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.
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!