“Damn it!” he shouted, “will you sit here now and quibble over what you think in your wisdom is possible or not. Get outside those doors—there’s an open park beyond—and I’ll knock your technicalities all to hell!”
The door slammed behind him before the words could be spoken to place him under arrest, and he tore across a velvet lawn to leap into a taxi.
There was a rising storm of indignant protest within the room that he had left. There were admirals, purple of face, who made heated remarks about the lack of discipline in the army, and generals who turned accusingly where the big figure of Colonel Boynton was still seated.
It was the Secretary of War who stilled the tumult and claimed the privilege of administering the rebuke which was so plainly needed. “Colonel Boynton,” he said, and there was no effort to soften the cutting edge of sarcasm in his voice, “it was at your request and suggestion that this outrageous meeting was held. Have you any more requests or suggestions?”
The colonel rose slowly to his feet.
“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” he said coldly, “I have. I know Captain Blake. He seldom makes promises; when he does he makes good. My suggestion is that you do what the gentleman said—step outside and see your technicalities knocked to hell.” He moved unhurriedly toward the door.
It was a half-hour’s wait, and one or two of the more openly skeptical had left when the first roar came faintly from above. Colonel Boynton led the others to the open ground before the building. “I have always found Blake a man of his word,” he said quietly, and pointed upward where a tiny speck was falling from a cloud-flecked sky.
Captain Blake had had little training in the operation of the ship, but he had flown it across the land and had concealed it where fellow officers were sworn to secrecy. And he felt that he knew how to handle the controls.
But the drop from those terrible heights was a fearful thing, and it ended only a hundred feet above the heads of the cowering, shouting humans who crouched under the thunderous blast, where a great shell checked its vertical flight and rebounded to the skies.