ship, for so great was our speed now, that I began
to fear we would have difficulty in checking ourselves. We were
literally falling upward, and with terrific acceleration.

Fortunately, we had several minutes in which to solve this difficulty,
which none of us, strangely enough, had foreseen. It was Gibbons who
found the answer.

"You'll be all right if all of you grab the wire tight when I give the
word," he said. "First I'll start reeling it in at full speed. You won't
get much of a jar, and then I'll decrease its speed again gradually, and
its weight will hold you back. Are you ready? One--two--three!"

We all grabbed tightly with our gloved hands as he gave the word. We
must have been rising a good bit faster than he figured, however, for it
wrenched our arms considerably, and the maneuver set up a sickening
pendulum motion.

For a while all we could do was swing there in an arc that may have been
a quarter of a mile across, about three and a half miles above the city,
and still more than a mile from our ship.

Gibbons skilfully took up the slack as our momentum pulled up the line.
Then at last we had ourselves under control again, and continued our
upward journey, checking our speed somewhat with our gloves.

There was not one of us who did not breathe a big sigh of relief when we
scrambled through the hatch safely into the ship again, cast off the
ultron line and slammed the trap shut.

Little realizing that we had a still more terrible experience to go
through, we discussed the information Blash and Gaunt had between them
extracted from the Han records, and the advisability of ultrophoning
Hart at once.

CHAPTER X

The Walls of Hell

The traitors were, it seemed, a degenerate gang of Americans, located a
few miles north of Nu-yok on the wooded banks of the Hudson, the
Sinsings. They had exchanged scraps of information to the Hans in return
for several old repellor-ray machines, and the privilege of tuning in on
the Han electronic power broadcast for their operation, provided their
ships agreed to subject themselves to the orders of the Han traffic
office, while aloft.

The rest wanted to ultrophone their news at once, since there was always
danger that we might never get back to the gang with it.

I objected, however. The Sinsings would be likely to pick up our
message. Even if we used the directional projector, they might have
scouts out to the west and south in the big inter-gang stretc