d miles behind, where a
white-haired admiral said: "Ah! Good boy! Get those bombers
up--pronto!"

Chris commanded a superb view of the ZX-2, whose gleaming shape,
showering rays of sunlight, hung like a thing in a painting over the
Black Fleet. He stared at the far-off dirigible, lost in admiration of
her trim lines, pausing a minute before returning to his own ZX-1. At
that distance, the mammoth craft seemed no more than four inches long,
yet, through his telescopic sight, he could discern her markings,
machine-gun batteries and the airplane rack along her belly plainly.
One plane, he saw, was suspended from the rack; the others were
scouting for the Blue Fleet, even as he had scouted for the Black. He
wondered if something were wrong with the plane left behind. Somehow,
it did not look quite familiar.

But, even as he watched, it dropped from the automatic rack, then
straightened and soared dizzily up. And, from one of the airplane
carriers' broad decks, he saw two pursuit craft begin to rise. He
grinned. They'd seen him, were coming after him!

He gripped the stick, prepared to swerve around. He had already raised
a spread-fingered hand for a derisive parting gesture, when suddenly
he stiffened. The hand dropped as if paralyzed.

"Good Lord!" he gasped. "What--"

The mighty thousand-foot dirigible ZX-2, pride of the Navy and all
America, had wobbled drunkenly in her path. She stuck her nose down,
and then her whole vast frame shivered like a wind-whipped leaf as the
dull roar of an explosion rolled over the sea. A huge sliver of hide
was stripped from her as if by magic, revealing the skeleton of
girders inside--revealing a tongue of crimson that licked out and
welled into a hell of flame.

Chris's blood froze. He watched the ZX-2 wallow in her death throes,
writhe in the fiery doom that had struck her in seconds, that was
devouring her with awful rapidity while thousands of men, blanched and
trembling, gazed on helplessly. He saw her plunge, a blazing inferno,
into the sea beneath....

There were old pals on her--buddies, gone in a flash of time!

This wasn't a war game. This was tragedy, stark before his eyes.

* * * * *

The Black Fleet forgot its mimic battle. Radio telephone messages
winged over the horizon to the approaching Blue Fleet. The Black
dreadnoughts hove to; launches with ashen-faced men in white manning
them dropped overboard; a dozen destroyers rolled in t