into denser air; it built up in volume; it varied its pitch and timber till it sounded like echoing voices ... ghostly voices and phantom words ... like orders from the dead....

And Danny O'Rourke found his eyes staring into those of the Infant, where he read only the confirmation of his own fears.

It was the Infant who first found words with which to break the dreadful silence.

"Headquarters is gone," he said in a strange, dry voice, "wiped out! They must have got it! It looks as if we were on our own.

"Where are you going?" he asked. "It's your ship."

And Danny answered with a single word, though he added other for emphasis under his breath:

"Down!" he said quietly. "And be damned to them!"

Rolling smoke clouds came to meet them. Danny O'Rourke was watching his altimeter sharply as he neared the ground. But he glanced more than once at the smoke. It was shot through with tongues of flame as they settled down; that was only what might be expected. But Danny was puzzled by the gray-white whirls that rose through the billowing smoke, until he knew it for the dust of powdered masonry, and realized that below him, where great buildings had been, were tumbled ruins.

Beside his control board a radio warning was telling of approaching ships. Danny cut in on then on emergency wave-length, and found that two full squadrons of nitro-ships were at hand with others coming.

"Let them tend to it!" the pale-faced youngster beside him choked—one does not see his country's capital destroyed without a tightening of the throat. "They can cool it with CO_2 and put down a rescue squad, though what they can do in that furnace is more than I can see."

Danny nodded mutely; he opened the exhaust to the full, and the rocket-plane swept out on whirlwinds of raging fire, and smoke, whose flames reached up even where they flew and licked hungrily at their ship.

Jarring explosions sent shudders through their craft. Ahead of them bright flashes illumined the swirling fumes where bursting shells marked the destruction of some ammunition stores outside the city.

And Danny, as he drove his red meteor into the clear air of the upper levels, was searching the heavens above for the enemy he had expected to sight down below. He knew now that his mad plunge into the seething flames was only a blind impulse—an effort to satisfy that demand within him for a foe upon whom to wreak revenge.

Beside him, his companion spun the dial of a receiving set for the Airnews Service; a voice was shouting excitedly into their cabin: "... physicists unable to find cause ... no meteoric material seen ... new rays ... enormous temperatures ... some new and unknown conditions encountered in space—"

"Hell!" said the Infant wearily, and snapped off the instrument. "Meteors! New conditions in space! But, come to think of it, we can't blame them for being off the trail. You know that the bird that's doing this flies high and fast ... and when he stops there's nobody left alive to tell of it!... And don't look for him here."

"Why not?" Danny demanded aggressively. "This ship isn't armed, but if I get my sights on that flyin' devil—"

"You won't," said the Infant darkly. "He's off somewhere discharging the load he's accumulated."

He reached for a map, stuck his finger on a point in eastern New York State. "Let's go there, Danny—and I'd like to get there right now!"

And Danny O'Rourke, who, ordinarily was a bit particular about who gave him orders, looked at the Infant's blue eyes that had gone hard and cold, and he swung his roaring ship toward the north and a place that was marked by a steady finger on the map.

New York was a place of flashing reflections far beneath them as they passed. Danny pointed downward toward the miniature city, where a silvery river met the sea; where a maze of flaming lights in all of the colors of the spectrum gave indication of activity at the great Navy Field.

"How did he miss it, the murderin' devil?" he asked. "How come that he hit Washington first? Did he have some way of knowin' that it was the heart of the whole country?"

"And why pick on us here in this country? Or are we just the first, and will he spit his rage over the rest of the world before he's through? It it the end of the world that's come?"

To all of which there was no answer. And at last, when New York had vanished, they came to a smaller city and a broad expanse of roof that took their wheels.

Danny followed where his companion led into great buildings and a place of offices where excited officials stood in knots about news-casting cones; then they were in a quiet room, in the presence of a lean-bodied man whose hawklike face turned flinty at some request the Infant made.

"What the lad wants, I don't know," said Danny to himself, "but whatever it is he won't be gettin' it from old Gimlet-eyes."

But he saw the Infant write something on a card and he heard him say, as he handed it to the official: "Send that to the President—at once!" And though the words were hardly audible they had a quality that brought an instant response; while the written words brought a portly man who shook the Infant's hand fervently and inquired what service a great electric company could render.

Danny heard Gimlet-eyes protesting; heard broken bits of sentences: "... the great Sorenson tube ... he knows of our disintegrator ... insists upon our furnishing ... preposterous...."

The portly man cut him short. "You will give Mr. Morgan whatever he wishes," he ordered crisply. Then Danny saw him clutch at a desk for support as still another man appeared at the open door to shout:

"New York! My God! New York's gone! Burning! The Empire State Building melted! Crashed!... The whole city is being destroyed!"

And in the moment of numbness that seized Danny O'Rourke he heard the Infant say: "How soon can we have it? I want it in our ship—up above—an hour? We'll be there." But Danny had no further interest in the Infant's arrangements for obtaining some unknown equipment; he was plunging through the doorway and running at full speed toward the ramp where they had descended.

He knew dimly that the younger man had followed and was crowding into the cabin after him. Danny, as he locked the port and lifted his red ship off her guides, was fully conscious of only one fact: that a hundred miles south a city was being destroyed and that somewhere in the vast heights above the city he would find the destroyer.

The Hudson that had been a thread of silver was no longer bright as they approached the city at its mouth; burnished now with its reflection of black smoke clouds and red tongues of flame, it vanished at last under a mountain of black that heaped itself in turbulent piles and whirling masses until the winds swept the smoke out over the sea.

And high above it all—so high that all clouds were below it—there hung in a lucent sky one tiny, silvery speck. There was a delicate steering sight on Danny's ship; he could direct the red craft as if it were in very fact a projectile that could be controlled in flight. And under the cross hairs of that sight swung a silvery speck, while the man who looked along the telescopic tube cursed steadily and methodically as if in some way his hate might span the gap and reach that distant foe.

And then the speck vanished. Danny followed it with the powerful glasses of his sighting tube; he saw it swing inland—saw it move like a line of silvery light, almost, swifter in its motion than his instrument could follow. But even in that swift flight Danny's eyes observed one fact: the enemy ship was coming down; it slanted in on that long volplane that must have ripped the air apart like a bolt of lightning. And Danny's red rocket swept out and around in a