Cities in the air

by Edmond Hamilton

I shouted to the black-jacketed attendants who were working like madmen around the great room's instrument-panels, cutting out motors that the heat reached, switching in spare motors and tube-propellers, keeping the mighty sustaining power of New York steady. Two of them leaped swiftly at my call, to the side of Yarnall to take the places of Connell and myself. And then Macklin and Hilliard who had been working with them, were running toward us also, and we four were running across the room and through the ante-rooms until we issued out from the electrostatic tower's base into the great plaza.

Standing there in that plaza with the darkness gathering about us, there stretched from horizon to horizon a boundless mass of gigantic light-gemmed cities, our own and the titanic ring that encircled us. The myriad lights of those cities, though, by which their gun-crews worked the great batteries, were feeble in comparison to the tremendous and blinding flares of brilliance in all directions that were fountaining up in giant gouts of dazzling light. Across all those cities floating, there leaped and flew the heat-shell flares, and the thunder of the guns was deafening, titanic, like the thunder of a stream of falling worlds! Beneath that thunder there came to us thin, high cries, the wild cries of crowds in the towers of cities and in their streets and plazas. And high, high above all these, far, far overhead, began to gleam the pale mocking eyes of the distant, watching stars.

All about us, in that moment that we burst out onto the plaza, it seemed that heat-shells were striking and flaring. But the static-tower itself was of a composition that the shells could not harm, the rare refractory alloy that in air-cities is used only for the vital power-towers. And, though shells had struck here and there at the plaza's edge and on its surface, though there were on it and around it still-glowing craters of fusing metal, few of the hundred close-massed cruisers that waited with their crews upon it had suffered serious injury in the awful course of the battle so far. And now Macklin and Connell and Hilliard and I were racing across the plaza toward those cruisers, into the foremost of them and up to its bridge-room. Then Macklin jumped to the controls, as I called an order into the distance-phone over the titanic drumming of guns. In the next moment our hundred cruisers were driving up like mad things above the titanic battle raging there above.

Up—up—through a wild inferno of rushing shells, up over all the struggling, thundering, reeling cities we sped, on the wild venture that was our last wild chance. As we drove upward, I now saw others of our central mass of air-cities falling. Atlanta and Cleveland and Mexico City were whirling downward, giant masses of lights in which glowed countless great fusing craters of metal, gyrating insanely down through the darkness to crash in awful destruction on the surface of the affrighted earth far below! Hardly more than a half-hundred, indeed, remained of all our air-cities now; and the odds against them swiftly lengthened, as they were hammered still upon an anvil of fire and death by the circle that hemmed them in. They were staggering ever swifter, were reeling and swaying so that within a few minutes, even as I had said, the remorseless fire from all about them would send them to earth also, and wipe the last of the cities and peoples of the American Federation from above the earth!

But, as I saw that, our own cruisers were whirling on above that giant central mass, toward the great ring of enemy cities about them. Macklin at the controls, with teeth set, sent our ship and those behind it driving low above the awful combat with the storms of rushing shells from both sides thick about us. Ship after ship behind us was flaring and fusing and falling in white-glowing meteoric destruction, unnoticed and unheeded by any in the titanic thundering battle beneath! On—on—we sped, rocketing through the night, seemingly the only cruisers now in the air, since the two great fleets had all but annihilated themselves. Yet as we shot on, it seemed almost that no cruisers could exist in the air over that great battle; since in dozens, in scores, our own ships were falling, stricken by the tempests of shells through which we were rushing!

But now we were reaching our goal, the giant Berlin that hung there in the enemy's circle with all its mighty batteries thundering again our doomed cities. Down toward it our cruisers swiftly rushed, unseen by any in the wild confusion that swept that city below us; down until we saw plainly the terrific spectacle of thundering batteries and wildly-rushing men. Here and there were heat-shells bursting and flaring in dazzling death, as the guns of our own cities roared savage answer. Down toward it moved our ships, now hardly more than a score in number, until there loomed just beneath us, that mighty central static-tower in which we had been so recently imprisoned! As we shot down toward it I beheld a glass ball above its tip, recognized that as similar in purpose to the periscopic screens on our own tower's tip, and then we had shot down past it, until our score of cruisers hoved beside the great tower's side, at the fifth level.

Hovering there in that moment beside the tower, with all the wild confusion raging beneath, and the plaza below still empty, we were still unseen by any beneath, by any in the great batteries that were thundering all around that plaza. Poised there in the darkness, we could see that the windows beside us were bright-lighted; that guards were swarming in the static-tower's upper levels, rushing to and fro. Then as our cruiser's door swung open, just level with a window beside us, Macklin and Connell and Hilliard and I were springing forth from that door and across the narrow gap, through that window, our heat-pistols ready in our hands! And at the same moment there burst after us our crew, and from all the windows around that level, from all the cruisers hovering beside those windows, a stream of black-uniformed Americans with heat-pistols in hands were pouring into the tower's fifth level!

Instantly the guards in that level were snapping their own weapons up toward us; but before they could fire a score of cartridges from our pistols had flicked and flared among them. As they sank lifeless in scorched, burned heaps of flesh we were racing through the other rooms and corridors of that level, killing the guards in it with our heat-pistols, the surprise of our attack taking them unawares. So awful was the drumming of the titanic battle all around and outside, that no alarm of our presence penetrated to the levels above and below us, and, now with the last of the guards wiped from that fifth level, I turned toward my three companions.

"Connell and Hilliard! Take half our men and find your places here in the tower, keeping anyone in its upper levels from getting farther down than this! Macklin, watch with our cruisers outside—at this low height the batteries around the plaza can't reach the ships, can't pivot toward you—and be ready to keep anyone from getting into the tower from outside!"

As they whirled to obey my orders with the other half of our men, some hundred and fifty in number, I was running toward the cage-lifts. With swift blows we destroyed the controls that guided them from level to level of the tower, and then we rushed toward the narrow stairs that led also downward. Another moment and we were rushing down those stairs, while as we did so there came a scuffle of battle above us, and we knew that the alarm had penetrated to the upper floors of the tower and that the guards there were pouring down to battle with Connell and Hilliard and their men. We leaped on downward, though, down until we had burst down into the fourth level. There our surprise was as complete, and before the guards there were aware of our presence, almost, we had sent our heat-cartridges flaring among them, had swept them from existence and were leaping down to the third level. And in that it went the same; and in the second below it, and then, with hearts pounding, we were rushing down into the first level!