"I needed only to escape, to race back to my own land, and knew that it would take our own engineers but a very short time to fit our own cities with similar speed-tubes, since though the European and Asiatic forces had been working with them for months that work so far had been mostly experimentation. But it was then, when I tried to escape, that my luck came abruptly to an end. For I was captured by the fleet-officers here in Berlin as I was on the very point of leaving, captured when the false identity which I had established at such pains was upset at the last moment through the detection of one of the documents I had forged. I was captured, and knowing that I had within my brain that great secret of theirs which would make their air-cities resistless, they would never, I knew, release me. They took me at once before their commander, the First Air Chief of the European fleet, and then by him and by a number of the Asiatic Air Chiefs also I was questioned exhaustively. "They wanted most to know what other American agents like myself were hidden within their air-cities. They knew that those agents or the greater part of them were known to me, and they knew that if I described or named them they would be able to catch them all and thus prevent the possibility of another spy learning their great secret as I had done. I refused utterly, though, to give them the information they wished, to reveal to them my fellow-agents in the various cities. At last they saw, after days of questioning and half-torture, that they could not as yet wring from me that information, so confined me here in a cell high in the central tower with the information that only death awaited me within days unless I acceded to their demands. And, confined here, I saw from the window that the whole European Federation fleet had begun to mass here at the air-city of Berlin, quietly and unobtrusively, and guessed then that they meant to loose their attack upon the American Federation. "The great tubes that were to move their cities through the air at such terrific speed were not yet finished, but they did not wait for these, launching out their great fleet of cruisers which with the Asiatic fleet outnumbered the American ships by two to one and should be able to overwhelm them, they thought. I think that their reason for starting that attack so soon, before their greater preparations were completely finished, was that they feared lest another spy like myself might discover their great secret and escape with it. So they let loose their fleets upon the American Federation to begin the war and forestall that contingency by beating down the American forces in a first tremendous attack. If that first great attack failed, they could swiftly complete the preparations that would make their air-cities of such immense speed and power, and then could launch all those air-cities upon the American ones in a second attack that nothing could resist.