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.