Instantly Yarnall had uttered a swift order; and as Connell's quick voice sent that order flying out to our cruiser-masses, they too whirled upward and forward to meet the onrushing enemy fleets. Then, far out in mid-air to east and west of us the great cruiser-fleets had met, had smashed into each other with blind fury. Through our screens we saw cruisers enveloped by scores in blinding flares, in that first moment of combat, as they raged in two separate mighty battles.
But, east and west, our own cruisers were outnumbered two to one and, despite their fierce resistance, were being pressed steadily back toward our gathered cities. Closer and closer through the air toward us were reeling those struggling lines of cruisers, more and more American ships falling in white-hot destruction as the heat-guns of their opponents concentrated upon them. Still far beyond them, to east and west, the colossal masses of the European and Asiatic air-cities were now rushing on toward us! Yarnall sent another order flying out, and the next moment a mass of cruisers that had remained at the edges of our gathered cities, on either side, and had not been in the first battle, were leaping forward now, like suddenly released hounds after prey. A score of them to the eastern combat and a score to the western one they flashed; and each, as it reached the lines of struggling ships, shot up over them and then flashed along their lines above them. And as they did, there shot downward from them over the battling cruisers intense jets of concentrated water-vapor, which puffed out instantly into great white cloud-masses that enveloped all the grappling thousands of ships!
Yarnall had brought into the battle, I saw, those great artificial cloud projectors that had saved us in our first great battle over the Atlantic! And, even as their white masses enveloped the struggling ships, he sent forth another order; and our own cruisers shot upward and downward out of those cloud-masses, at the very instant that they had been formed. Then, with all our own cruisers clear of the cloud-masses to east and west, and the European and Asiatic ships inside them driving for the moment in blind confusion, our cruisers poured a deadly hail of heat-shells down into the cloud-masses and the thousands of ships that swirled inside them! Only for a moment was it that they remained within the cloud-masses before fighting their way free; but in that moment they had been unable to fire a single effective shell at our own ships outside, and we had poured a veritable storm of deadly shells into the cloudy masses. So when, a moment later, the European and Asiatic ships broke from the vapor-clouds east and westward, our broadsides had taken toll of hundreds of their blinded ships, and hardly more than our own forces did they number now!
But, when they broke free from the cloud-masses and into open air again, they did not advance toward our awaiting ships; instead they shot back from either front toward their cities, in answer to some mysterious order. At once a similar order from Yarnall brought flashing back, to form again above our own cities, our own ships—still nearly two thousand strong and almost as many in number as the combined cruisers of our enemies. I heard dimly the great cheers that were rolling across all our cities, for this mighty blow which had beaten back our enemies' cruiser-fleets once more. Then those cheers died swiftly away; for, far away to east and west, the gigantic masses of the approaching air-cities loomed larger and larger, rushing through the air toward us!
Eastward the European Federation was approaching, in a gigantic circle that seemed to fill the whole eastern sky. To us three sitting there amid our periscopic screens, it was as though all the eastern screen was filled with that great oncoming mass of cities: Paris, London, Moscow, Cairo, Rome—all the tremendous air-cities of the great European Federation—and their capital of Berlin still at the center.
And westward, upon our western screen, loomed equally gigantic the similar circle of air-cities of the Asiatic Federation. Peking, the third in size of the world's air-capitals, at the center of its cluster of cities rushed at the same smooth speed toward us, with Shanghai and Tokio and Bombay and Rangoon foremost in its circle. From east and west thus the two stupendous circles of cities rushed toward our own, grimly waiting; and, as we watched them, there flashed over me in that tense moment a strange wonder as to the feelings with which one of a hundred years before would have watched this battle. Then I laid aside that passing wonder as the two great circles drew nearer to the range of our great heat-gun batteries. And this, surely, was a spectacle that none had ever seen or dreamed before—this spectacle of the world's mighty cities converging swiftly upon each other in battle to the death!
And as strange, too, must have been the sight of us three, sitting there amid our box-like periscopic screens, the heart of the mighty tower's base; yet seeing and directing from there all the great mass of the hundred mighty cities around us.
"They're not going to join forces!" I exclaimed: "They're going to strike us at the same moment from east and west!"
Yarnall nodded, his eyes intent upon the screens: "Either that," he said, "or—"