Then suddenly, from those cities, there was coming up toward us as though from a single voice a single, mighty cry!
Dawnward
At dawn of the next day our half-hundred great air-cities prepared to separate, to move back to those positions that had been theirs before danger had brought them together. Through all of that night they had hung there together, their streets crowded with weeping yet rejoicing crowds; and, now that the dawn showed them the green plains far beneath, they were beginning to depart. And we five, sitting there within the periscopic screens in the power-tower of New York, were watching them as they prepared to go.
Battered and scarred, all of them, by that titanic battle through which all had fought, many of them with great towers fused and broken, and scarred with great craters, they were crowding toward us. Washington was foremost among them, until it hung just beside our city, its great streets and plazas thronged with shouting crowds. And, in the wild shouts of those crowds, we could hear our own names, their roaring tribute. For, in their eyes, we had saved them by that last wild effort of ours. And then Washington was moving away from us, toward the southeast, speeding away and vanishing as a dark spot in the southeastern sky.
And now another was crowding beside us, and another, and still they came. Pittsburgh and Guatemala, Tacoma, Chicago and Philadelphia, Rio de Janeiro, Kansas City and Vancouver—one by one they were driving beside us, their giant bulks hanging beside New York, their mighty cheers reaching us. They moved away to north and south and east and west, to vanish as dark, dwindling spots in the skies, until New York alone of them remained hovering there high above the earth. And then, Yarnall's eyes returned to the screen beneath us, where there were revealed the great, shattered wrecks, laying half-buried in the green earth far below.
"We win," he said, slowly: "The American Federation wins; but at what cost? Two-thirds of the world's cities have crashed to annihilation and death, and a half of our own."
"It's so, Yarnall," I said, gazing down with him: "yet it was our necessity, and not our will. They attacked us without warning; attacked us with mighty weapons which they had devised especially to annihilate us all—and we could but defend ourselves."
"I know it, Brant," he said: "We could do nothing else—but I am glad—glad, man!—only that this greatest of all wars is the last."
"Earth's Last Air War!" It was Macklin speaking, thoughtfully: "Now, the war lords of our enemies have gone, their people will join with us to end all wars, to forget all! our enmities...."