ruggles, we got into
our special air helmets and adjusted the pressure. At our signal,
Gibbons exhausted the air in the compartment, pumping it into the body
of the ship, and as the little signal light flashed, Wilma threw open
the hatch.

Setting the ultron-wire reel, I climbed through, and began to slide down
gently.

We all had our belts on, of course, adjusted to a weight balance of but
a few ounces. And the five-mile reel of ultron wire that was to be our
guide, was of gossamer fineness, though, anyway, I believe it would have
lifted the full weight of the five of us, so strong and tough was this
invisible metal. As an extra precaution, since the wire was of the
purest metal, and therefore totally invisible, even in daylight, we all
had our belts hooked on small rings that slid down the wire.

I went down with the end of the wire. Wilma followed a few feet above
me, then Barker, Gaunt and Blash. Gibbons, of course, stayed behind to
hold the ship in position and control the paying out of the line. We all
had our ultrophones in place inside our air helmets, and so could
converse with one another and with Gibbons. But at Wilma's suggestion,
although we would have liked to let the Big Boss listen in, we kept them
adjusted to short-range work, for fear that those who had been clearing
with the Hans, and against whom we were on a raid for evidence, might
also pick up our conversation. We had no fear that the Hans would hear
us. In fact, we had the added advantage that, even after we landed, we
could converse freely without danger of their hearing our voices through
our air helmets.

For a while I could see nothing below but utter darkness. Then I
realized, from the feel of the air as much as from anything, that we
were sinking through a cloud layer. We passed through two more cloud
layers before anything was visible to us.

Then there came under my gaze, about two miles below, one of the most
beautiful sights I have ever seen; the soft, yet brilliant, radiance of
the great Han city of Nu-yok. Every foot of its structural members
seemed to glow with a wonderful incandescence, tower piled up on tower,
and all built on the vast base-mass of the city, which, so I had been
told, sheered upward from the surface of the rivers to a height of 728
levels.

The city, I noticed with some surprise, did not cover anything like the
same area as the New York of the 20th Century. It occupied, as a matter
of fact, only the lower h