* * *

It had passed through the very heart of Chicago within a few yards of
the ground, and it had cut and burned a swath more than a mile wide
through the buildings of that metropolis.

Other cities in America had felt the devastating effects of its
irresistible and molten heat and, within a short time, thousands of
people had been slain by it.

Time and again, from the terrace of the great tower, Dirk and his
companions saw the skies above them light up as that terrible, blazing,
projectile which, uncontrolled, went hurtling on its way through the
night.

For three hours it careened on its mad course and hysteria reigned
throughout the cities of the whole civilized world.

But then a report came from a rocket-liner that had left Berlin en route
for San Francisco.

"Either a great meteor or that leviathan of the Lodorians just swept
down past us in mid-Atlantic and plunged into the sea. Apparently it has
exploded, for it has thrown a great column of water for miles up into
the air. We are stopping and standing by, although the heat is intense
and clouds of steam are rising from the sea."

As the minutes passed by after the report from the rocket-ship had been
received, the disappearance from the sky of the flaming craft from space
seemed to confirm the belief that it had been swallowed by the ocean.
This was accepted as a certainty by eight o'clock in the morning.

"Ah," sighed Steinholt, "if only it had crashed on land somewhere. If
there only was enough of it left for us to--"

"Enough of any damn contraption of that kind," swore Lazarre fervently,
"is altogether too much. I hope, for one, that its fragments are
scattered so far that we never can put them together again."

* * * * *

Dirk and Inga leaned against one of the parapets that evening on a
gardened terrace of his own great mansion in Manhattan.

Their little party had gone there after leaving the Worldwide Tower in
the morning.

After resting during the day, Lazarre and Fragoni were somewhere
together, discussing the plans for a new palace to take the place of the
one that was destroyed so that Zitlan and his minions might die in its
ruins.

Steinholt, elsewhere, was delving into oceanography and submarine
engineering, in an attempt to learn whether or not it would be feasible
to fish for the remains of the lost ship of Lodore.

"It seems like a dream, doesn't it, Dirk?" the girl remarked. "It