air-cities could only move at a comparatively creeping
rate through the air, they would be able to mass their outnumbering
forces around our own cities and blast them from the air, annihilating
them and all the millions of our people inside them, sending them
hurtling to earth in titanic fusing wrecks!

"To rush forth to battle, to the annihilation of our own cities, in
their great air-cities! To send those gigantic cities of the air,
Berlin and Peking and Tokio and all the scores of others of the two
great Federations, thundering through the air to battle, each with
its masses of towers on it. They have made provision for all people
who are not entirely engaged in battle, to descend to the earth and
remain there in specially constructed buildings. This will help also to
reduce the weight of the cities. That was their great plan, their great
weapon, and I knew that with it, even as they said, they could burst
forth and annihilate our own air-cities. But, holding still to my work
there in the lower compartments, I strove to penetrate the heart of the
secret, the design of the great new horizontal tube-propellers which
were to accomplish this, to send the mighty cities rushing through the
air at such immense speed. Each of the great air-cities of the European
and Asiatic Federations, as I learned, was being secretly equipped
with these new tube-propellers, and I knew that if I could learn
their secret, could take that secret back with me, our own American
air-cities could be equipped with the new tubes likewise and could
meet the attacking cities at equal speed, on equal terms, even though
outnumbered.


                           The Great Danger

"So I endeavored in every way to penetrate the secret of the new tubes,
to ascertain their construction, which was jealously guarded by the
European and Asiatic Air Chiefs. And at last, hardly a month ago, I
did that, was able to make my way from my own work to one of the great
tube-propellers which was being installed in another compartment, and
by taking a place among those working on it was able to learn the
details of its construction. That construction was simple enough, I
found, amounting in fact to hardly more than a use of many smaller
tubes within the main tube-propeller, smaller tubes which drew air
from different directions upward and ahead, and thus by their shaping
and construction were able to fling a great air-city supported by them
onward through the air at that tremendous speed. I had learned the
great secret for which hundreds of our agents had sought, and needed
only to escape with that secret.

"I needed only to escape, to race back to my own land, and knew that
it would take our own engineers but a very short time to fit our own
cities with similar speed-tubes, since though the European and Asiatic
forces had been working with them for months that work so far had
been mostly experimentation. But it was then, when I tried to escape,
that my luck came abruptly to an end. For I was captured by the
fleet-officers here in Berlin as I was on the very point of leaving,
captured when the false identity which I had established at such pains
was upset at the last moment through the detection of one of the
documents I had forged. I was captured, and knowing that I had within
my brain that great secret of theirs which would make their air-cities
resistless, they would never, I knew, release me. They took me at once
before their commander, the First Air Chief of the European fleet,
and then by him and by a number of the Asiatic Air Chiefs also I was
questioned exhaustively.

"They wanted most to know what other American agents like myself
were hidden within their air-cities. They knew that those agents or
the greater part of them were known to me, and they knew that if I
described or named them they would be able to catch them all and thus
prevent the possibility of another spy learning their great secret as I
had done. I refused utterly, though, to give them the information they
wished, to reveal to them my fellow-agents in the various cities. At
last they saw, after days of questioning and half-torture, that they
could not as yet wring from me that information, so confined me here
in a cell high in the central tower with the information that only
death awaited me within days unless I acceded to their demands. And,
confined here, I saw from the window that the whole European Federation
fleet had begun to mass here at the air-city of Berlin, quietly and
unobtrusively, and guessed then that they meant to loose their attack
upon the American Federation.

"The great tubes that were to move their cities through the air at such
terrific speed were not yet finished, but they did not wait for these,
launching out their great fleet of cruisers which with the Asiatic
fleet outnumbered the American ships by two to one and should be able
to overwhelm them, they thought. I think that their reason for starting
that attack so soon, before their greater preparations were completely
finished, was that they feared lest another spy like myself might
discover their great secret and escape with it. So they let loose their
fleets upon the American Federation to begin the war and forestall that
contingency by beating down the American forces in a first tremendous
attack. If that first great attack failed, they could swiftly complete
the preparations that would make their air-cities of such immense speed
and power, and then could launch all those air-cities upon the American
ones in a second attack that nothing could resist.

"And even now, despite that daring and deadly attack which your ships
made here upon Berlin tonight, and upon Peking, as you say, the great
preparations of the European and Asiatic Federations are going swiftly
on, and soon now those preparations will be completed and their great
air-cities will be able to whirl through the air at that tremendous
speed. And then will come the end, for our American Federation. The
two hundred air-cities of the European and Asiatic Federations will
flash upon our own nation from east and west, with all their millions
of people and giant batteries of heat-guns, and will send our own
slow-moving air-cities crashing to earth, will send all the scores of
cities and all the millions of people of the American Federation into
destruction and death!"

"Destruction and death!" Connell's voice seemed echoing still about
us there in the silence when he had ceased, seemed beating like great
drum-notes of doom in our ears. Macklin--Hilliard--they sat beside
me in the dark cell as silent as myself. And in that moment we heard
again, from outside and far beneath, the great throbbing roar of
the life of all the mighty air-city about us, the humming rush of
cruisers to and fro above it and the dull mingled voices of its great
crowds, coming dimly up to our silent little cell high in the mighty
electrostatic tower. Then suddenly I had risen to my feet.

"Destruction and death--but there must be some way in which we can
prevent it!" I cried.

"What way is there?" Connell's tone was low, hopeless. "We only know
what looms above our nation, know that these preparations are coming to
their end, that these air-cities plan to rush upon our own. We cannot
halt the preparations that are going on in every air-city of the two
great enemy Federations."

"But if we could warn our own!" I said. "If we could get what you have
learned back to the American Federation--could install in all our own
air-cities similar new tube-propellers--then our cities could at least
meet the attack of the enemy cities with equal speed and power."

"But how to get back?" asked Connell. "How to escape from here? It
could be done, if we could escape, for the new tube-propellers could be
put in our own air-cities swiftly enough, yet to escape is impossible.
I have been here days, weeks, Brant, with the one thought of escape
uppermost, but the thing is hopeless."

       *       *       *       *       *

I strode to the square little window, looked forth from it. It was
quite open and unbarred, and large enough too to allow one to pass
through it, yet as I projected my head from it and gazed up and
downward in the darkness I saw that there was no need of bars across
it. For the little window was set directly in the sheer, towering side
of the mighty power-tower's pinnacle. Far up above our level soared
that tremendous tapering tower, so far that the tip seemed among the
stars above, while far below, a thousand feet at least, lay the smooth
metal of the great plaza. And though there were other windows below and
above us, each was separated a full ten feet or more from the other,
and, as we knew, to merely escape from our cell into another level of
the great tower would avail us nothing, since to gain the plaza outside
we would need to pass through the tower's lower levels thronged always
with armed guards. It seemed, indeed, that as Connell had said there
was no hope of escape for us, the door being solid, thick metal, and
as I turned back toward the other three something of Connell's own
hopelessness had taken root within my heart.

And that hopelessness grew within me in the hours that followed. For
when day came and illumined with brilliant light all the giant air-city
that stretched far around us it seemed only to emphasize the utter
helplessness of our position. Far beneath on the great plaza lay many
cruisers, and could we win to one of them we might well make a break
at top speed across the Atlantic, since so simple in design and so
unvarying in their exhaustless power-supply are modern air-cruisers
that one man alone at their bridge-room controls could operate
them. Yet to win down to those cruisers, down to the great plaza's
surface--that seemed impossible. And so as that day waned, and night
swept over the great floating mass of the towers of Berlin, to be
followed by day again, my despair was waxing ever stronger, deeper.

For during those days we could see plainly from our window the great
preparations going on still in the air-city about us. Already throngs
of workers had cleared away the twisted and fused wreckage that had
been made by the attack of our ships, and new masses of supplies were
pouring into Berlin in shipload after shipload from all the air-cities
of the European Federation, to replace those we had destroyed in
their great arsenals. The air seemed filled, indeed, with great
freight-carriers and official cruisers arriving and departing. And
beneath all this great surface activity and preparation, we knew, down
in the great tube-propeller compartments of the air-city's mighty base,
other and greater preparations were going on, other and different
tube-propellers were replacing the city's tubes, and swiftly the time
was approaching when all the city would be able to rush meteor-like
through the air.

It was that knowledge that made our despair most deep. For though there
was now a lull, apparently, in the great war's course, the European and
Asiatic forces preparing for their final giant blow, and the Americans
gathering their own forces apprehensively to resist the next attack,
we knew that it was but the lull before the final terrible storm that
was to settle the fate of earth's three mighty nations. And we knew,
too, that it was the fate of our own American Federation that would be
sealed in that gigantic attack, unless Connell could make his way soon
to our land with his great secret. And that he could not do so, that he
could not even escape from the little cell in which we were prisoned,
was all so clear to us that almost I wished that death had come to me
in the cruiser's crash to spare me the torture of mind that I and all
of us were now undergoing.

It was a torture accentuated, I think, by the complete emptiness and
eventlessness of those hours and days. Save for what we could see from
our high window upon the city around us, we were as cut off from the
world as though upon the moon. Twice each day, at dawn and at dusk, our
door was opened by the guards that brought our food, that food being as
in our own air-cities the paste-like synthetic compounds of artificial
proteins and fats and carbohydrates which had decades before replaced
the old natural foods. But though our door was thus flung open twice
each day, there was no hope of escape for us in that fact. For the two
guards who brought our food in to us carried their heat-pistols always
in one hand, and always, night and day, there watched in the corridor
outside a full score of similarly armed guards by whom one could not
hope to pass living toward the cage-lifts. It seemed indeed, as Connell
had said, that weeks of frenzied meditation could never disclose any
plausible plan of escape, and so I lapsed with him into a state of
half-lassitude that had been induced by our utter despair.

And so days passed. Not even the prospect of our own deaths which I
knew to be looming before us, was sufficient to rouse me from that
lassitude, not even the fact that at the end of that fortnight, as I
had guessed, the great attack of the air-cities was to be launched
upon the American Federation, and that it was for that reason that our
captors had given us that time.

Connell, Macklin, myself--we three had faced in our time perils and
risks enough, but so overwhelming was the doom that hung over us and
over our nation now that it stunned us, held us in stupefied despair.
But one of us there was that was not so stunned, and that was Hilliard,
my young second officer. His eager, restive nature, chafing at our
imprisonment and at the thing that was looming for our land, resisted
stubbornly the deep hopelessness that had settled upon the rest of
us, and hour after hour he spent in pacing about the little cell, or
in striving to devise some means for escaping from it. And at last,
upon the fourth day of our imprisonment there in the tower, he turned
suddenly toward us with an eager cry upon his lips.




                              CHAPTER VI


                           A Daring Venture

"I have it!" he exclaimed. "A way that two of us can win free with--and
maybe all! A chance out of millions, with death at the end of it,
maybe, but a chance to get Connell and his secret back!"

"But how?" I questioned. "How can two of us, even, get clear of this
cell?"

"The guards!" he exclaimed excitedly. "The two guards that bring our
food each dawn and dusk--if we can overpower them--"

"It's useless, Hilliard," I said. "Even if we did overpower them we
could not pass the score of other guards in the corridor outside, or
the scores of others on its lower floors."

"But listen," he appealed, and then, as he went on to detail to us the
plan that he had devised, I felt some slight measure of hope rising
within me, saw that dawning hope reflected in the faces of Connell and
Macklin.

"It _is_ a chance!" he exclaimed. "And if we can do it, if I can
get back to our own land, it means a chance still for the American
Federation! For the European and Asiatic Federations won't be starting
their attack for another ten days or more, their preparations not
finished till then, and in that time by bending every effort toward it
our own engineers could put the new tube-propellers in all our American
air-cities! Could make those cities able to meet the enemy cities,
attack when it comes!"

So, with that foremost in mind, we swiftly decided that upon that very
evening, when our guards brought our food at dusk, we would put the
plan into operation, would stake everything upon it. For even if but
two of us could escape by it, if Connell could be one of those two,
and could get back across the Atlantic with his tremendous secret, it
meant a fighting-chance for our Federation. And with that in mind the
rest of us were willing to take all chances, to dare all risks. Risky
enough the thing would be, we knew, all depending upon what occurred in
one moment of rushing action, and numberless were the features of it
that might go entirely wrong and ruin us. But we steeled ourselves with
the thought of what would become of our Federation if we failed. And so
ready and tense with resolution we waited for the coming of dusk.

To me, through the remaining hours of that day, it seemed that never
had the sun sunk westward so slowly. From our window we could see all
the activities that went on in the great air-city about us, could see
far across all this great mass of towers and streets and thronging
crowds which hung here miles in the air above the earth, and could see
those activities lessening somewhat as the long shadows of sunset fell
across narrow streets and smooth plazas. In the great plaza beneath,
at the foot of that electrostatic tower in which we were imprisoned,
there rested always a number of great cruisers of the European fleet,
reporting to the First Air Chief there in the tower's base, and now
with the approach of night other cruisers from the swarming masses
above the city were slanting down to rest upon the plaza. And these
cruisers we watched with intent gaze as the sunset's light declined.

Outside in the corridor we could hear the occasional movement of feet
as the score of guards there moved about now and then, but heard not
the approaching feet of the two that brought our food. What if they
were not to come upon this evening? Or what if more than two, or less
than two, were to come? Either contingency would be equally ruinous to
our plan, and with the passing of each moment we sat in an increasing
agony of expectation, Connell's eyes burning, Macklin as imperturbable
as ever, Hilliard eager and tense. Then at last, when the shadows
of dusk were falling across the great city of the air outside, were
deepening in our little cell, we heard voices outside, the greetings
of our guards in the corridor, and then a moment later the solid metal
door of our cell had clicked open. Then into the cell stepped our two
usual guards with our food, their heat-pistols ready as always in their
right hands.

The eyes of one warily upon us, the other took both of the metal
containers of synthetic food and reached to place them, as usual,
upon the lower bunk-rack, at the room's right hand side. Macklin was
lying upon that bunk-rack having stretched himself out as though
sleeping. The rest of us were lounging at the cell's other side, the
second guard's heat-pistol watchfully upon us while the first reached
toward the bunk-rack to place the metal food-containers beside the
supposedly-sleeping Macklin's head. But as he placed them there, as he
began to turn away from it, Macklin's hands shot suddenly behind his
head as he lay there and grasped the arm of the first guard in a single
movement, jerking him toward the bunk-rack! Like lightning the second
guard turned with his pistol toward that sudden movement and as he did
so, forgetful for the instant of the rest of us, we three had leaped
upon him! And then as Hilliard and I bore the second guard to the
floor, wrenching the pistol from him, Macklin and Connell had jammed
the first one against the cell's corner, with hand upon his mouth, and
had him equally powerless!

The whole swift scene of action had taken but a flashing moment to
carry out, and so lightning-like had been our movements, so careful
above all had we been to gag with our hands the two guards as we
grasped them, that no single sound save for a few low-choking gasps had
come from them. And then, while with hands over their mouths and with
all the strength of our muscles Hilliard and I held the two guards,
Macklin and Connell were swiftly stripping their tight-jacketed green
uniforms from them.

A moment more, and Connell and Macklin were swiftly doffing their own
black uniforms of the American Federation and donning the green ones.
Now came a restless movement of feet in the corridor without, and with
the speed of utter necessity we took the two discarded black uniforms
and forced them upon the two guards, holding them still voiceless and
powerless. Then, that done, the two guards were as like in their black
uniforms as Hilliard and myself; with Connell and Macklin, the latter
having been chosen because of the similarity of his appearance to one
of the guards, wearing now the guards' green uniforms. And now the very
climax of our endeavor was come, that moment upon which depended all,
for now, suddenly removing our hands from the lips of the two guards we
held, we added our own sudden cries to theirs, and at the same moment
Connell and Macklin, in their green uniforms, were engaging in a mock
struggle with us and with our guards, whose din seemed terrific there
in the quiet upper levels of the great tower!

Instantly as those cries arose there was a rush of feet outside and the
score of guards there poured down the corridor and through the cell's
door, to see four of us in black uniforms struggling apparently with
two green-uniformed guards, who were in reality Connell and Macklin.
It was the moment upon which all rested, and in that moment the score
of guards acted as Hilliard had foreseen, gazing not in that wild
moment of frenzied action at faces but at uniforms, seeing only in that
first moment in the dusky cell four black-garbed men struggling with
two green-garbed ones they had seen enter it but moments before. And,
seeing this, they rushed upon us four black-uniformed ones, Hilliard
and myself and the guards whom in the guise of aiding in the struggle
we had held, and began to beat us back against the cell's end, totally
forgetting in that moment the two green-uniformed men they were
succoring! And in that moment, as they pressed us back, Connell and
Macklin were stealing swiftly out of the cell, and down the corridor
toward the hall of the cage-lifts!

For but a moment more did we struggle with our outnumbering opponents
there, and then as they gripped and held the four of us helpless and
jerked our heads up wild cries came from them as they saw the faces of
us, saw that two of us were their own guards! Then the next moment,
needing no other explanation of what had happened, they turned with
their own black-garbed fellows, rushed out of the cell, slamming shut
its door behind them, down the corridor and toward the cage-lifts
after Connell and Macklin! We heard those cries re-echoed swiftly over
all the mighty building, heard rushing feet and repeated calls on the
levels of the great tower above and beneath us. And then, as we flung
ourselves to our window, gazed downward, we saw in the next moment two
green-garbed tiny figures issuing from the giant electrostatic tower's
base far beneath us, running across the great plaza toward the nearest
of the cruisers. They were Connell and Macklin!

I cried out with Hilliard hoarse words of encouragement, forgetful
that none could hear from our terrific height, saw Connell and Macklin
rushing up the slender gangplank in the cruiser's side and through
its open door, saw that door slam shut behind them, just as from the
base of the tower there poured out after them a flood of pursuing
green-garbed figures. Those pursuers were raising their heat-pistols,
and a hail of shining heat-cartridges were flying through the air
toward the cruiser in the next moment, but as they shot toward it
there came faintly up to us the droning of the ship's great motors
and then with all the power of those motors in its vertical lifting
tube-propellers it was rising upward, was lifting smoothly and swiftly
upward toward us! And at the same moment the green-uniformed crowd of
guards beneath were rushing across the plaza toward the other resting
cruisers, were rushing within them to soar up after Connell and Macklin!

Up toward us shot the lifting cruiser of our two friends, though, up
toward our little window, for such had been our plan by which two,
escaping, might rescue the remaining two. But as it shot upward I
looked down, saw beneath the scores of cruisers on the plaza rising
now after it, heard through all the great tower and for far around it
a great roar of rising shouts as the escape was discovered, saw the
giant gleaming muzzles of the great batteries of heat-guns around the
plaza turning swiftly upward on their pivots toward the rising cruiser
of Connell and Macklin! And so the next moment as that cruiser shot
up toward us, as I made out Macklin plain in its transparent-windowed
bridge-room, driving it up toward us, I flung an arm outward from the
tower to him, shouting in frenzied appeal.

"Back, Macklin!" I cried, with Hilliard crying too beside me. "No time
to get us--_back home with Connell, for God's sake_!"

He saw my frenzied gesture westward, caught the meaning of my wild
warning shout as the guns beneath swung toward him and the cruisers
below rushed up, and I saw him hang there for a fraction of a moment
irresolute, hesitating. Then the next moment, just as there came a
swift-spreading thunder of detonations from the great heat-guns around
the plaza he had whirled the wheel over and sent the great cruiser
rushing away from the tower, sent it rushing westward through the dusk
above the great air-city's gathered lights. In the next instant there
shot through the air where it had been the shining heat-shells from
beneath! And then as Macklin's cruiser rushed comet-like onward through
the dusk the great heat-guns beneath were turning again toward it.

I cried out hoarsely as they thundered again, but with a whirl sidewise
Macklin and Connell had evaded the rushing shells and were hurtling
on. Now over all the great air-city, over all the mighty mass of
Berlin was spreading a roar of alarm, and now the cruisers that had
rushed up in pursuit were rocketing westward after that single fleeing
one, the batteries beneath us holding their fire lest they strike
their own pursuing ships. With our hearts pounding Hilliard and I saw
that single little cruiser leap on, saw it shooting through the dusk
until its gleaming shape was now far away from the great air-city,
racing westward! Swiftly, though, the numberless pursuing cruisers
were converging upon it, and then, as we strained our eyes to see the
flying gleaming craft, there came a greater thundering of guns as all
the suddenly-alarmed batteries at the air-city's westward edge loosed
their shells upon the fleeing cruiser! That cruiser seemed to halt for
a moment unaccountably, there was a great blinding flare that could be
made only by heat-shells striking, and then the cruiser, the cruiser
that held Macklin and Connell and all the American Federation's fate,
was reeling blindly downward and out of sight, whirling lifelessly
downward toward the earth far below!




                              CHAPTER VII


                       The Great Movement Starts

Stunned and stupefied, Hilliard and I gazed out in that moment from our
window, out through the dusk above the air-city to where the cruiser
of our two friends had plunged to death. I think now that for those
first few moments neither of us was able completely to comprehend what
had happened, to comprehend what malign fate it was that had sent our
friends down to death there as they seemed making their escape. Staring
forth blankly, we saw the cruisers that had been pursuing them, that
had been overtaking them, turning back now toward the air-city, heard a
cheer rolling across that city as the crowds in its streets witnessed
the destruction of the fleeing craft, the flare of the shells that had
destroyed it. That great roaring cheer from beneath penetrated at last
into my brain with realization of what had happened.

"Macklin--Connell--" I whispered. "Macklin and Connell--gone--and the
last chance to warn our Federation gone--"

Hilliard's eyes were bright with unshed tears. "Our last chance," he
said.

Looking back, I think now that it was not the passing of our one chance
for freedom, nor the passing even of our one chance to carry Connell's
great secret homeward, that weighed upon us most in the following time.
It was the swift passing of our two friends, of Macklin especially, who
for long had formed with Hilliard and myself the trio that commanded
my cruiser, that stabbed us most in those first following hours and
days. Prisoned there as before, but two of us now where there had been
four, we waited now in a certain heedlessness for the doom that we
knew awaited us and our Federation. The wild break for freedom that
two of us had made and that had ended in those two's destruction, had
apparently not changed the plans of the European First Air Chief in
regard to us, and we knew that at the end of the designated fortnight,
less than ten days hence now, we must either reveal all our knowledge
of the American forces, which we could not do, or suffer death.

We knew, too, that even as Connell had guessed, it was at the end
of that fortnight, ten days hence, that the European and Asiatic
Federations planned to launch their final gigantic attack of
air-cities, since it was evident that they wished to gain their
information from us only to use it immediately in their attack. For now
below, in the city's base-compartments, the great new tube-propellers
that were to whirl it through the air at such terrific speed were
being completed, we knew, as in all the two hundred air-cities of the
European and Asiatic Federations. The long months of experimentation
over, it needed but weeks or days to rush those new tube-propellers
into place. And had Connell escaped with his secret it might well have
been, I thought, that even in the ten days left the new-type tubes
could have been swiftly manufactured by thousands and placed in all our
own American air-cities.

If Connell had escaped! But Connell had not escaped, Connell had
plunged to death with Macklin, amid the flaring heat-shells. Prisoned
there in our little cell, Hilliard and I despite that ever-approaching
doom almost paid no attention whatever to all outside and about us,
brooding there in silence hour upon hour as night followed day and day
night. We had not, even, the slightest further thoughts of escape,
although such thoughts would have been hopeless, for now our door
was never opened save by the full score of armed guards outside. So,
losing all thought and all hope of freedom, we sat on in our little
prison high in the mighty tower, dead to all the unceasing rush of
preparations and gathering of cruisers in the city about us.

But at last, upon the eighth day after the break of Connell and
Macklin, and the second day before our approaching doom, there came
an event which roused us suddenly from that renewed apathy into which
we had fallen. For days we had noticed that the crowds in the streets
were proving fewer and fewer, the only people now remaining being
groups of green-uniformed officials unceasingly moving in and out of
the headquarters there. There was finally made clear to us the reason
of their activities. For, as we gazed forth from our window on the
afternoon of that day, we seemed to sense a certain air of anticipation
in the people that remained. They swarmed forth into the great
air-city's streets; we heard in a moment more a strange great hissing
from far below us, all around the city's base and edge; and then were
aware that with that hissing sound and with a great tremor of power
that beat through all its colossal metal mass, the great air-city was
moving! Was moving not slowly and majestically as air-cities commonly
move, but was leaping forward through the air with sudden tremendous
speed. We knew now that most of the city's population had been removed
to the ground and the movement toward the west had started.

Now came excited roars from the crowds beneath, as the giant mass that
was Berlin leapt forward, and now as Hilliard and I leaned from our
window with an excitement almost as great we caught our breaths. For we
could see now, from the cloud-masses that lay beneath in the distance,
that the great air-city was cleaving the air at a speed that was
rapidly mounting to over a hundred miles an hour. Terrific winds were
whirling all about our power-tower, as it shot through the atmosphere,
and those same winds sweeping with titanic force through the city's
streets and about its towers forced the crowds in those streets swiftly
within the shelter of the structures. And still at ever-mounting speed,
the hissing of power and the tremendous roar of winds increasing
still, the mighty air-city was whirling on, its soaring towers of
metal swaying back beneath the awful winds of their progress, whipping
through high cloud-banks and out into clear air again, giving us
flashing glimpses from our own wind-swept window of the ground far
outward and beneath flashing back at immense speed as we shot onward,
as all the colossal city sped on, at a velocity that I knew by then
must be over a hundred and fifty miles an hour!

A colossal city, speeding through earth's atmosphere! Awed, despite
ourselves, Hilliard and I clung at our window there as with all else in
the city we sped on. A colossal city five full miles in its diameter,
with all its works and streets and giant batteries of heat-guns, and
rushing above earth at a velocity seeming almost unattainable! And even
as we watched, we felt the great city slanting upward with the same
terrific speed, climbing swiftly upward until the air about us was all
but freezing and then diving down toward earth once more on a long,
gliding swoop! Then it had turned in mid-air, was flashing back over
its course, was going through maneuver after maneuver until at last the
great hissing from its base ceased, and it hung at its former height
above the earth once more, the crowds in its towers surging forth now
to renew their excited shouts.


                           Last Preparations

Hilliard and I gazed for a long moment at each other. "The
tube-propellers they were putting in--finished--," he said slowly, "And
Berlin ready now for the great attack--"

"And all the other European Federation cities," I said, "and all those
of the Asiatic Federation--all must be nearly completed now, their new
tube-propellers installed also. And in two more days----"

In two more days! It was the thought that beat hammer-like in my brain
and in Hilliard's in those hours that followed, those hours that were
now closing down, one by one, upon the doom of ourselves and of all our
nation. Two more days! Two more days at the end of which would have
ended the fortnight of our imprisonment, when would come for us the
death that had loomed larger and larger during each of those passing
days. Two more days at the end of which the great air-cities of the
European and Asiatic Federations would rush like whirlwinds over the
oceans toward our own slow-moving and helpless cities, to beat them
down with all the thunder of their giant batteries. Two more days!--and
at the end of them for us and for all the great air-cities and all the
millions of the American Federation, doom!

It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that in the following hours,
Hilliard and I felt close about us the intense despair that ever
since the ill-fated attempt of Connell and Macklin had surrounded us.
Through all that night following the first demonstration of the immense
speed of the air-city, we sat awake, listening to the great shouts of
triumph and exultation that came dimly up to us from the crowds that
remained in the streets far beneath. The European Federation, we knew,
already felt the glow of imminent victory that this new speed of their
great air-cities would give them, and were exultant at the chance to
annihilate completely the hated American Federation. And, to accomplish
that, the very last great preparations were going on now in every part
of the air-city.

Great loads of shining heat-shells were being transferred from the
stores that had been brought to Berlin, to the giant batteries of
heat-guns around the city's edge and its central plaza around the
electrostatic tower. The cruisers of the European battle-fleet, still
some two thousand in number, were resting on all the landing plazas,
and were being cared for and inspected by hordes of green-uniformed
attendants. All other air-craft were lowered into the great city's
base-hangars to be out of the way during the oncoming combat. By a
stroke of genius on the part of Berlin's commander, the power of the
great air-forts had been added to that of the city itself, by simply
placing the air-forts here and there on unused landing plazas, where
they formed in effect great armored gun-turrets on the city's surface.
And, finally, the mighty city's speed and power to maneuver had been
tested rigorously. With all its peoples inside its metal towers, it
was shot at terrific speed low and high above the earth; turning and
dipping and rising at that awful velocity like a flashing airplane
rather than a gigantic city of the magnitude it really had.

Through all the hours of that night, and the next day (the thirteenth
of our imprisonment) those great preparations, that unceasing rush
of excited activity, continued. Night came, and still the last
preparations were to be made; magazines were being filled, and
green-uniformed figures were swarming in countless numbers in the
streets; going about their maneuvers; battle-cruisers were moving
ceaselessly across the sky. During the hours of that night, as Hilliard
and I sat silent there, high above all the tremendous turmoil of the
streets and plazas below, we sometimes raised our eyes to watch also
the calm, slow march of the great constellations across the sky above;
glittering groups of stars that seemed to look down with cool and
contemptuous eyes upon all this mad flurry of human excitement and
human endeavor. Dozing a little now and then, we sat there until at
last dawn sent its rosy light across the world. It was the last dawn, I
knew, that Hilliard or I would look upon.

Now, it seemed, all the preparations in the giant air-city about us
were completed. The crowds that had moved in its streets during the
day and night before remained, but silent now with the thrill of
approaching combat. Tense and silent the city remained, as the sun
crept up toward the zenith through the morning hours of that fateful
day. And, high in our tower-cell, Hilliard and I found ourselves
gripped by the same tense feeling of anticipation. From our window as
we watched the city, we made out the west, a dark spot rushing through
the air toward Berlin, a spot that was growing steadily larger in size,
that was broadening out into a large dark disk; and then as it came
swiftly closer we saw with astonishment that it was a city, a giant
air-city almost as large as Berlin itself!


                      The Gathering of the Cities

We heard a stir of excitement in the streets below as that mighty
air-city came closer to us; then saw it slowing down until at last it
had come smoothly to rest out to the south of Berlin, hanging there
in mid-air a half-dozen miles away. It was London! Even as I had
recognized it, Hilliard had done so also. London! The great air-city
that held all southern England for the European Federation, could be
clearly recognized, not only by its size but by the somewhat different
architectural design of its metal towers and plazas. We could make
out clearly now the surface of the other city, its huge batteries of
heat-guns, and its great towers surmounted by a central pinnacle. And
now, as we scanned the horizon away to the north, we could see another
dark disk, another mighty air-city, rushing swiftly toward us!

"They're gathering!" Hilliard's voice was agonized. "Gathering--all the
air-cities of the European Federation! It's the beginning of the end."

"Gathering for their great attack," I said.

"God, if Connell and Macklin could have escaped!" Hilliard's cry burst
from his tortured soul. "If our own air-cities had only the speed and
the power to resist this attack!"

"Steady, Hilliard," I told him, my hand on his shoulder. "It's the end,
I think--the end for our Federation as well as ourselves--but we must
face it."

Now the air-city from the north was rushing closer, was hanging
northward of Berlin, and we saw that it was Stockholm. And, even as it
came to rest out there beside us, two other air-cities were rushing
up from the south; looming larger swiftly and identifying themselves,
when they too shot up to hang near our central city, as Geneva and
Rome. And then from the west were coming others, Paris and Brussels
and Amsterdam; while down from the cold east were speeding Moscow
and Helsingfors and Leningrad. City after city was rushing from all
quarters of the compass, from every part of the European Federation,
until they filled the sky. Through the hours of that afternoon we
watched their numbers grow until they numbered over a hundred. They had
come from every part of the earth, over which the European Federation
held sway. From the bleak eastern steppes, from the jagged peaks and
green valleys of the Pyrenees, from the great ice-locked fiords of the
north and from the blue plains of southern Africa, they were rushing
at colossal speed to gather here in a great circle about their capital
city--Berlin! Great air-cities, each of which flashed through the
air at the same tremendous speed, each of which bore upon it great
batteries of those giant heat-guns that nothing else in the air could
sustain, each of which held upon it a soaring electrostatic tower and
thousands of other clustered pinnacles. As in Berlin, the crowding,
seething millions of its peoples had been left on the ground quarters
prepared for them. The gathering of the cities! At last, with the
coming of sunset, all but the last few of the Federation's mighty
air-cities had gathered around Berlin!

By then, gazing out from our window high in the electrostatic tower,
Hilliard and I seemed to be looking across a single gigantic city
that stretched in mid-air as far as the eye could reach, so closely
were the scores of great hovering air-cities hanging together! It was
as though we were looking forth across an endless plain of clustered
towers of metal, from which rose here and there the higher pinnacle of
a city's power-source; a titanic plain of towers and streets of metal,
crowded with millions of the European Federation's soldiery. And, as
the blood-red sunset flamed eastward upon all this huge assemblage, now
waiting only for the last of their number, something seemed to snap in
my brain, and all the stoicism which I had summoned to meet our fate
and our nation's fate abruptly vanished.

"We _can't_ stay here while doom rushes upon our nation!" I cried
madly. "Since they start out tonight--since our time is up and we die
ourselves tonight--we'll go to death fighting for our freedom!"

But, now, it was Hilliard who endeavored to calm me. "It's useless,
Brant," he said. "A few hours more; then all will be rushing west while
the Asiatic Federation is moving east upon our air-cities. And at any
moment now, before that attack starts, they will be coming here for us."

"But they'll not take us to a death like that!" I exclaimed, a cold,
long-repressed fury surging up within me. "If we're to die we'll do it,
striking a blow at our enemies!"

Like a caged tiger I paced the little cell's interior, growing shadowy
and dusky now; the sun had disappeared. From the corridor outside came
the voices of the guards, and at any moment I expected the door to
swing open and admit those who would take us to a last examination at
which our silence would bring immediate death. Already, far out over
the great mass of scores upon scores of giant air-cities that filled
the air about us, a great, complicated pattern of brilliant lights
was gleaming through the deepened twilight; and now, from south and
east and west, the last of the great European Federation's air-cities
were assembling about that tremendous gathered mass of cities. Then,
as I turned from the metal door which I had been examining in blind
and futile rage, my eyes fell upon our bunk-racks and the strong but
slender strips of metal that held them out from the metal wall, against
which they were set diagonally. And, as I looked at them an idea, a
last flame of hope, burned into my brain, and I turned swiftly to
Hilliard.

"Those strips of metal!" I exclaimed, pointing toward them. "Those
bunk-supports--it's a chance to escape! A chance that means death,
Hilliard, I think--but death is upon us now in any case--"

Swiftly, almost incoherently, I explained to him the idea that had
suggested itself to me. I heard his breath catch as he comprehended
its appalling nature. Then I saw his eyes gleam as he realized that,
inasmuch as almost certain death awaited us, death in escaping could
not deter us, for we were already doomed. So, we grasped one of the
metal strips and tried with all our force to tear its lower end loose
from the metal wall. That lower end, set directly in the wall, seemed
integral with its metal; and, as we pulled upon the metal strip,
gasping with our great effort, muscles tired, we still kept on. We
had to work quietly lest some sound betray us to the guards without.
It seemed that we could never tear it loose. Straightening from the
violent exertion, with dizzy heads, muscles aching, we paused for a
moment, then reached to grasp the strip again, braced ourselves against
the wall and exerted all our force upon it. It held for a terrible
moment, then seemed to give, to bend--and then, with a little grating
sound, we had pulled the strip loose from the wall into which it had
been set.




                             CHAPTER VIII


                            A Single Chance

Intently for a moment we listened without moving; but there came no
sound of alarm from without, nothing but the occasional voices of the
guards. And now we grasped another of the metal bunk-supports, and
wrenched its metal strip loose from the wall with another tremendous
effort. We had in our hands two metal strips, each of some three feet
in length. These we now bent swiftly into two L's or right angles of
equal sides, using all our combined strength on each to bend the strong
metal. Then, swiftly loosening the long, strong leather belts that
criss-crossed over our black air-jackets, we formed of them swiftly two
leather ropes ten feet in length. Each of these we attached to one of
our metal L's, making each fast to one of the jagged, broken ends of
one of the bent strips. Then, panting from our swift efforts, we stood
erect, and moved toward our little window.

Night lay over the world now, and from our window we saw the cities
illumined by their lights stretching out to the horizon. On the landing
plazas of the air-city beneath us rested the great European Federation
battle-fleet. In the plaza directly beneath us, that which surrounded
the base of our great electrostatic tower, there rested but a few score
of cruisers, those of the commanders who were now at the headquarters
inside the great tower's base. The plaza was practically deserted; for
it was the evening meal. For a moment I stood there at the window,
gazing out over that tremendous mass of giant air-cities. Then,
summoning all my courage, I flung my right leg over the window's base,
through its opening.

Sitting astride that opening, while Hilliard watched anxiously behind
me, I placed the metal angle I carried upon the flat metal sill of the
window, one end of its angle catching on the sill while the other end,
to which my leather rope was fastened, pointed straight downward toward
the great plaza a thousand feet beneath. Then, holding to that leather
rope, I slid out of the window's opening; and hung by my hands from the
slender rope with only empty air between me and the plaza far below.
Tensely I swung there in that moment, but the metal angle caught in the
sill held my weight. And so, sliding down the leather rope fastened to
it, I felt my feet strike in a moment against the sill of the window
below. Another moment and I stood upon that sill, crouching within that
window's opening.

The window in which I crouched opened into one of the great upper
corridors of the electrostatic tower; but I knew that to venture back
into the building, swarming now with guards, was to meet death, nor
did I plan to do so. Giving my leather rope a twitch, I worked loose
the angle resting on the sill above; and, when that dropped toward
me, I placed it on the sill on which I stood, and the next moment was
sliding down to the window below. And now above me Hilliard, using his
own metal angle and leather rope in the same way, was following me, was
sliding from window to window after me, down the smooth side of the
mighty pinnacle to the street far below. Down--down--like two strange
insects we crept downward from window to window. None in the streets
below glimpsed the two tiny shapes crawling down the mighty tower's
side; for the darkness had deepened now, and in the plaza directly
beneath us there were none of the crowds that swirled elsewhere.

Our greatest danger, indeed, was that we would be seen by someone
inside the tower as we swung down from window to window; and twice
I was forced to hang for a few seconds from my leather rope above a
window inside which I could hear voices. Yet still down and down we
swung, praying that the regular line of windows in the static-tower's
side, extended unbroken clear to its base; for otherwise we were lost.
Down and down we went, moving more hastily now despite the awful
hazards of our progress; so hastily that once Hilliard's hook or angle
slipped halfway out from the sill upon which it hung, and all but
precipitated him down to death before he could slide into the window
beneath him.

But now we were within the last dozen levels of the plaza's surface,
and were down with all the eagerness of renewed hope. For in the plaza
there beneath us there lay still the unguarded cruisers, their officers
and crews gathered in the great tower down which we were creeping.
Another level--another--and down we swung through the dusk, in such
a descent as surely man never had made before. The plaza was close
beneath, the window of our cell now far above. From far around that
plaza, from Berlin and from all the air-cities about, we heard the
great hum of final preparations being made. I knew they were ready now
to sally forth upon their gigantic attack. But we were within the last
few levels of the plaza, now, swinging down with mad haste from window
to window toward its smooth surface. And then it was, when we were
within a few yards of that surface, that I heard a dim cry from far
above.

"Down now with all your strength, Hilliard!" I cried to my friend above
me. "They've come to our cell after us--are giving the alarm!"

"The nearest cruiser there below!" he exclaimed thickly as he swung
madly down after me. "We'll make it yet!"

But now the cry of our guards high above was being taken up and
repeated by other voices in the great electrostatic tower. That cry
was coming down through it from level to level, even as we swung from
the last window to the level plaza. And, as we staggered across it,
toward the open door of the nearest cruiser, there came a series of
popping detonations from above and the next moment little flares of
terrific heat were bursting all about us as the guards shot their heat
cartridges down toward us! From their great height and through the dusk
their aim was poor, and in a moment more we were at the cruiser's open
door. But now the alarm was spreading over all the tower behind us, and
at the same moment that we flung ourselves in through the cruiser's
open door, slamming it behind us, we heard a wild clamor of voices from
the power-tower's base!

The next instant, though, we were bursting up into the cruiser's
bridge-room and for a moment of agony I fumbled at its controls, set
differently from those of our American cruisers. Then the motor-stud
had clicked beneath my fingers and, as the great electric motors
beneath droned suddenly loud with the current rushing through them, I
sent all their power into the cruiser's tube-propellers. Up it went
rushing, up and away at terrific speed and at a steep slant, even as
a mass of green-uniformed figures burst from the electrostatic tower
into the plaza! Out and over that plaza at terrific speed we shot,
out and upward at such awful mounting velocity that, before the great
batteries of heat-guns around us could turn, before the alarm from
the power-tower had time to spread, we were whirling up and through
the dusk over all the massed towers and gleaming lights of the great
air-city Berlin!

Out and over--and now as we soared upward into the rarefied levels of
the air like a shooting-star, our cruiser was driving outward over the
cities, stabbing westward through the air, literally chasing the sun
that had disappeared hours before. From Berlin behind us there rose a
hundred cruisers, soaring in swift and deadly pursuit! But so swift had
been our rush, so tardy had been the alarm of our escape, that before
the great batteries of Berlin could blast us from the air we were
beyond them; and before the other massed air-cities over which we were
rushing could receive that alarm we had split the air westward above
them, and had rushed out from over the last of their titanic floating
masses and into the night!

"We're clear of the cities!" I yelled to Hilliard over the thunderous
droning of our motors and the roar of winds about us. "If we can shake
off these pursuing cruisers we'll win back across the Atlantic yet!"

"But their whole battle-fleet is rising now!" cried Hilliard, gazing
back. "And now all their air-cities are beginning to move westward
too--_all their hundred air-cities are moving west to the attack_!"


                          Across the Atlantic

Despite the wild peril of our rushing ship, I felt for a moment all the
blood congealing around my heart as Hilliard yelled those words, and I
looked backward for one last glimpse. For there, behind us, behind the
hundred ships that were pursuing us, the whole two thousand cruisers of
the European battle-fleet had risen and were coming westward also. They
were not pursuing us so much as they were speeding westward according
to their plan, moving after us in a great crescent formation! And,
behind them, we could see now all the hundred gigantic air-cities of
the European Federation, massed there in a colossal circular formation
about their central city of Berlin; moving westward also behind the
crescent of their fleet, they were flashing with terrible majesty
through the air in their circular-massed formation; at a speed that
mounted swiftly to two hundred miles an hour!

The great attack had begun!

Only a moment I gazed back upon that colossal spectacle never seen by
man before, and knew that in that moment, far on the world's other
side, the hundred great air-cities of the Asiatic Federation would be
rushing eastward; the two great forces of hurtling air-cities were
converging upon the American Federation. Then, as we shot forward with
our own greater and terrific speed, the vast massed cities and the
fleet before them had passed from sight behind us and only the hundred
grim pursuing cruisers were visible in the night as we hurtled on!

On--on--and now I shouted to Hilliard to go beneath to the cruiser's
motor room. He moved down toward them while I gripped the wheel
tightly, standing there alone in the bridge-room of the long great
cruiser that had but Hilliard and I inside it. And, while we hurtled on
at our maximum terrible speed, as the cruisers behind drove steadily
after us, we realized that we and our pursuers were outracing the
sun around the earth! We saw by the growing light that we were high
above the sea instead of land. The sea that we saw through breaks in
the vapor-layer, gleamed to the west of us with sunset lines. We were
over the Atlantic, and now, as hope of escape from our pursuers burned
stronger within me, there came a sudden faltering in the steady drone
of our great motors! I felt our cruiser lose speed in that moment,
knew that faltering to be caused by the circuit-breakers tripping at
the tremendous power we were using. But then after an awful moment
of hesitation the motors were droning as loudly as ever as Hilliard,
beneath, had thrown back the circuit-breakers in the connections that
conveyed the static electricity from the atmospheric charge about us
to our transformers. Only a moment had we faltered thus; but in that
moment the hundred pursuers behind had come swiftly closer!

Onward still, like some phantom, we rushed, minute after minute of
droning, racing flight, with the sunset ahead flaming brilliant now,
as we overtook it. Steadily, the long gleaming ships behind us were
creeping closer while the sun rose in the western sky. Though Hilliard
was working like a madman in the motor-room beneath, tending the motors
as a mother anxiously watches her child, he was but one and could not
do the work of a dozen. And so, on after us, they came; drawing toward
us so close that at last I knew that we could not win free of them in
our frenzied flight. For, although we had rushed on for a time that
seemed endless to us, and a few hundred miles remained between us and
the American coast, their leaders were so near now that another minute,
I knew, would find them using their bow-guns upon us.

Even as the thought came to me, there was a thundering detonation
behind us and then but a few feet to either side, a shining heat-shell
flashed past us. Another detonation, and another followed, and I knew
that not for long could we escape them thus; since with each moment the
shooting was becoming more accurate. So, just as a dozen of their bow
guns thundered again, I suddenly drove the cruiser downward in a flying
headlong plunge down through the vapor-layer beneath us; and, as the
pursuing ships plunged straight down after us, I sent our own cruiser
instantly whirling upward and through that layer once more!

It was a maneuver that gained us a moment's advantage; since when the
pursuing ships drove up through the vapor-masses again on my track,
it took them an instant to locate and shape their course after me. In
that instant we had moved a little from them; but now, remorselessly as
ever, they came on after us, as pursued and pursuing ships drove like
light toward the flaming western sky. On and on, on until again they
were close behind, until again their guns were beginning to thunder,
and then I repeated my former maneuver, my last resort. I dived
headlong downward again through the vapor-layer, and upward again, as
their ships drove after me. But, when I flashed up again through the
vapor-masses this time, I suddenly slowed my ship, slowed it and then
held it motionless there in mid-air, with cold of icy fear tight around
my heart in that moment! For, this time, half of the hundred pursuing
ships had not dived down after me but had flashed on ahead as I drove
down; and so, now, when I flashed up they hung before me, while the
remainder drove still toward me from behind! I was trapped at last
between their masses of ships before and behind me!

Slowing my cruiser, holding it motionless there with mechanical fingers
in that moment, I knew it to be the end. Our last moment had come.
The two masses of ships were moving toward me, from ahead and behind,
were moving toward our cruiser. Our only escape cut off, no twists or
turns now could save us; they were converging upon us, were moving
deliberately toward us from either side. Another moment, I knew, and
hundreds of heat-guns would thunder from them, hundreds of heat-shells
would send our ship downward in flaring, fusing destruction. Another
moment--

A great cry sounded beside me, and I wheeled to find Hilliard pointing
mutely upward toward a mass of long, gleaming shapes that were rushing
headlong down upon us from high above, that were diving headlong
down upon the European cruisers to east and west of us, raining a
hail of heat-shells upon them! "American ships!" My cry was echoing
Hilliard's. Great gleaming cruisers, outnumbering the hundred east
and west of us, were driving down upon those hundred with all their
heat-guns thundering! Then in the next moment, while our own cruiser
hung motionless, helpless there in mid-air, American and European
cruisers were whirling in a mad, swift battle about us, ships striking
and falling like lightning on all sides of us. And before we could
comprehend with our stunned minds what was taking place, the European
cruisers had suddenly dropped from that battle, had massed together and
were splitting the air eastward, rushing back eastward and disappearing
toward the mighty approaching armada of great air-cities and cruisers
of which they were the scouts.

Now from the mass of the American cruisers one shot toward our own,
level and hung beside our own ship, and as its door was flung open we
opened the door of our own. I stared at a tall figure, not crediting my
eyes.

"Macklin!" I cried as I recognized him: "Macklin! You got clear, then?"

"Brant--Hilliard--!" he was himself exclaiming: "It is you two in that
ship, then! We were sent on a last patrol out here, saw your ship
attacked by other European ships, came to your rescue--"

"We escaped from Berlin," I told him: "But you, Macklin, we thought you
and Connell dead, saw your cruiser struck by heat-shells and falling--"

"It was a last ruse," Macklin swiftly explained: "Those pursuing
ships were overtaking us; so, when their batteries fired a storm of
heat-shells after us, we fired one of our own heat-guns back toward
them at the same time, and our shells meeting one or two of the
oncoming ones made them burst and flare there behind us. Then, at
the next moment, we sent our ship whirling down as though struck and
destroyed."

"But Connell, then!" I cried: "Connell got back with his great secret.
All the hundred European Federation air-cities are rushing across the
Atlantic to the attack!"

We leaped across the gap to the gangway; the door of Macklin's cruiser
closed behind us; and he gave the order that sent it, with the whole
cruiser fleet; westward at swiftly mounting speed. Then he turned back
to us.

"Connell got back with his secret, yes," he said: "And though the
hundred European Federation air-cities are rushing westward and word
has come that the massed hundred Asiatic Federation cities also are
rushing eastward for the attack, they will find the great air-cities
of the American Federation massed together and ready for them! In
the ten days since our return, every effort of our cities has been
exerted to make use of Connell's knowledge, and to equip with the new
tube-propellers that will give them the same tremendous speed as our
enemies. And now all our cities are massed together and waiting for the
attack of our enemies."




                              CHAPTER IX


                     The Battle of the Air-Cities

Now the hundred cruisers of our force were cleaving the air westward
at terrific speed, while Macklin and Hilliard and I stood together in
the bridge-room of the foremost as it rushed on. Beneath us, the gray
Atlantic showed here and there through openings in the vapor-masses,
and ahead the sun still hung in the western sky. And within a few
minutes more, we saw that the vapor-layer beneath was thinning, and
that now we were flashing not over the sea but over land; over green
hills and valleys that we could glimpse rushing past far beneath us. I
gazed to north and south in search of New York and the other coastal
air-cities that should have hung there, but nothing was in sight.

"All our American Federation air-cities," Macklin told me: "are massed
together, hanging south of the Great Lakes. From Buenos Aires to
Winnipeg, they've come."

"You think, then, that the European and Asiatic Federation air-cities
are going to make a simultaneous attack from both sides?" I shouted to
him above the roaring of our flight. He nodded emphatically.

"Undoubtedly. The Asiatic Federation cities are over the Pacific now,
and are keeping in touch with the European ones by distance-phone to
time their attack to coincide from east and west. They know our own
cities have massed together, must know now that they've been equipped
with the great new speed-tubes also; but they're coming on."

"Two to one," I said: "Two hundred air-cities attacking our one
hundred. God, what a battle it will be!"

But now Hilliard had broken into our conversation, was pointing far
ahead toward a dark, flat mass that stood out against the brilliant
western sky, and toward which we were moving. The terrific speed at
which we had been racing on for hours was decreasing now. Far beneath
the land was still rolling back at great speed, long green plains now;
since already we had flashed west over the Alleghanies. Then, as the
dark mass westward grew steadily with our approach to it, other ships
were driving suddenly beside our own, watchful patrols that drove down
upon our hundred cruisers and swiftly challenged them. Macklin answered
those challenges by the distance-phone, but for the moment I paid small
attention to him, gazing forward with heart beating rapidly at the
great mass that hung high in mid-air before us. For, as we drove closer
toward that mass, it was becoming visible to our eyes as our goal, the
hundred giant air-cities of the American Federation!

The hundred mighty American Federation air-cities were clustered there
miles above the green plains, in a great circular mass, with New York,
most colossal of all of them, at the center! Cities that had long
hung over North and South America from sea to sea, air-cities whose
names were those of the long-vanished cities of the land, that once
had dotted the surface of those continents. Boston and Los Angeles,
Rio de Janeiro and Chicago, Mexico City and Quebec, Valparaiso and
Miami--these and scores of others hung there in that great cluster.
All the air-cities of the American Federation were gathered here about
their air-capital of New York to withstand the tremendous attacks now
closing in from east and west!

Massed there as they were, the hundred mighty air-cities seemed, even
as the European ones had seemed to me, but one vast plain of metal
towers and streets. As far as the eye could reach, there stretched away
the tremendous forest of those soaring towers, with here and there
rising from them the taller spires of each city's great electrostatic
tower. And, everywhere among those towers, everywhere around the rim
of each great circular air-city and at its center there loomed great
batteries of giant heat-guns; while here and there, on the plazas
of the cities rested the turret-like cubes of the recalled great
air-forts, their own grim heat-guns protruding expectantly. And through
streets and towers, between the batteries and around the air-forts and
across the plazas of the assembled cities, there swarmed the millions
of their peoples, wild with excitement now as the last dread hour
approached. And, massed there above all the great floating cities,
hung grim and motionless the two thousand or more cruisers that still
remained of the American Federation's eastern and western fleets.

It was toward these massed battle-cruisers, at a level somewhat higher
than that of the air-cities, that our own hundred cruisers were
rushing. Over those assembled giant cities we raced, the great mass of
them below us almost hiding the ground beneath. As we shot above them,
I saw now that they had been ranged in a tremendous circle, the great
capital of New York hanging in the center. Across the great ring of
the air-cities we rushed; were racing at last above New York, toward
its own giant power-tower. Then we had reached it, and were sinking
vertically downward, until our hundred cruisers came to rest upon the
central plaza. Here, even as in Berlin, the central plaza was reserved
always for the ships of the First Air Chief and his followers; so that,
although immense crowds now beat through all the streets and plazas
about it, there were none around our hundred ships. And in an instant
Macklin and Hilliard and I were out of that which had brought us and
hastening across the clear space toward the static-tower's base.


                             Preparations

On past its guards and through the ante-rooms we strode, and in another
moment were in the office of the First Air Chief. There was unfamiliar
apparatus among the great switchboards of its walls, I noted as we
entered. The First Air Chief himself had risen from his great table-map
as we entered and was coming toward us; beside him, another figure,
whom I recognized instantly as Connell. Then both of them were grasping
the hands of Hilliard and of myself.

"Brant!" Yarnall was exclaiming: "I got Macklin's report of your escape
and his rescue of you--man, but I'm glad that you got free! And it was
what you did there in Berlin, what you did to help Connell and Macklin
escape, that has enabled us to use Connell's knowledge and fit our
air-cities for the coming battle!"

"I did no more than the others," I told him: "But you know of the
enemy's coming then? You know that already the European Federation
cities are on their way?"

He nodded. "They and the Asiatic Federation's cities from the westward,
Brant," he said: "And we are awaiting them here--awaiting them with a
chance at least, thanks to you four--to strike back at them when they
come. And already they are near--by the map here you can see--"

And he turned toward the great table-map upon which was depicted the
whole of the earth's surface, the red circles upon it denoting as
before the position of the air-cities that hung above it. Now, however,
all the circles of the American Federation cities were massed together
south of the white outline of the Great Lakes, hanging motionless as
the cities around us were hanging motionless. Away to the east on the
map, though, just moving in from the Atlantic over the eastern coast,
there was creeping across the map another mass of red circles, moving
slowly toward our own, that represented the great gathered cities of
the European Federation that were rushing westward toward us. And in
from the Pacific was creeping a similar mass of a hundred little red
circles that were, I knew, the Asiatic Federation's cities.

From east and west they were moving, there on the map, moving even
as the cities they represented moved through the air, automatically
showing their positions and progress. This was accomplished, I knew,
by means of special batteries of cruiser-finders, tuned and trained
to detect the great electrostatic-motors of air-cities, and recording
instantly thus whenever those cities moved with their great electric
fields. Their records were carried through complicated mechanical
calculators which plotted the exact positions and movements of the
cities; and these calculators, in turn, were connected to small special
projectors set beneath the great ground-glass table-map, casting upward
upon it the red circles of the air-cities. Thus those red circles moved
upon the map, even as the great air-cities moved across the world.

This arrangement, indeed, was of no late date, and was used by both
European and Asiatic Federations as well as by ourselves; but as I
gazed now about the great circular room I saw that within it were some
new arrangements also. These consisted of a series of six great glass
screens which were arranged in box-like form about the great air-city's
controls at the room's center. And, while the First Air Chief swiftly
explained to us their purpose and design, I saw that one sitting inside
their box-form, with four on four sides, and one above and one below,
could see in all those directions as though from the very top of the
great power-tower. For they were in effect great electrical periscopes;
four great similar screens had been set on four sides of the
electrostatic tower's high tip, and another one above that tip, while
the sixth had been set in the under-side of the great city's base. The
views possible to those six screens were then transferred down to the
six there about us; the light-vibrations that struck the screens above
and beneath being transformed by television receivers into electrical
vibrations and brought down to television reproducers behind our own
six screens.

Sitting there at the city's controls, amid those six screens and
looking into them, one could see as clearly as though from the
power-tower's tip in all directions. It was quite necessary, too, that
this should be the case; since the man who operated the great air-city,
from its six direction-controls and its single speed-control there,
must see clearly in all directions, now that the great air-cities could
rush at such tremendous speed through the air. When I said as much to
the First Air Chief, who had turned now and was gazing intently at the
great table-map upon which the eastern and western masses of circles
were slowly creeping toward our own, he nodded, and contemplated me for
a moment with a curious expression.

"The man," he said finally, "who is to hold the controls of New York in
the battle tomorrow, will be you, Brant!"

"The honor is great," I said: "I've operated the city's controls,
though never did I expect to take it into battle. But Macklin and
Hilliard here--I want them to stay here for the time being--I want the
hundred cruisers on the plaza outside to stay there during the battle."

"You have a plan?" the First Air Chief asked, but I shook my head.

"No more than an idea," I said: "An idea that may help us if the battle
goes against us, if their attack is too strong for us. Even then it is
too insane, perhaps, to be of any use, but it might help us--"

Yarnall nodded assent, and then Macklin and Hilliard had joined the
two dozen or more of black-garbed attendants and engineers who were
busy at the great switchboards that lined the circular room's walls.
They scrutinized its dials to determine the rate of the vast currents
rushing down from the power-tower's tip far above to the motors in
the city's great base; added a fresh battery of transformers or threw
in resistances to hold that current steady; and moved ceaselessly
about the walls in their anxious watch. Now, Yarnall and Connell and
I were marking our own places, the three metal seats there behind the
big table-map, with the great screens of the electrical periscopes
all about us. Yarnall would sit in the center, with eyes upon the red
circles on the great map, tensely watching their progress, as admiral
of our mighty fleet of colossal cities, ready to direct it and our
cruisers to the battle. Connell would be at his right, before him the
black mouthpiece and speaker of a single distance-phone. Behind that
were the scores of switches and intricate controls, which connected
that distance-phone to the operators of all our hundred air-cities.


                           The Battle Nears

As the third of the trio, I would sit at Yarnall's left, before me the
six switch-levers which sent the colossal city of New York whirling
through the air in any direction; while beside them was the gleaming
knob which regulated the city's speed. The great batteries of New York
were at my command also; all their mighty heat-guns around the city's
edge and around our electrostatic tower and elsewhere were controlled
by the distance-phone whose mouthpiece rose before me. The great
batteries of all our other cities were controlled in the same way by
their own operators, and were subject like New York to the commands
of the First Air Chief beside me, who could maneuver our whole great
armada of tremendous cities at will through the air. In the city of San
Francisco, too, we knew, was the Second Air Chief, placed there to take
command in case New York were destroyed or the First Air Chief disabled.

Thus, on the morrow were grouped we three, who were to sway such
colossal forces in a battle as no men had seen before. Now, Yarnall was
pointing to the table-map's surface, where the red massed circles of
the European and Asiatic Federation armadas were indicated but a few
hundred miles on either side of our own great mass of cities. Watching
them there, we sat in silence, save for the clicking of occasional
switches by the engineers about us. From far away, far across New York
and all the other air-cities gathered around it, there was coming the
dull, dim throbbing of the life of millions that swarmed through those
cities. And now Yarnall reached forward and touched the control of the
great electrical periscopes whose screens boxed us in.

Instantly those dull-glass screens were alive with light, and it was as
though we were gazing forth from the very tip of the power-tower out
over our gathered mass of cities. North and east and south and west,
from all the screens about us the views were alike, of a tremendous
mass of clustered metal towers that encircled New York. Below us was
the screen, above which our metal seats were suspended on supports. It
seemed a trap-door through which we were gazing down toward the green
plains far beneath; though in reality all the city's massive base lay
between us and that view. So intensely realistic was the scene that lay
about us that we all but forgot the great circular room in which we
really were, and seemed suspended high in air above the great mass of
our gathered air-cities.

"The enemy armadas," said Yarnall, his voice low, "will be in sight
within fifteen minutes."

For upon the map the two masses of red circles were rushing on from
east and west, and seemed now almost upon the mass of circles that was
our own great fleet of cities. Looking out over those cities, through
the periscopic screens about us, we could see the forts raising their
great guns to firing range. I realized, as I saw it, that the battle
now ready to start would mean annihilation to half the world. This was
indeed Armageddon, when on earth itself was left no human being at
peace; when every nation was rushing through the air toward this last
conflict!

Now, however, Yarnall touched another control, and from the
electrostatic tower's tip, high above us flashed great signals
of brilliant lights that were taken up and repeated from all the
power-towers of all the hundred cities that ringed us round. And, as
those signals flashed, the great crowds that filled the streets of the
air-cities were suddenly flowing out of those streets into the cities'
towers; until within a few moments none were visible in all the streets
and plazas, save those black-uniformed men who stood ready at the great
heat-guns of our batteries. And those crowds went quietly, despite
their tense excitement, because they knew that they were being ordered
inside for their greater protection. There was no refuge upon the
earth's surface far beneath, for them; when the destructive powers of
all the world were battling above it in the air.

Then the First Air Chief spoke a brief order and, as Connell beside him
repeated it swiftly into the distance-phone (as he did with Yarnall's
orders in all the combat that followed) the great fleet of cruisers
hanging above us and visible in our top screen divided into two masses,
of a thousand or more ships each, which swept swiftly to east and west.
Beyond the great ring of air-cities they leaped, until they were far
out; and each division then formed into a great curving line screening
our ring of cities to east and west, facing the fleets rushing toward
them from those directions. Then we were gazing again at the table-map
before us, a deathly silence seeming to grip all the world. Upon that
map we could see the European and Asiatic armadas were now within
hardly more than a hundred miles of our own; and tensely we watched the
east and western screens now, gazing out beyond our cities.

"They'll use their cruiser-fleets for their first attack," Yarnall was
saying as we gazed tensely forth. "They'll try to wipe out our cruisers
before they bring their cities on to attack ours."

I nodded. "It would give them a big advantage when the cities come to
blows. But our cruisers beat them back once with the odds two to one,
and now--"

I broke off sharply, and at the same moment heard a low breath from
Yarnall and Connell simultaneously, felt seemingly a low tremor that
seemed to run instantaneously across all our massed air-cities. For
there, far to the westward, black against the sky, there had appeared
a line of far-flung black dots that were growing very quickly in size,
and that were massed together in a crescent formation whose horns were
toward us. It was the advancing cruiser-fleet of the Asiatic Federation
forces. Tensely we watched it as it came on; then we looked to the
east to see a similar crescent of advancing dots, the European cruiser
fleet. On they came, smoothly rushing toward our own lines of cruisers,
hanging to the east and west of our cities; and then for the moment we
forgot them as we made out, to east and west, behind them, advancing
toward us, great black masses that even at that distance seemed to fill
the air. They were the two massed mighty armadas of the European and
Asiatic Federation's air-cities, rushing to battle with our own!




                               CHAPTER X


                            The First Clash

For one moment we gazed toward them and toward the advancing cruisers
that rushed before them, as though held by the grandeur of the
spectacle. The tremendous mass of our air-cities hanging there, high
above the earth the gleaming ranks of our own two thousand cruisers
that poised to east and west, the advancing cruiser-fleets of twice
their strength behind which there rushed gigantically on the great
massed air-cities of our enemies--it was a spectacle breath-taking
enough! But, then, the two enemy cruiser-fleets had come within a short
distance of our own waiting cruisers; and, as they did so, both their
fleets shot suddenly upward, as though in answer to a common order, to
drive above our own cruisers and our air-cities!

Instantly Yarnall had uttered a swift order; and as Connell's quick
voice sent that order flying out to our cruiser-masses, they too
whirled upward and forward to meet the onrushing enemy fleets. Then,
far out in mid-air to east and west of us the great cruiser-fleets had
met, had smashed into each other with blind fury. Through our screens
we saw cruisers enveloped by scores in blinding flares, in that first
moment of combat, as they raged in two separate mighty battles.

But, east and west, our own cruisers were outnumbered two to one
and, despite their fierce resistance, were being pressed steadily
back toward our gathered cities. Closer and closer through the air
toward us were reeling those struggling lines of cruisers, more and
more American ships falling in white-hot destruction as the heat-guns
of their opponents concentrated upon them. Still far beyond them,
to east and west, the colossal masses of the European and Asiatic
air-cities were now rushing on toward us! Yarnall sent another order
flying out, and the next moment a mass of cruisers that had remained
at the edges of our gathered cities, on either side, and had not been
in the first battle, were leaping forward now, like suddenly released
hounds after prey. A score of them to the eastern combat and a score
to the western one they flashed; and each, as it reached the lines
of struggling ships, shot up over them and then flashed along their
lines above them. And as they did, there shot downward from them over
the battling cruisers intense jets of concentrated water-vapor, which
puffed out instantly into great white cloud-masses that enveloped all
the grappling thousands of ships!

Yarnall had brought into the battle, I saw, those great artificial
cloud projectors that had saved us in our first great battle over the
Atlantic! And, even as their white masses enveloped the struggling
ships, he sent forth another order; and our own cruisers shot upward
and downward out of those cloud-masses, at the very instant that
they had been formed. Then, with all our own cruisers clear of the
cloud-masses to east and west, and the European and Asiatic ships
inside them driving for the moment in blind confusion, our cruisers
poured a deadly hail of heat-shells down into the cloud-masses and the
thousands of ships that swirled inside them! Only for a moment was
it that they remained within the cloud-masses before fighting their
way free; but in that moment they had been unable to fire a single
effective shell at our own ships outside, and we had poured a veritable
storm of deadly shells into the cloudy masses. So when, a moment later,
the European and Asiatic ships broke from the vapor-clouds east and
westward, our broadsides had taken toll of hundreds of their blinded
ships, and hardly more than our own forces did they number now!

But, when they broke free from the cloud-masses and into open air
again, they did not advance toward our awaiting ships; instead they
shot back from either front toward their cities, in answer to some
mysterious order. At once a similar order from Yarnall brought flashing
back, to form again above our own cities, our own ships--still nearly
two thousand strong and almost as many in number as the combined
cruisers of our enemies. I heard dimly the great cheers that were
rolling across all our cities, for this mighty blow which had beaten
back our enemies' cruiser-fleets once more. Then those cheers died
swiftly away; for, far away to east and west, the gigantic masses of
the approaching air-cities loomed larger and larger, rushing through
the air toward us!

Eastward the European Federation was approaching, in a gigantic circle
that seemed to fill the whole eastern sky. To us three sitting there
amid our periscopic screens, it was as though all the eastern screen
was filled with that great oncoming mass of cities: Paris, London,
Moscow, Cairo, Rome--all the tremendous air-cities of the great
European Federation--and their capital of Berlin still at the center.

And westward, upon our western screen, loomed equally gigantic the
similar circle of air-cities of the Asiatic Federation. Peking, the
third in size of the world's air-capitals, at the center of its cluster
of cities rushed at the same smooth speed toward us, with Shanghai and
Tokio and Bombay and Rangoon foremost in its circle. From east and west
thus the two stupendous circles of cities rushed toward our own, grimly
waiting; and, as we watched them, there flashed over me in that tense
moment a strange wonder as to the feelings with which one of a hundred
years before would have watched this battle. Then I laid aside that
passing wonder as the two great circles drew nearer to the range of our
great heat-gun batteries. And this, surely, was a spectacle that none
had ever seen or dreamed before--this spectacle of the world's mighty
cities converging swiftly upon each other in battle to the death!

And as strange, too, must have been the sight of us three, sitting
there amid our box-like periscopic screens, the heart of the mighty
tower's base; yet seeing and directing from there all the great mass of
the hundred mighty cities around us.

"They're not going to join forces!" I exclaimed: "They're going to
strike us at the same moment from east and west!"

Yarnall nodded, his eyes intent upon the screens: "Either that," he
said, "or--"


                              Armageddon!

He broke off suddenly; for at that moment there came to us a giant
salvo of thunder from both east and west, a terrific shock of sound
that rolled deeply through the air toward us from the two distant
armadas advancing! An instant later there was a whistling sound over
our own cities, and we knew that a great storm of heat-shells was
plunging toward them. A few struck with wild bursting flares across our
massed cities, and with their suddenly-released gigantic heat there
appeared great craters of fusing, melting metal. The greater part of
the shells, though, fell short, whirled down to earth to flash on the
ground far below. The range was not yet closed, I knew; and so far our
own great cities remained silent as death. Yarnall was watching now
with hands clenched tightly, as the two circles from east and west came
on. A moment later there rolled from them another great salvo, and
another mass of shells rushed toward us; but, though most of these also
fell short, a greater number than before flared and fused in melting,
searing death upon our own massed cities!

I gazed anxiously at Yarnall, a strange dread taking possession of me
for an instant as the tremendous armadas came on. Would he never give
the order to fire? He was sitting still as a carved statue, his eyes
upon the screens and his lips compressed; and in that moment there
came to me a dim sense of all the terrific responsibility that weighed
upon him, the leader of a third of earth's cities and peoples battling
against the remainder of mankind. Silent he sat and still, while the
great approaching armadas rushed nearer, their cities coming more and
more distinctly into view in our far-seeing screens. In another moment,
I knew, another thunderous broadside would be belching toward us. But,
just as I looked for it to come, Yarnall spoke a single word and, as
Connell's swift voice sent that word flying out to all our cities,
as my own flashed it to all the batteries of our center-most city of
New York, there was a hush of a split-second. And then, out from all
our own hundred giant cities, there broke such a titanic thundering
detonation as seemed to shake violently all the air about us! And, an
instant later, we saw the heat-shells from our batteries falling in
thousands upon the two advancing armadas, upon their rushing gigantic
cities, and flaring into white-hot craters of fusing metal.

Before that terrific blow the two advancing masses seemed to stagger a
little in mid-air, to hesitate for an instant; but then they advanced
steadily onward and their own great batteries thundered an answer to
our salvo. Then, as the two giant circles drew nearer to our own on
either side, the whole world seemed swallowed again in one ceaseless
thundering of sound. The giant batteries of all our great air-cities
burst forth again, to send a storm of heat-shells rushing east and
west upon our enemies! The air between us and the armadas nearing on
either side must have been filled with shells in that moment; for we
saw tremendous flares there in mid-air as shells of ours met some of
theirs and burst. But few of them did that, most of them whirling
through the air to burst and flare in all their awful destroying heat
and brilliance upon the air-cities!

In that instant, as the batteries of all three gigantic armadas
thundered, it seemed that numberless fountains of brilliant light
and terrific heat were springing into being amid the metal towers of
all the three masses of great air-cities! Great fountains of heat
unthinkable, beneath which all the metal about them fused and melted
instantly, and about which all life was scorched into annihilation! Yet
this had taken but the first moment of the battle to accomplish; and
now, as the two great circles of the European and Asiatic Federations
swept nearer, I saw that two of the foremost of the great European
cities, Paris and Lisbon, were staggering and reeling as they rushed
forward with the rest! They had met an awful storm of striking
heat-shells from our own cities; and though their great motors were
deep in their mighty bases, though the alloy of their electrostatic
towers could not be affected by heat-shells, yet the deadly hail of
shells that had fallen upon them had penetrated apparently almost down
to their great motors beneath!

I whirled to Yarnall, "Paris and Lisbon!" I cried: "They're falling
behind the rest a little--they're hit hard!"

He nodded, eyes burning now: "All east batteries concentrate on Paris
and Lisbon!" he ordered; and, as Connell's voice sent the order flying
out to our eastern massed cities, their batteries were thundering with
even greater fury.

But now all their shells were aimed toward the two crippled cities of
Paris and Lisbon, and a hell of bursting shells were flaring across
those two ill-fated giants of the air. It was as though a living wave,
of brilliant heat and light from the bursting shells, were dancing
like lightning across the two cities; and in that instant it must
have burned from them all the life in their towers, even as they were
striving to do with our own. The towers of each city became in that
moment almost a single great surface of fusing, white-hot metal; its
awfulness added to by the exploding of the stores of heat-shells and
magazines beneath the terrific flares. Out beyond them and around them
there swept other cities of the European armada to protect them. There
came Madrid and London and Moscow, all their guns thundering answer;
but now our own gunners were not to be denied of their prey. As our
batteries sent repeated storms of shells upon the two doomed cities
we saw Paris staggering, slipping to a lower level, hanging a moment
there, and then whirling sidewise downward, down to the green earth far
below! In a moment it had crashed, with a terrific rending and cracking
of metal!

I heard a dull roar of cheers rolling across our city above and between
the thunder of the guns, cheers that were redoubled a moment later as
Lisbon too whirled downward to annihilation, a mere mass of fusing
metal. But, even as the cheers sounded they were stilled, and Yarnall
was uttering further orders to our batteries.

From the Asiatic Federation's circle, a great smothering fire of shells
had been falling in those moments upon the westernmost of our own
cities, upon Omaha. Its guns were still thundering in savage answer;
but, battery by battery, they were going silent as there fell upon them
the concentrated fire of the whole advancing Asiatic Federation cities,
the great guns of Peking thundering at the center of the rest. Then
Omaha, too, had slipped and staggered and was whirling down to earth in
fusing destruction, its motors reached by the bursting shells at last!


                          Avoiding the Ambush

Now it seemed as though in all the world was nothing but thundering
guns and bursting shells; for now as they came nearer toward each other
the three great circles of cities were exchanging a veritable tempest
of heat-shells upon each other. Watching that hell of battle through
our screens, we three sat tensely there. Yarnall's eyes were intent
upon the advancing armadas; Connell, gripping his distance-phone, was
barking orders to the great cities that were thundering about us.
The two giant circles of the enemies' cities were very near our own
now, rushing toward us at their tremendous speed; and, as they thus
neared us, it seemed that nothing could surpass the tremendous roaring
broadsides that were hurled from city to city. I saw Amsterdam and
Madrid staggering a little behind their fellows, reeling beneath our
awful fire, saw Hong-Kong in the Asiatic forces, its great towers all
but levelled by the flaring heat-shells, plunge suddenly downward as
more of those shells reached its motors! But in our own mass now New
Orleans was plunging likewise beneath the fire of the advancing fleets;
and St. Louis was swaying as though badly hit!

But at that moment there came an abrupt exclamation from Yarnall; and
then we saw that the two advancing circles of the enemy cities, rushing
toward our own, were changing their form, were changing swiftly into
two great crescents of which the horns of each were toward us. Those
two giant crescents were moving to join each other, to form one great
circle; and, if they did so, our own mass of cities would be completely
surrounded by the overwhelming numbers of our enemies, the easy target
for all their mighty batteries. We would inevitably be annihilated by
the enclosing circle of the enemy. But, even before I had understood
that maneuver, Yarnall's swift order was flashing out to all our
gathered cities.

"North at full speed for all cities! Unchanged formation!"

The next instant our whole great mass of cities was moving, was moving
with swiftly mounting speed northward! For, as his order sounded I had
jerked open the speed-control before me, had flung back one of the
direction-levers. And, as I did so, there had come a great droning of
motors from beneath, resounding even above the madly-thundering guns,
flinging all the mighty city of New York northward. Also there came
the great hissing of the numberless new tube-propellers that were
jerking it swiftly forward! And, as New York leaped northward at my
touch, all its great batteries still detonating, so were all the great
air-cities that ringed us leaping northward, and all their guns were
still thundering toward the advancing armadas!

But now the enemy had seen our swift leap northward, and, as their
commanders guessed our purpose, they sent their own two crescents
whirling toward us with even greater speed to enclose us before we
could escape! For the next moment it was a race between the three great
city-masses, a race in which our own sought to evade the two that
closed upon it from either side. And, as our cities and theirs raced
through the air at tremendous speed, every gun still firing, it seemed
that we must lose! For, just north of us, the two northward horns
of the closing crescents had almost met, were almost joined before
us! That northward horn of the Asiatic crescent held Shanghai and
Colombo and Singapore and others; while the horn that projected from
the European mass had foremost in it Moscow and Brussels and Algiers.
And as we shot northward in that wild moment, to escape before those
two horns could join, Yarnall sent flying forth a swift order for all
batteries in all our cities to concentrate their fire now upon the
foremost cities in the two closing horns to the north!

At once our own guns were thundering with redoubled fury; for,
unless we could destroy in the next few minutes the foremost of
those cities north of us, they would have closed upon us and brought
our irretrievable doom. So, disregarding for the time all the
other air-cities of the two closing crescents about us, all fire
was concentrated upon the foremost cities of the two horns closing
northward. A storm of heat-shells rushed thick through the air toward
them; but at the same time the masses of European and Asiatic cities
east and west of us were pouring down upon us the broadsides of their
own giant batteries! And beneath that terrific fire, cities among our
mass were falling swift in fusing destruction. St. Louis and Miami and
Seattle were whirling to death as we raced onward; all the people in
them who had been left alive by the shells were meeting annihilation in
the great crash far below!

But, though we were being decimated by the fire of the closing
crescents on either side, our own terrific concentrated fire was having
effect upon the closing horns of cities north of us, and in the moments
while we rushed toward them, Singapore, Colombo and Brussels had been
sent down in white-hot destruction by our awful fire. The remaining
cities in those two projecting horns were still rushing toward each
other with their utmost speed to close the gap between them before our
great circle could speed through it. With Moscow and Shanghai at their
eastern and western tips, the two horns swiftly closed toward each
other; while as swiftly and with every motor droning its loudest, with
every heat-gun thundering northward, we shot onward. For a moment the
whole great race was in doubt; for a moment it seemed to us that our
great mass of cities could flash through that gap before it closed.

But as we watched in tense, terrible hope, even as our mighty cities
raced northward, the cities of those closing horns seemed to make a
last supreme effort, a last great burst of speed. They shot forward,
their leaders Shanghai and Moscow almost racing into each other; and
then, with all their tube-propellers reversed, they were suddenly
halting a barrier of mighty air-cities all around us! But nothing now
could halt our tremendous mass, so awful was our speed and so close
were we to the enemy's line. I saw those cities looming suddenly
gigantic before our own mass as we raced on; heard hoarse exclamations
from Yarnall and Connell beside me; and then with a terrific shock,
that seemed the shock of meeting worlds, our vast northward-flying mass
of air-cities had crashed headlong into the great line of cities before
us!




                              CHAPTER XI


                           City Against City

In the moment that followed, after our flashing circle of cities had
thundered headlong into the line before us, all other sounds, all the
thunder of countless guns and the drone of motors and the hiss of
tube-propellers and cries of voices, were drowned in one tremendous
splintering crash of metal upon metal. The giant mass of cities about
us seemed to reel drunkenly in mid-air in that moment. New York at
their center staggered from the awful shock transmitted to it. Then
upon the screen north of me, I saw titanic metal masses that had
been cities falling downward. Moscow with Sydney and Algiers, and
Boston with Detroit, these whirled downward in that moment--no longer
recognizable as air-cities and seeming to the eye but great twisted
bulks of rended metal.

But not even that giant collision had been able to halt the tremendous
momentum of our northward-thundering mass of cities; for as those
cities before us crashed downward, the whole great circle of our mass,
New York still at its center, was thundering on through the gap that
that crash had made in the line before us! We were sweeping northward
and out beyond that line that our great crash had shattered. We had won
free only by means of that awful crash. Instantly, Yarnall had cried
another order, and our great mass of air-cities was swiftly shifting
its formation into a long line; and at its head rushed our own city
of New York. And then, while the great circle of the enemy's combined
armada remained there for the moment still behind us, as though stunned
by our colossal crash and escape through it, the First Air Chief sent
another order flashing forth. At once our line turned like a wheeling
snake, high in the air, and was rushing back upon the circle of our
enemies! We were rushing back and along the line of European Federation
cities that made up that circle's eastern half for the moment. And, as
our long line of mighty cities whirled past them, all our batteries
were thundering upon them roaring death.

[Illustration: Now our line turned like a wheeling snake, high in the
air, and was rushing back upon the circle of our enemies. And as our
long line of mighty cities whirled past them all our batteries were
thundering.]

The advantage now was all with us; since in their great circular
formation more than half their great mass of cities could not reach us
with their guns. And, so during that moment, the odds were more than
even as our long line swept on, with all our batteries pouring their
broadsides forth! Steady at the controls, I held New York at that
colossal line's head, holding it at an even distance from the great
circle of the enemy cities. I saw now that our terrific fire, as we
rushed past those cities, was swiftly in that moment taking effect upon
them. Even as I gazed, Amsterdam, Vienna, Cairo and Madrid were falling
beneath the awful concentrated fire of our rushing cities; and in our
own line Buenos Aires staggered, swayed and fell as the enemy barked
savagely back toward us.

"On!" Yarnall was crying beside me: "It's our chance to strike hard at
them--before they can bring the rest of their cities into action!"

"But they're doing it now!" I shouted back to him, above the thunder
of guns, the drone of motors and hissing tube-propellers. "They're
stringing their circle out into a line also!"

For it was plainly visible, upon the great screen beside me, that the
commanders of the enemy were striving to form their great circle into
a line that could meet our own more effectively in mid-air. We saw
their cities rushing inward and changing formation there beside us;
but we knew that our change had come and so hung upon the flank of
the great mass of cities, our line rushing along it with all our guns
turned toward it. And now, though Quebec was falling in our line, our
guns had sent down Copenhagen, Yokohama and Calcutta in the mass beside
us; since by now we had raced past the mass of the European air-cities
and our guns were thundering against the Asiatic cities. Their guns
roared sullenly in answer to us as we flashed past them; but, for the
moment, in their disorganization, in their attempts to reform swiftly
from their circle into a line like our own, their fire was seriously
hampered by their own movements. In that moment we were pouring a
smothering hail of shells upon them, and city upon city was whirling
downward in wild destruction.

Then suddenly, with a supremely swift effort, their circle had
lengthened, straightened, their confusion of the moment had vanished;
and their cities had formed almost instantly into a long line, like
our own, but longer than our own. We found ourselves in that moment
with our own line parallel in mid-air to theirs, a mixture of European
and Asiatic cities directly opposite us; and then, as we raced on,
they were racing on with us, their own batteries thundering with
newly-released fury, as they sought to blast us from the air beside
them! I heard the sharp order of the First Air Chief beside me, and
held New York steady at the head of our line. The two great city-fleets
were racing through the air in a great running fight, with every gun
thundering!

Directly opposite New York there raced, at the head of their line, the
mighty air-city of Peking, third of the three great air-capitals. The
two giants were evenly matched; and now at the head of our respective
lines we engaged in a tremendous duel in mid-air, a duel so intense
that, almost, I forgot the fate of the rushing armadas behind us. In
all New York about us mighty fountains of brilliant light and awful
heat, were flaring with each salvo of heat-shells from the Asiatic
capital. But, at the same time, our own gunners were working their
batteries like madmen; and we could see similar giant craters of fusing
metal springing into being over all the vast mass of clustered towers
that was Peking. Far behind in the enemy's line raced the third great
air-capital of Berlin; and we guessed that it was now from Berlin that
the movements of all our foes were being directed. But so awful was the
battle that we were undergoing with the Asiatic capital opposite us
that for the moment we forgot almost all else.

Behind us, I was dimly aware of all our great line of air-cities
grappling with the line rushing opposite; Chicago, a little farther
back in our line from ourselves, was carrying on as terrific a duel
with London. Constantinople in the enemy's line was whirling downward
beneath the batteries of Denver and Valparaiso. Montreal, in our own,
was falling in fusing death as it became the target for all the giant
batteries of the colossal city of Berlin. City after city in the two
racing, struggling lines was falling to annihilation as the awful
battle raged on. High above the colossal lines of racing cities, our
own great fleet of cruisers and the enemy's were whirling in a wild
fury, insane as our own giant battle of cities. Surely Armageddon had
come upon the earth at last!

Although the European and Asiatic cities still outnumbered us, we had
cut down their great margin of superiority in that attack which our
line had made upon their confused circle. Now, with equal fury, they
were striking from line to line.

Straight ahead of our two racing lines, there loomed now a great bank
of drifting vapors, great cloud-masses drifting south from the lakes
to the north. Neither of our two battling lines desired to enter those
vapor-masses, and so as one, when we neared them, both lines shot
downward.


                           Surrounded Again

Down--down--with our batteries thundering still across the gulf
toward Peking, whose own guns answered with as great a fury, though
in their city as in ours, battery after battery was being silenced!
Down--down--until the green earth beneath, lit by the descending
afternoon sun, seemed just beneath us, rushing up toward us with awful
speed as we shot down to it! Yet in that dread moment neither line of
struggling cities straightened upward, each fearful of the other's
gaining an advantage. In an instant more, it seemed, New York must
crash together headlong into the earth.

Downward we shot, and I saw the green plain looming awful beneath us.
At the last moment I jerked back another of the direction-levers before
me; and as, in answer to the controls, New York tipped sharply upward
once more. I saw Peking opposite rushing up at the same instant, saving
itself as we had done. Behind us the cities that directly followed in
our two lines were curving up as swiftly, all their guns thundering
still as furiously. But, farther back in the two lines, there were
cities that had swooped too low to recover, had dipped lower and in the
next moment had crashed and been annihilated upon the green earth, as
they collided with it at their terrific speed!

But while our two lines were whirling upward at as steep a slant as
they had descended, the battle seemed to deepen in furious intensity.
New York and Peking were stabbing still at each other with all their
forces, each colossal city seeming too mighty to be struck down, though
each was flaming under a terrible fire of shells. Behind us, after
a running duel that had achieved almost the magnitude and fully the
intensity of our own, Chicago had given London the finishing stroke;
and that great city was wavering, staggering, then slipping and falling
in white-hot annihilation toward the earth! And, as all along both
lines, other cities staggered and fell, I saw that above us the two
whirling cruiser-fleets had almost entirely vanished. They had almost
entirely annihilated each other by the insane fury of their attacks!

I felt my brain spinning, felt all things about me resolving into a
wild whirl of thunderous sound and flaring light. I heard, as though
from a great distance, the orders of Yarnall beside me, and the
frenzied voice of Connell sending those orders flashing out from the
distance-phone; heard the thunder of guns and sound of motors and
propellers and wild noises that were coming from all the city about
us. Then, before our two onrushing lines, there loomed another great
mass of drifting vapors; and again our two lines dipped downward to
avoid those masses. But, as we shot downward, the line opposite us with
Peking at its head shot as quickly upward again, in answer to some
command; it raced on _through_ the vapor-masses instead of beneath
them!

In the next moment we had shot our own line upward again to race side
by side with them still; but we were too late, for that moment had
given them, at their tremendous speed, the advantage for which they
sought. For in that moment, rushing on through the vapor-masses instead
of beneath them, they had gained a little; so that when we shot upward
again to their level they were ahead of us as well as beside us! And
then their line ahead of us was swiftly curving back and around our
other side! As we slowed instantly, to avoid a collision that would
annihilate us and all our mass, they swept the end of their longer line
around the rear of our own, and thus in the next instant were forming a
complete circle around our cities. They had at last accomplished their
great objective, had managed to surround our mass of mighty cities,
outnumbering us still.

As their circle closed lightning-like about us, we three sat in
that moment as though stunned; and then, from all the air-cities
that encircled us, a terrific thunderous fire was pouring upon us!
Encircled, we were a perfect target now for all the European and
Asiatic gunners around us, pouring all their mighty broadsides upon us.
And now Yarnall had leaped to his feet, the tense agony in his eyes
reflected in those of Connell and myself in that terrible moment.

"They've got us!" he was crying hoarsely: "They've got us inside their
circle at last--they're hammering us to doom!"

"Can't we break out?" I cried: "Break through this circle about us?"

He shook his head, his eyes burning: "No--their circle is complete
around us now and we'd only crash our own cities to earth--but we'll
try above and below!"

With the words, he gave a brief order and, as Connell's voice flashed
that order to all our confused mass of cities, they leaped upward in
sudden concerted motion, all their motors' energy turned suddenly
into their vertical lifting power. But, as they shot upward thus, to
win free of the circle about us, that circle lifted at the same speed
as our own mass, hovering still around us and beating us still with
all the relentless fire of their massed batteries. And, when we shot
suddenly downward in an attempt to escape from below they sank downward
at as quick a speed, were encircling us still. And now, beneath that
awful hammering fire of all the massed cities that enclosed us, our own
were beginning to stagger; to sway and reel!

The titanic circle of enemy air-cities about us and our own great
throng of cities, each a giant circular mass of belching flame,
floating there miles above the earth; the thunder of each city's giant
batteries, and the terrific brilliance of the storms of heat-shells
that struck from city to city; the great glowing craters of metal that
each striking shell made in a city, all these things seemed merged
in the six periscopic screens that enclosed us like some chaotic and
meaningless panorama!

I was aware of Yarnall's agonized expression, as we strove with every
power that was ours to save our great air-cities from destruction. For
now in our cluster, city after city was falling beneath that deadly
fire of fusing shells. Los Angeles, Winnipeg, Panama, and Nashville
whirled down one after the other. And, though our batteries were still
thundering their roaring answers, our surrounded cities were still
striking savagely out, with the colossal batteries of New York still
thundering loudest, I saw how swiftly we were being annihilated!
For, raging there in fearful battle high in the dusk between earth
and stars, there was left now hardly more than sixty of our hundred
air-cities; while in the circle about us there still hung, despite the
giant blows we had struck them, a hundred or more of the European and
Asiatic cities! And with all their guns thundering into us, the odds
were swiftly changing and becoming more in their favor!

Finally I stood up, as though jerked to my feet by some strange force
greater than myself, and wheeled toward the First Air Chief.

"It's the end now, Yarnall!" I cried to him above that thunderous roar
of battle that seemed splitting all the night about us: "The end for
all our cities within an hour if this keeps on!"

"The end!" he said, his own face grim: "But there's no escape--we can
only meet it fighting!"

My eyes held his fixedly in that tense moment. "The hundred cruisers in
the plaza outside!" I said: "The cruisers I had you keep waiting for
me--that last crazy plan of mine is our one chance now!"

"Your plan?" he cried, a flicker of hope rising into his eyes. But when
I explained that plan in a few swift words his eyes widened with sudden
stunned astonishment, and he cried out: "The thing's insane, Brant!
You'll never make it!"

"But it's our last chance!" I shouted to him as the thunderous drumming
of doom all about us deepened, and two more of our cities crashed
earthward. "It's the one last chance to save our cities!"

He paused there silent a second, then reached, wrung my hand tightly.
"Then go, Brant!" he said simply: "Take the hundred cruisers--and God
grant that you are able to do the thing!"

I shouted to the black-jacketed attendants who were working like
madmen around the great room's instrument-panels, cutting out motors
that the heat reached, switching in spare motors and tube-propellers,
keeping the mighty sustaining power of New York steady. Two of them
leaped swiftly at my call, to the side of Yarnall to take the places of
Connell and myself. And then Macklin and Hilliard who had been working
with them, were running toward us also, and we four were running across
the room and through the ante-rooms until we issued out from the
electrostatic tower's base into the great plaza.

Standing there in that plaza with the darkness gathering about us,
there stretched from horizon to horizon a boundless mass of gigantic
light-gemmed cities, our own and the titanic ring that encircled
us. The myriad lights of those cities, though, by which their
gun-crews worked the great batteries, were feeble in comparison to
the tremendous and blinding flares of brilliance in all directions
that were fountaining up in giant gouts of dazzling light. Across all
those cities floating, there leaped and flew the heat-shell flares,
and the thunder of the guns was deafening, titanic, like the thunder
of a stream of falling worlds! Beneath that thunder there came to us
thin, high cries, the wild cries of crowds in the towers of cities and
in their streets and plazas. And high, high above all these, far, far
overhead, began to gleam the pale mocking eyes of the distant, watching
stars.

All about us, in that moment that we burst out onto the plaza, it
seemed that heat-shells were striking and flaring. But the static-tower
itself was of a composition that the shells could not harm, the
rare refractory alloy that in air-cities is used only for the vital
power-towers. And, though shells had struck here and there at the
plaza's edge and on its surface, though there were on it and around it
still-glowing craters of fusing metal, few of the hundred close-massed
cruisers that waited with their crews upon it had suffered serious
injury in the awful course of the battle so far. And now Macklin
and Connell and Hilliard and I were racing across the plaza toward
those cruisers, into the foremost of them and up to its bridge-room.
Then Macklin jumped to the controls, as I called an order into the
distance-phone over the titanic drumming of guns. In the next moment
our hundred cruisers were driving up like mad things above the titanic
battle raging there above.

Up--up--through a wild inferno of rushing shells, up over all the
struggling, thundering, reeling cities we sped, on the wild venture
that was our last wild chance. As we drove upward, I now saw others
of our central mass of air-cities falling. Atlanta and Cleveland and
Mexico City were whirling downward, giant masses of lights in which
glowed countless great fusing craters of metal, gyrating insanely down
through the darkness to crash in awful destruction on the surface
of the affrighted earth far below! Hardly more than a half-hundred,
indeed, remained of all our air-cities now; and the odds against them
swiftly lengthened, as they were hammered still upon an anvil of fire
and death by the circle that hemmed them in. They were staggering ever
swifter, were reeling and swaying so that within a few minutes, even as
I had said, the remorseless fire from all about them would send them to
earth also, and wipe the last of the cities and peoples of the American
Federation from above the earth!

But, as I saw that, our own cruisers were whirling on above that
giant central mass, toward the great ring of enemy cities about
them. Macklin at the controls, with teeth set, sent our ship and
those behind it driving low above the awful combat with the storms
of rushing shells from both sides thick about us. Ship after ship
behind us was flaring and fusing and falling in white-glowing meteoric
destruction, unnoticed and unheeded by any in the titanic thundering
battle beneath! On--on--we sped, rocketing through the night, seemingly
the only cruisers now in the air, since the two great fleets had all
but annihilated themselves. Yet as we shot on, it seemed almost that
no cruisers could exist in the air over that great battle; since in
dozens, in scores, our own ships were falling, stricken by the tempests
of shells through which we were rushing!

But now we were reaching our goal, the giant Berlin that hung there
in the enemy's circle with all its mighty batteries thundering again
our doomed cities. Down toward it our cruisers swiftly rushed, unseen
by any in the wild confusion that swept that city below us; down
until we saw plainly the terrific spectacle of thundering batteries
and wildly-rushing men. Here and there were heat-shells bursting and
flaring in dazzling death, as the guns of our own cities roared savage
answer. Down toward it moved our ships, now hardly more than a score
in number, until there loomed just beneath us, that mighty central
static-tower in which we had been so recently imprisoned! As we shot
down toward it I beheld a glass ball above its tip, recognized that as
similar in purpose to the periscopic screens on our own tower's tip,
and then we had shot down past it, until our score of cruisers hoved
beside the great tower's side, at the fifth level.

Hovering there in that moment beside the tower, with all the wild
confusion raging beneath, and the plaza below still empty, we were
still unseen by any beneath, by any in the great batteries that were
thundering all around that plaza. Poised there in the darkness, we
could see that the windows beside us were bright-lighted; that guards
were swarming in the static-tower's upper levels, rushing to and
fro. Then as our cruiser's door swung open, just level with a window
beside us, Macklin and Connell and Hilliard and I were springing forth
from that door and across the narrow gap, through that window, our
heat-pistols ready in our hands! And at the same moment there burst
after us our crew, and from all the windows around that level, from all
the cruisers hovering beside those windows, a stream of black-uniformed
Americans with heat-pistols in hands were pouring into the tower's
fifth level!

Instantly the guards in that level were snapping their own weapons
up toward us; but before they could fire a score of cartridges from
our pistols had flicked and flared among them. As they sank lifeless
in scorched, burned heaps of flesh we were racing through the other
rooms and corridors of that level, killing the guards in it with our
heat-pistols, the surprise of our attack taking them unawares. So awful
was the drumming of the titanic battle all around and outside, that no
alarm of our presence penetrated to the levels above and below us, and,
now with the last of the guards wiped from that fifth level, I turned
toward my three companions.

"Connell and Hilliard! Take half our men and find your places here in
the tower, keeping anyone in its upper levels from getting farther down
than this! Macklin, watch with our cruisers outside--at this low height
the batteries around the plaza can't reach the ships, can't pivot
toward you--and be ready to keep anyone from getting into the tower
from outside!"

As they whirled to obey my orders with the other half of our men, some
hundred and fifty in number, I was running toward the cage-lifts. With
swift blows we destroyed the controls that guided them from level
to level of the tower, and then we rushed toward the narrow stairs
that led also downward. Another moment and we were rushing down those
stairs, while as we did so there came a scuffle of battle above us,
and we knew that the alarm had penetrated to the upper floors of the
tower and that the guards there were pouring down to battle with
Connell and Hilliard and their men. We leaped on downward, though, down
until we had burst down into the fourth level. There our surprise was
as complete, and before the guards there were aware of our presence,
almost, we had sent our heat-cartridges flaring among them, had swept
them from existence and were leaping down to the third level. And in
that it went the same; and in the second below it, and then, with
hearts pounding, we were rushing down into the first level!

As we poured down into its ante-rooms, its guards rushed toward us and
their own heat-pistols came up; but they too were falling in scorched
heaps a moment later, and we were dashing through the ante-rooms
toward the great circular inmost chamber that held the inmost controls
of this great air-city of Berlin! Through those ante-rooms we burst,
the surprised guards falling lifeless and burnt before us, and then
into the inmost circular room! All around its panelled walls moved
green-uniformed attendants who whirled with surprise from their
switches and dials at our entrance; while at the room's center there
was what seemed at first to be a great dull-glass globe! We knew that
that globe enclosed within itself the great table-map and controls of
Berlin; and now there were bursting out, through an opening in that
globe, the three green-uniformed men who had been within it--the First
Air Chief of the European Federation and the two officers who with him
had been controlling the movements of all the mighty combined European
and Asiatic cities!


                           The Captured City

As the leader saw me, his swarthy face lit for a moment with a flash
of recognition, of astonishment; and then he and his fellows were
leaping toward us, their hands flashing down toward the heat-pistols
at their belts as the attendants around the room jerked forth their
weapons also. But as they did so, our own heat-pistols flashed up and
for the next instant the great room seemed full of flares of blinding
light as the cartridges burst among them, sending them staggering and
swaying and falling in seared heaps! I shouted to my men swift orders
that sent a score of them to the great switch-panels to take the places
of the attendants there; while the remainder rushed toward the great
doors that opened from the tower's lowest level into the plaza outside.
Swiftly they closed those doors, barred them and massed behind them,
and then I was rushing toward the great dull-glass ball at the room's
center.

Inside that ball stood the great table-map upon its great block, while
beside it were the six levers and speed-knob which controlled the speed
and direction of Berlin. As I took the seat before them now, I gazed
about me, and saw that the great ball's interior was in effect a great
periscopic screen itself, one in which I could gaze in any direction
through the other great ball above the static-tower's tip. And now,
gazing into it around me there, I could see that in the outer night
there stretched still the giant ring of the enemy cities, of which this
Berlin was the heart, surrounding our own survivors and hammering them
still with that deadly fire which would soon bring them crashing to
earth. Far out over that mighty field of battle, its brilliant lights
and blinding heat-flares stabbing the darkness, and its thunderous roar
of guns shaking the air, I could gaze; while even at the same moment I
heard, high above, Connell and Hilliard and their men engaged fiercely
in holding the guards in the upper tower back. At the same instant came
a sudden knocking, an alarmed rapping and then a battering and crying
of voices against the great tower's door from outside; as the alarm
spread from the tower's upper levels!

Disregarding all these things, I grasped the controls before me,
watching the scene all about the great city through the periscopic
ball about me. Swiftly I jerked open the speed-knob, at the same
time slamming down one of the direction-levers; and, as I did so, I
saw that the whole great city of Berlin was soaring up now above the
ring of cities in which it had hovered, until it was a little above
their level. And then I thrust back the lever in my hand and jerked
down another; as I did so the mighty air-city of Berlin, the titanic
air-capital whose controls we had captured and which lay now in my
hands, was driving sidewise toward Geneva, that hung beside it in the
ring. Toward it we sped, driving at top speed toward it at a height a
little above it, so that our colossal base was on the level of Geneva's
upper towers. And with set teeth I drove Berlin onward, and in the next
moment its great base had sheared right across the upper towers of
Geneva, had mowed down those great towers like blades of wheat before a
reaper!

Then as Berlin drove on from above it I saw Geneva wavering in mid-air
behind us for a moment, and then crashing down to earth through the
night! I had mowed away the great electrostatic tower whose collection
of cosmic energy held it aloft, and Geneva went crashing down to earth
through the darkness like some giant comet of blazing lights plunging
to doom! And then, beneath my hands, Berlin was driving still onward
across and over that great ring of enemy cities, shearing now in the
same way across the towers of city upon city in that ring. Stockholm
and Cape Town and Bucharest fell as I mowed their power-towers from
them; and to them that awful spectacle of Berlin rushing upon them and
sending them to doom, crashing across their great towers, must have
been utterly stunning and inexplicable in that wild moment!

On--on--around the great ring I held, almost insane with wild fury and
excitement in that moment of triumph, driving through the night on our
captured air-city and sending city after city whirling to death. I was
dimly aware that the fighting above had ceased. Connell and Hilliard
and their men had wiped out the guards in the tower above, and they
had rushed down to defend the electrostatic tower's doors, against
which a wild battering was resounding now. Huge crowds were surging
madly against the tower as they felt their great city rushing through
the night and crashing in wild destruction across their fellow-cities!
But, in the wild excitement that was surging through me now, I paid
no attention to all about me; for surely I was swaying such colossal
forces as no man ever had swayed before.

The European and the Asiatic cities were breaking from me, in wild
panic, disorganized and shattered; since there came now no commands to
them from this city of Berlin that had held their commander. And as
they broke into a disorganized mass, the half-hundred American cities
massed in the center, who had seen the terrible havoc that Berlin,
beneath my hands, was wreaking upon their enemies, were themselves
rushing to the attack once more; and all their guns were thundering
toward the disorganized mass of their enemies!

Up toward Berlin from that mass as we rushed forward there rose to meet
us the giant air-capital of Peking, battered, scarred; its commander
seeking to stay this crazy destruction its sister-capital was wreaking
upon their own forces. Up it came; and for an instant it seemed that
Berlin and Peking must crash together bodily, but with a last wrench
of the speed-control I sent Berlin racing higher. And then, as we
met Peking, crashed over it, that mighty capital's power-tower also,
with its other clustered towers, was sheared from it by our great
base. Peking was wavering for a moment and then went whirling down to
death! Yet even as it wavered, slipped and fell, its great guns were
thundering savagely upon us until it had crashed to earth far below!


                               Victory!

And now, down through the night upon the mass of our enemy cities, I
sent Berlin slanting down toward them, at its full speed, and across
them in a tremendous ramming swoop that sheared the towers from a
dozen of them, even as they attempted confusedly to rise and meet
the onthundering mighty city! Of that confused, disorganized and
broken mass there remained of them at last hardly more than a score,
still savagely belching death from their guns toward our half-hundred
American cities and still sending an occasional one downward! But now
as I whirled the giant mass of Berlin back toward them like a striking,
gigantic bird of prey, I was aware of a tremendous battering and
clanging of metal; and at the same moment Hilliard was shouting to me
from the great doors that opened from the ante-rooms into the plaza.

"They're breaking down the doors, Brant!" he was screaming above the
wild thunder of battle and the clamor of giant crowds that surged
against those doors outside: "Fight on, though--we'll try to hold them
back!"

"Hold them a moment longer!" I yelled back to him: "A moment more--!"

For now I sent Berlin whirling downward in another terrific swoop
across the mass of our enemy cities and it sheared across half their
mass, as they sought by rising or sinking to avoid that deadly swoop.
But a half-score were left of them now, and now the half-hundred cities
of the American Federation had gathered about them and were hammering
them with terrific fire. No gun sounded now on Berlin, all its crews
and soldiers were rushing wildly across it toward the electrostatic
tower, as the city whirled and crashed and fought and ran there against
their own allied cities! Caught in the terrific fire of the cities
around them, the half-score European and Asiatic cities were going
down with guns thundering into annihilation. But now I was aware at
the same moment of a terrific uproar there at the tower's doors and of
wild shouts and clanging blows there as our men fought to hold back the
madly surging crowds outside!

Gripping the levers before me for one last effort, I jerked open the
speed-control to its widest; and then, as it shot above the mass of the
European and Asiatic cities, only a half-dozen in number now, I whirled
the mighty mass of Berlin down upon them in one last tremendous swoop
from which they sought in vain to swerve. They too were hesitating for
a moment and then went whirling down to death, the last of the European
and Asiatic cities save for Berlin itself about me! And then, as I
brought that city to a stay, with the last of its companions crashing
beneath and with the American cities hanging all about us now, there
was a great clang of falling metal at the tower's doors, and back
through them wild crowds without were pushing our black-uniformed
defenders!

Connell and Hilliard at their head, our men were being pushed back
through the ante-rooms, back toward the great circular room in which
I sat at the controls; and, as I gazed out through the opening in the
great periscope ball about me, I saw that an instant more would see
them overpowering the last of our men, rushing in upon me to take
the city's controls once more! But as I saw that, I reached forward,
slammed down the lever that sent the city rushing downward! I gripped
that lever and with a supreme effort tore it completely from its
socket! The next moment a wilder cry came from the crowds fighting
through the door and the crowds over all the city outside, as they felt
that city whirling and swaying beneath them, felt it whirling down to
death through the night to annihilation!

And as they uttered that tremendous cry, as the swaying city flashed
downward, their struggle at the door forgotten in that awful moment of
doom, I was aware subconsciously that I was staggering with Connell and
Hilliard and our remaining men, up the narrow stair. Up to the great
tower's second level and to its windows, beside which hung our cruisers
with Macklin and a skeleton crew, holding them there beside the tower
even as the great city whirled with awful speed downward! Then we
jumped through those windows into the cruisers. And the next moment,
just as the cruisers with ourselves inside them drove upward like light
from the falling city, Berlin had crashed into the earth just beneath
us, with a terrific, annihilating shock that buckled it, broke it, made
of it but a great twisted mass of rended metal!

Then we were driving up toward the half-hundred remaining American
air-cities that hung still high above, the giant city of New York still
at their center. Up until we had soared above those cities and they lay
beneath us, giant circles of brilliant light, scarred here and there
with countless craters of fused metal! Their great crowds of peoples
had surged, now, from their towers, out into their squares and streets.
They gazed as if incredulously stunned by their deliverance, at the
empty air and night about them, where so shortly before had hung the
enemy that had been sending them to doom. In that moment, as we hung
there high over them, in that moment of incredible surprise and dawning
joy, it seemed that all the world was silent after the terrific thunder
of that wild rushing battle that had riven earth and sky so short a
time before. It was as though the night, and the winds about us, and
the white stars overhead, were as silent with astonishment in that
moment as the crowds on the cities that hung around and beneath us.

Then suddenly, from those cities, there was coming up toward us as
though from a single voice a single, mighty cry!


                               Dawnward

At dawn of the next day our half-hundred great air-cities prepared
to separate, to move back to those positions that had been theirs
before danger had brought them together. Through all of that night
they had hung there together, their streets crowded with weeping yet
rejoicing crowds; and, now that the dawn showed them the green plains
far beneath, they were beginning to depart. And we five, sitting there
within the periscopic screens in the power-tower of New York, were
watching them as they prepared to go.

Battered and scarred, all of them, by that titanic battle through which
all had fought, many of them with great towers fused and broken, and
scarred with great craters, they were crowding toward us. Washington
was foremost among them, until it hung just beside our city, its great
streets and plazas thronged with shouting crowds. And, in the wild
shouts of those crowds, we could hear our own names, their roaring
tribute. For, in their eyes, we had saved them by that last wild
effort of ours. And then Washington was moving away from us, toward
the southeast, speeding away and vanishing as a dark spot in the
southeastern sky.

And now another was crowding beside us, and another, and still they
came. Pittsburgh and Guatemala, Tacoma, Chicago and Philadelphia, Rio
de Janeiro, Kansas City and Vancouver--one by one they were driving
beside us, their giant bulks hanging beside New York, their mighty
cheers reaching us. They moved away to north and south and east and
west, to vanish as dark, dwindling spots in the skies, until New York
alone of them remained hovering there high above the earth. And then,
Yarnall's eyes returned to the screen beneath us, where there were
revealed the great, shattered wrecks, laying half-buried in the green
earth far below.

"We win," he said, slowly: "The American Federation wins; but at what
cost? Two-thirds of the world's cities have crashed to annihilation and
death, and a half of our own."

"It's so, Yarnall," I said, gazing down with him: "yet it was our
necessity, and not our will. They attacked us without warning;
attacked us with mighty weapons which they had devised especially to
annihilate us all--and we could but defend ourselves."

"I know it, Brant," he said: "We could do nothing else--but I am
glad--glad, man!--only that this greatest of all wars is the last."

"Earth's Last Air War!" It was Macklin speaking, thoughtfully: "Now,
the war lords of our enemies have gone, their people will join with us
to end all wars, to forget all! our enmities...."

"We will," I said, as I turned toward the controls, "but we five can
never forget what has happened."

And then, as the others sat silent at my words, I was opening the
speed-control before me, moving over one of the great levers, and
sending New York, with its great motors droning and its tube-propellers
hissing, away to the east; toward the sunrise, faster and faster,
rushing eastward over the green plains that were now rolling swiftly
back far beneath. On all the mighty city around us, in all its
streets and plazas, its great surging crowds were shouting still, a
great, rejoicing clamor. But we five there at the city's controls, in
the great tower, sat silent and unmoving. Gazing out into the blue
cloudless heavens before us as our city rushed dawnward, we looked into
the face of the morning sun. It was the sun rising on a world at peace.


                                The End





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