I strode to the square little window, looked forth from it. It was quite open and unbarred, and large enough too to allow one to pass through it, yet as I projected my head from it and gazed up and downward in the darkness I saw that there was no need of bars across it. For the little window was set directly in the sheer, towering side of the mighty power-tower's pinnacle. Far up above our level soared that tremendous tapering tower, so far that the tip seemed among the stars above, while far below, a thousand feet at least, lay the smooth metal of the great plaza. And though there were other windows below and above us, each was separated a full ten feet or more from the other, and, as we knew, to merely escape from our cell into another level of the great tower would avail us nothing, since to gain the plaza outside we would need to pass through the tower's lower levels thronged always with armed guards. It seemed, indeed, that as Connell had said there was no hope of escape for us, the door being solid, thick metal, and as I turned back toward the other three something of Connell's own hopelessness had taken root within my heart.
And that hopelessness grew within me in the hours that followed. For when day came and illumined with brilliant light all the giant air-city that stretched far around us it seemed only to emphasize the utter helplessness of our position. Far beneath on the great plaza lay many cruisers, and could we win to one of them we might well make a break at top speed across the Atlantic, since so simple in design and so unvarying in their exhaustless power-supply are modern air-cruisers that one man alone at their bridge-room controls could operate them. Yet to win down to those cruisers, down to the great plaza's surface—that seemed impossible. And so as that day waned, and night swept over the great floating mass of the towers of Berlin, to be followed by day again, my despair was waxing ever stronger, deeper.
For during those days we could see plainly from our window the great preparations going on still in the air-city about us. Already throngs of workers had cleared away the twisted and fused wreckage that had been made by the attack of our ships, and new masses of supplies were pouring into Berlin in shipload after shipload from all the air-cities of the European Federation, to replace those we had destroyed in their great arsenals. The air seemed filled, indeed, with great freight-carriers and official cruisers arriving and departing. And beneath all this great surface activity and preparation, we knew, down in the great tube-propeller compartments of the air-city's mighty base, other and greater preparations were going on, other and different tube-propellers were replacing the city's tubes, and swiftly the time was approaching when all the city would be able to rush meteor-like through the air.
It was that knowledge that made our despair most deep. For though there was now a lull, apparently, in the great war's course, the European and Asiatic forces preparing for their final giant blow, and the Americans gathering their own forces apprehensively to resist the next attack, we knew that it was but the lull before the final terrible storm that was to settle the fate of earth's three mighty nations. And we knew, too, that it was the fate of our own American Federation that would be sealed in that gigantic attack, unless Connell could make his way soon to our land with his great secret. And that he could not do so, that he could not even escape from the little cell in which we were prisoned, was all so clear to us that almost I wished that death had come to me in the cruiser's crash to spare me the torture of mind that I and all of us were now undergoing.
It was a torture accentuated, I think, by the complete emptiness and eventlessness of those hours and days. Save for what we could see from our high window upon the city around us, we were as cut off from the world as though upon the moon. Twice each day, at dawn and at dusk, our door was opened by the guards that brought our food, that food being as in our own air-cities the paste-like synthetic compounds of artificial proteins and fats and carbohydrates which had decades before replaced the old natural foods. But though our door was thus flung open twice each day, there was no hope of escape for us in that fact. For the two guards who brought our food in to us carried their heat-pistols always in one hand, and always, night and day, there watched in the corridor outside a full score of similarly armed guards by whom one could not hope to pass living toward the cage-lifts. It seemed indeed, as Connell had said, that weeks of frenzied meditation could never disclose any plausible plan of escape, and so I lapsed with him into a state of half-lassitude that had been induced by our utter despair.
And so days passed. Not even the prospect of our own deaths which I knew to be looming before us, was sufficient to rouse me from that lassitude, not even the fact that at the end of that fortnight, as I had guessed, the great attack of the air-cities was to be launched upon the American Federation, and that it was for that reason that our captors had given us that time.
Connell, Macklin, myself—we three had faced in our time perils and risks enough, but so overwhelming was the doom that hung over us and over our nation now that it stunned us, held us in stupefied despair. But one of us there was that was not so stunned, and that was Hilliard, my young second officer. His eager, restive nature, chafing at our imprisonment and at the thing that was looming for our land, resisted stubbornly the deep hopelessness that had settled upon the rest of us, and hour after hour he spent in pacing about the little cell, or in striving to devise some means for escaping from it. And at last, upon the fourth day of our imprisonment there in the tower, he turned suddenly toward us with an eager cry upon his lips.