"The plan is bold enough," he said, "but it means a chance to strike a terrific blow at our enemies, to cripple and perhaps destroy their great preparations that mean doom for us. The two hundred and fifty cruisers gathered here in the central plaza have been completely replenished with supplies and inspected while you slept, their magazines filled with heat-shells, their bomb-slots with mighty heat-bombs. You can thus start at once, heading straight across the Atlantic toward the air-city of Berlin. And if you can reach it with your cruisers, under the cover of darkness and the unexpectedness of your coming, win through their great patrols and chains of air-forts, and reach the great air-capital, you will be able to strike a blow that may yet save us. I know, and you know, Captain Brant, what perils lie between your cruisers and their goal, but I need not speak of those perils and need not tell you what hopes depend upon your raid. I need only give you now a single order--to start at once!" Five minutes later our two hundred and fifty cruisers, humming like a great swarm of bees, were rising up into the brilliance of the sky. My own cruiser leading, the familiar figures of Macklin and Hilliard again in the bridge-room beside me, I wondered momentarily if ever I was to return to New York. The mighty city floating there beneath us, its crowds now watching in wondering silence as we rose from it, its masses of buildings suspended there between earth and sky like a strange new galaxy of stars--it was home to me, and it was somberly enough that I watched it dropping now away from our ships. Upward we rose, hovered, then shot toward the west, driving smoothly until the great mass that was New York had dropped out of sight behind us. Then as I spoke an order into the distance-phone our ships turned, circling widely to the south, and then moved eastward, out of sight of New York. It was a necessary maneuver, I knew, to make it appear that our cruisers had gone westward. Necessary because in New York's millions there were certain to be European spies who would have endeavored to warn their capital had they suspected that we were in reality racing eastward. And now as we shot out over the Atlantic again, I gave another order and our two hundred and fifty cruisers massed quickly into a compact triangle with my own ship at its apex. It was the best formation for a raiding party, and holding to it our little fleet shot upward now and onward, onward until we were racing above the great line of our air-forts hanging miles out over the Atlantic in a great watchful chain. We had answered their challenge and were rushing on above and beyond them. Within minutes they had vanished behind us, and our cruisers were rocketing forward at swiftly mounting speed, racing onward and upward until at more than a thousand miles an hour we were rushing eight miles above the ocean's surface.