place."

We were indeed hungry again. And while we were eating Tako gestured
to the window. "Look there. Your world seems visible a little."

Just before we slept it had seemed that mingled with the shadows of
Tako's world was the gray outline of an ocean surface beneath us. I
gazed out at the dim void now. Our flight was far slower than
before. We were slackening speed for the coming halt. And I saw now
that the shadows outside were the mingled wraiths of two spectral
worlds, with us drifting forward between and among them. The terrain
of Tako's world was bleaker, more desolate and more steeply
mountainous than ever. There were pits and ravines and gullies with
jagged mountain spires, cliffs and towering gray masses of rock.

And mingled with it, in a general way coincidental with it in the
plane of the same space, we could see now the tenuous shapes of our
own world. Vague, but familiar outlines! We had passed Sandy Hook!
The ocean lay behind us. A hundred feet or so beneath us was the
level water of the Lower Bay.

"Don!" I murmured. "Look there! Long Island off there! And that's
Staten Island ahead of us!"

"Almost at our destination," Tako observed. And in a moment he
gestured again. "There is your city. Have a good look at your dear
New York."

* * * * *

Diagonally ahead through the window we saw the spectres of the great
pile of masonry on lower and mid-Manhattan. Spectres of the giant
buildings; the familiar skyline, and mingled with it the ghostly
gray outlines of the mountains and valley depths of Tako's world.
All intermingled! The mountain peaks rose far higher than the
tallest of New York's skyscrapers; and the pits and ravines were
lower than the waters of the harbor and rivers, lower than the
subways and the tubes and the tunnels.

"Another carrier!" Don said abruptly. "See it off there!"

It showed like a great gray projectile coming in level with us. And
then we saw two others in the distance behind us. Fantastic, ghostly
arrival of the enemy! Weird mobilization here within the space of
the doomed New York.

"Can they see us?" I murmured. "Tako, the people down there on
Staten Island--can they see us?"

"Yes," he smiled. "Don't you think so? Look! Are not those ships of
war? Hah! Gathered already--awaiting our coming!"

I have already given a brief summary of the events of the days and
nights just past here in New York. The terror at the influx of
apparit