"Captured," Macklin quietly said. "You and Hilliard and I were the only ones to survive our cruiser's crash, Brant--and we survived only because we were in the ship's bridge-room, its upmost part, when it crashed. You had been stunned, and before Hilliard and I could recover from that crash the European guards had swarmed up over the wreck and captured us, taking us here to the great central electrostatic tower." "We three the only survivors?" I repeated. "Then--then all our crew--?" Macklin did not answer, but as his eyes held mine I read my answer in them, and as I did so something hard seemed to form in my throat. Our crew--the hundred cheery lads that had manned my cruiser for long, and each of whom I had known by name--and all annihilated in that great crash downward which we three in the bridge-room had alone escaped. I felt Macklin's understanding grip on my shoulder, and then we were suddenly recalled to realization of our position as a door in the ante-room's left side clicked open, another green-uniformed figure emerging from within. He spoke a brief order to our guards in the European tongue, that Latin-Teutonic combination of languages which was universal throughout the European Federation and which I myself spoke and understood to some extent. Instantly our guards motioned us to the door from which the other had emerged, and as we passed through that door before them we found ourselves in a larger and circular room, white-lit like the first. It was, I saw instantly, the central control-room of the great power-tower, of the whole great air-city of Berlin. Like the similar control-room in the power-tower of New York it held on its walls panel upon panel of dials and gleaming-knobbed switches, while at the center of the room were also six great controls that directed the great air-city's movements through the air in any direction, and the single power or speed-control. Beside these was another great raised table-map, this one mounted upon a solid block of metal, with upon it the red circles of the world's air-cities. And beside that map there sat now a dozen or more men in the same green uniform as our guards, though with metal wing-like insignia upon their sleeves. They were, I knew without asking, the highest Air Chiefs and officers of all the European Federation, gathered here in the control-room of that Federation's capital city. The Captors' Threat For a moment we three faced them in silence, our guards watchful still behind us, and then the center-most of the seated figures, a swarthy, black-haired officer with black, probing eyes, whose five metal wing-insignia marked him as the First Air Chief of the European forces, spoke to us, in our own tongue.