An official at the conference seized his telephone to call the head of the Government Research laboratories, demanding that this necessary equipment be manufactured in quantity at once, for world distribution. The very madness in the air made the conference burst into gibing laughter at the futility of it. Freddie and Dan had had the heat-projector hastily transferred to a Nungess monoplane-type flyer. A tiny affair--nothing, for their purpose, like the huge Arctic A. But it was capable of some four hundred miles an hour under favorable conditions. They donned suits of the black insulated fabric; they had the glasses and ear-grids; the heat-projector, and a small Essen-Bloc airplane gun. Within two hours they left the chaos of the War Department, took off from an adjacent stage for Graff's Brazilian encampment. This now was no mere test attack to create a diversion! They were determined, by whatever desperate means, to stop the Red Control. They left with the assurance that the earth's main attack would follow them in a few days. A few days! If the workmen assembling the weapons could hold their reason. The War Secretary laughed a little wildly as he said it. White-faced Hulda flung her arms around Dan, and wept. There was in her mind no other belief but that she would never see him again. CHAPTER XX THE NIGHT PROWLERS "Where the devil are we?" demanded Dan. "I can't see anything--much less with these cursed glasses." "Put them back on!" said Freddie sharply. They had run into a gale from the north, soon after crossing over Cuba. It would have been accounted a storm-wind, before the days of the Great Change. But such winds now were common. A steady, fifty-mile-an-hour blow. Flying with it, they had made great speed. Over Jamaica, across the Caribbean, to strike the Colombian coast near the mouth of the river below Baranquilla. It was a race against the dawn; by daylight they would be seen by Graff's watchers, before they could get near the barrage; and to wait another day, with the Red Madness stalking the earth, was unthinkable. At Baranquilla they were flying low. No lights showed. From Baranquilla to Cartagena had been one great city of small farms. It was deserted now. Graff and I, in that swing up to the coast, had cut a swath through it; and the people all fled. Freddie and Dan swept southeast. A vast territory; mountains, with mines all abandoned; and the forests, and lower farm lands, uninhabited now. The dawn must have been very near. Dan was anxiously, fearfully watching for it. The Infra-red glasses turned everything a dull, dead gray; the ear-grids muffled sound to an annoying hush. Dan occasionally would cast them off. The red things were riding the night with the plane. They hovered outside the small inclosed cabin in which Dan and Freddie were sitting. They seemed crowding the cabin itself, their voices jabbering over the muffled motor-throb.