"Nitro squadron Hundred and One, on the fire!" it said, and gave a position in quick figures. Danny's own voice transmitter was on. He snapped out the position of the lone fighter. "Get in there!" he ordered; "Show your stuff! No—wait! Follow me; I'll lead you in!"
And to himself he added: "Now we'll see what pure nitrogen will do in a real scrap."
He closed a switch, and from a compartment at his back a low whine rose and grew to a scream. It was echoed in a shriek more shrill from the bow where a port had opened to take in the air. And Danny knew that that air, of which eighty percent was nitrogen, was being rid of its oxygen in the retort at his back, and the nitrogen alone was pouring out beneath him in a tremendous and ceaseless blast.
The squadron had appeared—a row of dots that came in on a long slanting drive from the ten thousand level. They swung into faultless formation to "ride his tail" into whatever flaming breath he might lead. And Danny O'Rourke threw his red ship down and into the valley that seethed with a brew from the Pit itself.
There had been pines in that valley, and firs towering hundreds of feet in the air. They were living torches now, half seen through a whirling chaos of flame. It billowed as if the very gases that burned were tortured in the burning. The black-red of smoke-choked flames parted at times to show a deadlier white light below—a white, glaring heat in the heart of this gigantic, furnace—a scintillant, quivering horror on which Danny fixed the cross hairs of his sights as he rode his screaming meteor down into the pit.
"Bats out o' hell!" And now the brood was returning, it must have seemed. But beneath them, as they passed, that vivid whiteness went dead. Yet before it changed Danny saw unbelievable things—pools of molten rock, glaring white through the smoke.
Up and out at the end of the valley! And Danny gasped for breath even in the shelter of his cabin's insulated walls. And, used as he was to the red menace that they fought, he went sick at sight of a message that spelled itself beside his controls.
"Ship number six down. Failed to come out." It was signed with the name of the squadron commander who had followed where he led.
And the valley! For five miles they had laid a blanket of non-combustible gases. For five minutes, perhaps, their course could be seen. And at the end of that time it was as it had been before, and the flames raged on unchecked.