He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and
aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away
in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not have
discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun. But that
night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was handy and quite
prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not a couple of miles away;
he was going to Berlin with that and just one other man. Two men would
be enough for what he meant to do....

He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts
science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of destruction,
and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic type....

He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming face.
He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great pleasures.
There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour, about the voice
in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his remarks with the long
finger of a hand that was hairy and exceptionally big.

'We'll give them tit-for-tat,' he said. 'We'll give them tit-for-tat. No
time to lose, boys....'

And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony
the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing
sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to
the heart of the Central European hosts.

It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above the
banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to plunge at once
into their wet obscurities should some hostile flier range into vision.
The tense young steersman divided his attention between the guiding
stars above and the level, tumbled surfaces of the vapour strata that
hid the world below. Over great spaces those banks lay as even as a
frozen lava-flow and almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged
areas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches
of the land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite
distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps and
signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid through a
boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. But if the world
was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through that vapour floor came
the deep roar of trains, the whistles of horns of motor-cars, a sound
of rifle fire away to the south, and as he drew near his destination the
c