Peering downward, figure tensed over the wheel, Macklin was holding the cruiser behind those rushing ones ahead, and now, looking away to the right, I could make out the dark, long bulks of the European cruisers also. And across the gap from fleet to fleet were hurtling storms of the heat-shells still, shot forth by our great heat-guns whose valve-breeches made them capable of underwater operation. And as they burst there broke from them the same great flare of light and heat as in the air above, little affected for the moment by the waters about them, destroying in that moment the ships they struck and making the waters about those fusing ships boil terribly with their terrific released heat. But straight downward through those boiling waters swirled and swept the following cruisers of the two great fleets. As our guns thundered there in the great deep, as heat-shells raced and broke and flared about us, I saw schools of fish and strange sea-creatures and denizens, for a moment in the glow of the yellow searchlights or the flares of bursting heat-shells. The fish were all striving desperately to escape from this hell of battle and death that we men had carried down with us. And still downward--our two great columns were racing, hanging to each other with fierce, resistless tenacity, raking each other still with the great heat-guns as we shot lower into the mighty depths! Finally Hilliard dashed up into the bridge-room from below. "This can't keep on much longer!" he cried. "The cruiser's walls can't stand this heat and speed!" "It'll have to keep on as long as the First Air Chief keeps on!" I shouted to him, over the drone of motors and thunder of guns. "If the battle is to end for both fleets here--let it!" But I saw even in that moment that Hilliard was right, and that the walls about us, the transparent metal of the windows, had become searing to the touch. Not only had we raced through areas of water boiling at terrific temperatures from heat-shells that had burst in ships there, but our own immense speed was producing by its friction with the waters a heat that was almost softening the cruiser's walls. Yet I saw that still the First Air Chief's cruiser was rushing deeper and deeper before us, and that still the great column of our own fleet and that of the European fleet were following locked in that colossal death-grip, their heat-guns thundering still toward each other.