It was that knowledge that made our despair most deep. For though there was now a lull, apparently, in the great war's course, the European and Asiatic forces preparing for their final giant blow, and the Americans gathering their own forces apprehensively to resist the next attack, we knew that it was but the lull before the final terrible storm that was to settle the fate of earth's three mighty nations. And we knew, too, that it was the fate of our own American Federation that would be sealed in that gigantic attack, unless Connell could make his way soon to our land with his great secret. And that he could not do so, that he could not even escape from the little cell in which we were prisoned, was all so clear to us that almost I wished that death had come to me in the cruiser's crash to spare me the torture of mind that I and all of us were now undergoing. It was a torture accentuated, I think, by the complete emptiness and eventlessness of those hours and days. Save for what we could see from our high window upon the city around us, we were as cut off from the world as though upon the moon. Twice each day, at dawn and at dusk, our door was opened by the guards that brought our food, that food being as in our own air-cities the paste-like synthetic compounds of artificial proteins and fats and carbohydrates which had decades before replaced the old natural foods. But though our door was thus flung open twice each day, there was no hope of escape for us in that fact. For the two guards who brought our food in to us carried their heat-pistols always in one hand, and always, night and day, there watched in the corridor outside a full score of similarly armed guards by whom one could not hope to pass living toward the cage-lifts. It seemed indeed, as Connell had said, that weeks of frenzied meditation could never disclose any plausible plan of escape, and so I lapsed with him into a state of half-lassitude that had been induced by our utter despair. And so days passed. Not even the prospect of our own deaths which I knew to be looming before us, was sufficient to rouse me from that lassitude, not even the fact that at the end of that fortnight, as I had guessed, the great attack of the air-cities was to be launched upon the American Federation, and that it was for that reason that our captors had given us that time.