"All our American Federation air-cities," Macklin told me: "are massed together, hanging south of the Great Lakes. From Buenos Aires to Winnipeg, they've come."
"You think, then, that the European and Asiatic Federation air-cities are going to make a simultaneous attack from both sides?" I shouted to him above the roaring of our flight. He nodded emphatically.
"Undoubtedly. The Asiatic Federation cities are over the Pacific now, and are keeping in touch with the European ones by distance-phone to time their attack to coincide from east and west. They know our own cities have massed together, must know now that they've been equipped with the great new speed-tubes also; but they're coming on."
"Two to one," I said: "Two hundred air-cities attacking our one hundred. God, what a battle it will be!"
But now Hilliard had broken into our conversation, was pointing far ahead toward a dark, flat mass that stood out against the brilliant western sky, and toward which we were moving. The terrific speed at which we had been racing on for hours was decreasing now. Far beneath the land was still rolling back at great speed, long green plains now; since already we had flashed west over the Alleghanies. Then, as the dark mass westward grew steadily with our approach to it, other ships were driving suddenly beside our own, watchful patrols that drove down upon our hundred cruisers and swiftly challenged them. Macklin answered those challenges by the distance-phone, but for the moment I paid small attention to him, gazing forward with heart beating rapidly at the great mass that hung high in mid-air before us. For, as we drove closer toward that mass, it was becoming visible to our eyes as our goal, the hundred giant air-cities of the American Federation!
The hundred mighty American Federation air-cities were clustered there miles above the green plains, in a great circular mass, with New York, most colossal of all of them, at the center! Cities that had long hung over North and South America from sea to sea, air-cities whose names were those of the long-vanished cities of the land, that once had dotted the surface of those continents. Boston and Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Chicago, Mexico City and Quebec, Valparaiso and Miami—these and scores of others hung there in that great cluster. All the air-cities of the American Federation were gathered here about their air-capital of New York to withstand the tremendous attacks now closing in from east and west!
Massed there as they were, the hundred mighty air-cities seemed, even as the European ones had seemed to me, but one vast plain of metal towers and streets. As far as the eye could reach, there stretched away the tremendous forest of those soaring towers, with here and there rising from them the taller spires of each city's great electrostatic tower. And, everywhere among those towers, everywhere around the rim of each great circular air-city and at its center there loomed great batteries of giant heat-guns; while here and there, on the plazas of the cities rested the turret-like cubes of the recalled great air-forts, their own grim heat-guns protruding expectantly. And through streets and towers, between the batteries and around the air-forts and across the plazas of the assembled cities, there swarmed the millions of their peoples, wild with excitement now as the last dread hour approached. And, massed there above all the great floating cities, hung grim and motionless the two thousand or more cruisers that still remained of the American Federation's eastern and western fleets.
It was toward these massed battle-cruisers, at a level somewhat higher than that of the air-cities, that our own hundred cruisers were rushing. Over those assembled giant cities we raced, the great mass of them below us almost hiding the ground beneath. As we shot above them, I saw now that they had been ranged in a tremendous circle, the great capital of New York hanging in the center. Across the great ring of the air-cities we rushed; were racing at last above New York, toward its own giant power-tower. Then we had reached it, and were sinking vertically downward, until our hundred cruisers came to rest upon the central plaza. Here, even as in Berlin, the central plaza was reserved always for the ships of the First Air Chief and his followers; so that, although immense crowds now beat through all the streets and plazas about it, there were none around our hundred ships. And in an instant Macklin and Hilliard and I were out of that which had brought us and hastening across the clear space toward the static-tower's base.
Preparations