With the words, he gave a brief order and, as Connell's voice flashed that order to all our confused mass of cities, they leaped upward in sudden concerted motion, all their motors' energy turned suddenly into their vertical lifting power. But, as they shot upward thus, to win free of the circle about us, that circle lifted at the same speed as our own mass, hovering still around us and beating us still with all the relentless fire of their massed batteries. And, when we shot suddenly downward in an attempt to escape from below they sank downward at as quick a speed, were encircling us still. And now, beneath that awful hammering fire of all the massed cities that enclosed us, our own were beginning to stagger; to sway and reel!
The titanic circle of enemy air-cities about us and our own great throng of cities, each a giant circular mass of belching flame, floating there miles above the earth; the thunder of each city's giant batteries, and the terrific brilliance of the storms of heat-shells that struck from city to city; the great glowing craters of metal that each striking shell made in a city, all these things seemed merged in the six periscopic screens that enclosed us like some chaotic and meaningless panorama!
I was aware of Yarnall's agonized expression, as we strove with every power that was ours to save our great air-cities from destruction. For now in our cluster, city after city was falling beneath that deadly fire of fusing shells. Los Angeles, Winnipeg, Panama, and Nashville whirled down one after the other. And, though our batteries were still thundering their roaring answers, our surrounded cities were still striking savagely out, with the colossal batteries of New York still thundering loudest, I saw how swiftly we were being annihilated! For, raging there in fearful battle high in the dusk between earth and stars, there was left now hardly more than sixty of our hundred air-cities; while in the circle about us there still hung, despite the giant blows we had struck them, a hundred or more of the European and Asiatic cities! And with all their guns thundering into us, the odds were swiftly changing and becoming more in their favor!
Finally I stood up, as though jerked to my feet by some strange force greater than myself, and wheeled toward the First Air Chief.
"It's the end now, Yarnall!" I cried to him above that thunderous roar of battle that seemed splitting all the night about us: "The end for all our cities within an hour if this keeps on!"
"The end!" he said, his own face grim: "But there's no escape—we can only meet it fighting!"
My eyes held his fixedly in that tense moment. "The hundred cruisers in the plaza outside!" I said: "The cruisers I had you keep waiting for me—that last crazy plan of mine is our one chance now!"
"Your plan?" he cried, a flicker of hope rising into his eyes. But when I explained that plan in a few swift words his eyes widened with sudden stunned astonishment, and he cried out: "The thing's insane, Brant! You'll never make it!"
"But it's our last chance!" I shouted to him as the thunderous drumming of doom all about us deepened, and two more of our cities crashed earthward. "It's the one last chance to save our cities!"
He paused there silent a second, then reached, wrung my hand tightly. "Then go, Brant!" he said simply: "Take the hundred cruisers—and God grant that you are able to do the thing!"