Onward thus we crept, Hilliard reporting at intervals of every few moments as an air-mine was picked up ahead, while at my swift repetition of his report Macklin would swerve our ship to avoid it. Behind our own craft, we knew, all the scores of our cruisers were creeping forward through the great vapor-layer in the same manner. Now we could plainly hear the great, unceasing drone of the mighty air-forts above, as we crept through the vapor-layer beneath them, and knew that were we to emerge into any chance opening in the thick mists about us we would have but short shrift enough from the giant guns of those forts overhead. Yet still we crept on, praying that none of our cruisers struck the deadly mines, since a single one striking would loose a great flare of heat and light from the bursting air-mine that would betray us all. Even our own ship, as it swerved from an air-mine that Hilliard had hastily reported, almost ran full onto another one in the opposite direction, a great cube of metal, holding within it a hell of condensed heat and death and suspended by its power gained from the concentrated cosmic trap. And though Macklin whirled our cruiser aside in time to graze by it it seemed impossible that all our ships could feel through this field of death without disaster. Yet still we were creeping onward, through the thick mists, and now the great air-forts' drone came from behind and above us, as we passed on beneath them. On and on, feeling blindly forward through that zone of potential death we went, over the second chain of air-forts whose motors' sound came up to us muffled through the mists, and then that too was dropping behind us. For some moments, though, we continued to feel forward in the vapor-layer, and then I had given the ships behind the order to rise and at once, as carefully as ever, our cruisers were feeling their way upward until they emerged at last into the open air above the mists, a tight steel hand seeming to unclose from about my heart as we came up from out that terrible zone of death into the dim starlight of the upper night, the white beams of the upper air-forts now far behind us. On to Berlin "Through at last!" I cried to Macklin, as we drove upward. "It seems incredible that all our ships could have won through that mine-field!" Macklin nodded. "We'd not have made it had the air-forts there been using their own cruiser-finders," he said. "But they never dreamed that any ships would try to get through the mine-sown mists, evidently."