"You have a plan?" the First Air Chief asked, but I shook my head.
"No more than an idea," I said: "An idea that may help us if the battle goes against us, if their attack is too strong for us. Even then it is too insane, perhaps, to be of any use, but it might help us—"
Yarnall nodded assent, and then Macklin and Hilliard had joined the two dozen or more of black-garbed attendants and engineers who were busy at the great switchboards that lined the circular room's walls. They scrutinized its dials to determine the rate of the vast currents rushing down from the power-tower's tip far above to the motors in the city's great base; added a fresh battery of transformers or threw in resistances to hold that current steady; and moved ceaselessly about the walls in their anxious watch. Now, Yarnall and Connell and I were marking our own places, the three metal seats there behind the big table-map, with the great screens of the electrical periscopes all about us. Yarnall would sit in the center, with eyes upon the red circles on the great map, tensely watching their progress, as admiral of our mighty fleet of colossal cities, ready to direct it and our cruisers to the battle. Connell would be at his right, before him the black mouthpiece and speaker of a single distance-phone. Behind that were the scores of switches and intricate controls, which connected that distance-phone to the operators of all our hundred air-cities.
The Battle Nears
As the third of the trio, I would sit at Yarnall's left, before me the six switch-levers which sent the colossal city of New York whirling through the air in any direction; while beside them was the gleaming knob which regulated the city's speed. The great batteries of New York were at my command also; all their mighty heat-guns around the city's edge and around our electrostatic tower and elsewhere were controlled by the distance-phone whose mouthpiece rose before me. The great batteries of all our other cities were controlled in the same way by their own operators, and were subject like New York to the commands of the First Air Chief beside me, who could maneuver our whole great armada of tremendous cities at will through the air. In the city of San Francisco, too, we knew, was the Second Air Chief, placed there to take command in case New York were destroyed or the First Air Chief disabled.
Thus, on the morrow were grouped we three, who were to sway such colossal forces in a battle as no men had seen before. Now, Yarnall was pointing to the table-map's surface, where the red massed circles of the European and Asiatic Federation armadas were indicated but a few hundred miles on either side of our own great mass of cities. Watching them there, we sat in silence, save for the clicking of occasional switches by the engineers about us. From far away, far across New York and all the other air-cities gathered around it, there was coming the dull, dim throbbing of the life of millions that swarmed through those cities. And now Yarnall reached forward and touched the control of the great electrical periscopes whose screens boxed us in.
Instantly those dull-glass screens were alive with light, and it was as though we were gazing forth from the very tip of the power-tower out over our gathered mass of cities. North and east and south and west, from all the screens about us the views were alike, of a tremendous mass of clustered metal towers that encircled New York. Below us was the screen, above which our metal seats were suspended on supports. It seemed a trap-door through which we were gazing down toward the green plains far beneath; though in reality all the city's massive base lay between us and that view. So intensely realistic was the scene that lay about us that we all but forgot the great circular room in which we really were, and seemed suspended high in air above the great mass of our gathered air-cities.
"The enemy armadas," said Yarnall, his voice low, "will be in sight within fifteen minutes."
For upon the map the two masses of red circles were rushing on from east and west, and seemed now almost upon the mass of circles that was our own great fleet of cities. Looking out over those cities, through the periscopic screens about us, we could see the forts raising their great guns to firing range. I realized, as I saw it, that the battle now ready to start would mean annihilation to half the world. This was indeed Armageddon, when on earth itself was left no human being at peace; when every nation was rushing through the air toward this last conflict!