Yarnall nodded assent, and then Macklin and Hilliard had joined the two dozen or more of black-garbed attendants and engineers who were busy at the great switchboards that lined the circular room's walls. They scrutinized its dials to determine the rate of the vast currents rushing down from the power-tower's tip far above to the motors in the city's great base; added a fresh battery of transformers or threw in resistances to hold that current steady; and moved ceaselessly about the walls in their anxious watch. Now, Yarnall and Connell and I were marking our own places, the three metal seats there behind the big table-map, with the great screens of the electrical periscopes all about us. Yarnall would sit in the center, with eyes upon the red circles on the great map, tensely watching their progress, as admiral of our mighty fleet of colossal cities, ready to direct it and our cruisers to the battle. Connell would be at his right, before him the black mouthpiece and speaker of a single distance-phone. Behind that were the scores of switches and intricate controls, which connected that distance-phone to the operators of all our hundred air-cities. The Battle Nears As the third of the trio, I would sit at Yarnall's left, before me the six switch-levers which sent the colossal city of New York whirling through the air in any direction; while beside them was the gleaming knob which regulated the city's speed. The great batteries of New York were at my command also; all their mighty heat-guns around the city's edge and around our electrostatic tower and elsewhere were controlled by the distance-phone whose mouthpiece rose before me. The great batteries of all our other cities were controlled in the same way by their own operators, and were subject like New York to the commands of the First Air Chief beside me, who could maneuver our whole great armada of tremendous cities at will through the air. In the city of San Francisco, too, we knew, was the Second Air Chief, placed there to take command in case New York were destroyed or the First Air Chief disabled. Thus, on the morrow were grouped we three, who were to sway such colossal forces in a battle as no men had seen before. Now, Yarnall was pointing to the table-map's surface, where the red massed circles of the European and Asiatic Federation armadas were indicated but a few hundred miles on either side of our own great mass of cities. Watching them there, we sat in silence, save for the clicking of occasional switches by the engineers about us. From far away, far across New York and all the other air-cities gathered around it, there was coming the dull, dim throbbing of the life of millions that swarmed through those cities. And now Yarnall reached forward and touched the control of the great electrical periscopes whose screens boxed us in.