pushed it askew; and then, since he did not
need it now, discarded it altogether.

* * * * *

Where we went I could not surmise, except that we flew low over the
sullen black waters of the Nares Sea and then headed northeast. We
kept well below the zero-height, with the dark crags of the Lowlands
passing under us.

The night grew darker. Storm clouds obscured the moon; and it was then
that De Boer shut off the mechanism of invisibility. The control room,
with only the watchful Gutierrez now in it--besides De Boer, Jetta and
myself--was silent and orderly. But there were sounds of roistering
from down the ship's corridor. The bandits, with this treasure of the
radiumized quicksilver ingots aboard, were already triumphantly
celebrating.

I sat whispering with Jetta. De Boer, busy with charts and
navigational instruments, ignored us, and Gutierrez, so long as we did
not move, seemed not to object to our whispers.

The night slowly passed. De Boer served us food, calling to one of his
men to shove a slide before us. For himself, he merely drank his
coffee and an alcoholic drink at his instrument table, while absorbed
in his charts.

The roistering of the men grew louder. De Boer leaped to his feet,
cursed them roundly, then went back to his calculations. He stood once
before Jetta, regarding her with a strange, slow smile which made my
heart pound. But he turned away in a moment.

The bandits, for all De Boer's admonitions, were now ill-conditioned
for handling this flyer. But I saw, through the small grid-opening in
the control room ceiling, the pilot in his cubby upon the wing-top.
He sat alert and efficient, with his lookout beside him.

* * * * *

The night presently turned really tumultuous, with a great wind
overhead, and storm clouds of ink, shot through occasionally by
lightning flashes. We flew lower, at minus 2,000 feet, on the average.
The heavy air was sultry down here, with only a dim blurred vista of
the depths beneath us. I fancied that now we were bending eastward,
out over the great basin pit of the mid-Atlantic area. No vessels
passed us, or, if they did, I did not sight them.

De Boer had a detector on his table. Occasionally it would buzz with
calls: liners or patrols in our general neighborhood. He ignored them
with a sardonic smile. Once or twice, when our dim lights might have
been sighted, he altered our course sharply. And,