a slow, lazy parabola,
came down and dropped into the lake. But it fell where the marksman saw
the boat, a safe distance to one side. A ball of fire dropping into the
water, exploding the water all around it for a distance of a dozen feet.
Like a cascade, the water mounted.

Tarrano chuckled. "A very bad marksman."

Other bombs came. It turns me cold when I think how orders like this
could have come from the Great City--these bombs which had they found
their mark would have killed Tarrano, but at the expense of the life of
Elza. They did not find their mark. Tarrano continually changed the
curve of his beam. The image of the boat shifted. A few moments only;
and riding the waves of the bomb-tossed water, they rounded a bend, back
into the narrow river and were beyond range.

Tarrano snapped off his ray. "Quite safe, Lady Elza. Do not be alarmed.
I doubt if they will locate us again. They should be very busy now in
the Great City. I'm surprised they could even think to notify this
Station we have just passed."

We were indeed very busy in the Great City during those hours, as you
shall presently hear.

Tarrano and Elza were not again disturbed. How far they went in the boat
she does not know, but at last they landed in a sheltered cove. An air
vehicle was there. Tarrano transferred Elza to it, and in a moment more
they were aloft.

The vehicle was little more than an oblong platform, with a low railing.
A platform of a substance resembling _glascite-transparent_; and with a
_glascite_ shield V-shaped in front to break the rush of wind and yet
give vision. A mechanism, not of radio-power, but of gravity like the
space-flyers. Such platforms had been, but were no longer in use on
Earth. Elza had never seen one. It was a new experience for her, this
flying with nothing above one, nothing to the side, or underneath save
that transparent substance. To her it was like floating, and at times
falling headlong through the air.

They rose no more than a thousand feet at first, and then swept parallel
with the ground. At a tremendous speed; even at this height the forests
seemed moving backward as the ground moves beneath a surface vehicle.

Dark, somber forests of luxuriant tropical vegetation. It was now
nearing dawn; the auroral lights were dropping low in the sky; the great
Venus Cross of Dawn was rising, its first two stars already above the
line of hills to one side.

Then the sky out there flushed red; a limb of t