"Wait," said Danny O'Rourke calmly, and glanced at his watch; "wait for another ten minutes! He's over Boston now. And he's waitin' there for me—though he doesn't know it yet. But I'll be droppin' in on him."
"Don't be an utter fool, Danny," urged the voice of the Chief; "there isn't a thing you can do. You try to come down on him, and he'll do as he did with the cruisers—just slip aside like lightning and nail you with his damned heat ray when you're below! I'm near Boston now. You keep away. Where can I meet you? We've got to think—got to do something!"
And Danny, before he opened the switch that ended their talk, said meditatively: "Like lightnin' he moves ... but he'll have to move faster than lightnin' to dodge me. And if you're near Boston, stick around; I'm comin' now, but not to meet you, Chief; I've got another important engagement. I'm keepin' it for—for the Infant. And give the Infant the credit, Chief; give it all to him, he's earned it: he's paid for it in full." Then the snap of a switch cut off the sound of Danny's voice before it showed a tell-tale quaver.
It was steady some minutes later, when Danny swept in above the mounting clouds that he had learned to know. Beneath them invisible fingers of death were sweeping back and forth where men and women ran shrieking in terror or waited calmly and dry-eyed for the end. Above them a slender rounded thing wove its pattern of destruction back and forth ... back and forth. A spectral ship—a pale phantom, elusive and dimly seen until it came against the black of rolling smoke from below.
But to Danny O'Rourke, slanting down from tremendous heights, the white shape was never lost. On the cross hairs of his directional sights the ghostly ship hung, and Danny threw his own red rocket like a living flame over and down where the white one sensed his coming and waited.
Beside him a human voice, high with horror, called to him. "Come back!" the Chief of the Mountain Division was commanding. "Danny! For the love of Heaven, turn back!"
But the voice was unheard by Danny O'Rourke. There was another voice speaking ... he could almost see the smiling pink and white face of one beside him who spoke of his "little tin ship" ... spoke, too, of a white ship that would be like a great thunder-cloud ... and of his own screaming meteor that was like the earth ... and there was to be a messenger of death like the hammer of Thor that would flash between the two....
Danny saw the white one slipping easily aside; the ship was swelling suddenly before him—it was close ... but the jagged lightning—the ripping flash of blue that joined the two craft in a crashing arc—was neither seen nor heard by Danny. Danny was too busy to notice, for he was engaged in smiling converse with one whom he called the "Infant" and whose pink and white face beamed gladly upon him "like a damned little cherub," as Danny was telling him....