"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."