re to this point of vantage. The
planes that had leaped to this new menace swept toward the bombers in
three parallel lines, above, to right and left of them. Allan's plane
leaping to position at the very end of one long line. The three
leaders reached the first rocket-ship, and their green beams shot out.
In that instant the enemy craft seemed to explode in intense blue
light. Then the awful dazzle was gone. The rocket ship was there, just
as before, but the American helio-planes were gone, were wiped out as
though they had never been. The next trio, and the next, rushed up.
Again and again came that flash of force, annihilating them. Superbly
the tiny gnats that were the American planes plunged headlong at the
hovering Leviathan of the air and were whiffed into nothingness. Sixty
brave men were dancing motes of cosmic dust before the shocked
commander could sound the recall.

The helicopter squadron curved away, still keeping its ordered lines,
but orange flame leaped out from all twelve of the enemy vessels,
orange flame that caught them, that ran along their ranks and sent
them hurtling Earthward--blackened corpses in blazing coffins.
"Abandon ships!" The adjutant's last order crisped, coldly metallic,
soldierly as ever. In the next breath, as Allan reached for the lever
that would open the trapdoor beneath him, he saw the command-ship
plunge down, a flaring comet.

* * * * *

Above Allan Dane, the twenty-foot silk of his parachute bellied out in
the denser air of the lower heights. His respirator tube was still in
his mouth, and the double, vacuum-interlined leather of his safety
suit had kept him from freezing in the spatial cold of the
stratosphere. He looked south.

All the proud thousands of the defense fleet were gone, blown to
fragments by the time bombs from above. The city was hidden in a
thick, muddy-yellow fog. "Queer," the thought ran through his brain,
"that there should be fog in mid-afternoon, under a blazing sun." Then
he saw them, the circling black ships of the enemy, trailing behind
them long wakes of the drab yellow vapor that drifted heavily down to
shroud New York with--gas!

Allan felt nauseated as he imagined a fleeting picture of the
many-leveled city, of its mist-darkened streets with swarming myriads
of slumped bodies clogging the conveyor belts that still moved because
no hand was left to shut them off; of women and children, and aged or
crippled men