"Macklin--Connell--" I whispered. "Macklin and Connell--gone--and the last chance to warn our Federation gone--" Hilliard's eyes were bright with unshed tears. "Our last chance," he said. Looking back, I think now that it was not the passing of our one chance for freedom, nor the passing even of our one chance to carry Connell's great secret homeward, that weighed upon us most in the following time. It was the swift passing of our two friends, of Macklin especially, who for long had formed with Hilliard and myself the trio that commanded my cruiser, that stabbed us most in those first following hours and days. Prisoned there as before, but two of us now where there had been four, we waited now in a certain heedlessness for the doom that we knew awaited us and our Federation. The wild break for freedom that two of us had made and that had ended in those two's destruction, had apparently not changed the plans of the European First Air Chief in regard to us, and we knew that at the end of the designated fortnight, less than ten days hence now, we must either reveal all our knowledge of the American forces, which we could not do, or suffer death. We knew, too, that even as Connell had guessed, it was at the end of that fortnight, ten days hence, that the European and Asiatic Federations planned to launch their final gigantic attack of air-cities, since it was evident that they wished to gain their information from us only to use it immediately in their attack. For now below, in the city's base-compartments, the great new tube-propellers that were to whirl it through the air at such terrific speed were being completed, we knew, as in all the two hundred air-cities of the European and Asiatic Federations. The long months of experimentation over, it needed but weeks or days to rush those new tube-propellers into place. And had Connell escaped with his secret it might well have been, I thought, that even in the ten days left the new-type tubes could have been swiftly manufactured by thousands and placed in all our own American air-cities. If Connell had escaped! But Connell had not escaped, Connell had plunged to death with Macklin, amid the flaring heat-shells. Prisoned there in our little cell, Hilliard and I despite that ever-approaching doom almost paid no attention whatever to all outside and about us, brooding there in silence hour upon hour as night followed day and day night. We had not, even, the slightest further thoughts of escape, although such thoughts would have been hopeless, for now our door was never opened save by the full score of armed guards outside. So, losing all thought and all hope of freedom, we sat on in our little prison high in the mighty tower, dead to all the unceasing rush of preparations and gathering of cruisers in the city about us.