Yarnall had brought into the battle, I saw, those great artificial cloud projectors that had saved us in our first great battle over the Atlantic! And, even as their white masses enveloped the struggling ships, he sent forth another order; and our own cruisers shot upward and downward out of those cloud-masses, at the very instant that they had been formed. Then, with all our own cruisers clear of the cloud-masses to east and west, and the European and Asiatic ships inside them driving for the moment in blind confusion, our cruisers poured a deadly hail of heat-shells down into the cloud-masses and the thousands of ships that swirled inside them! Only for a moment was it that they remained within the cloud-masses before fighting their way free; but in that moment they had been unable to fire a single effective shell at our own ships outside, and we had poured a veritable storm of deadly shells into the cloudy masses. So when, a moment later, the European and Asiatic ships broke from the vapor-clouds east and westward, our broadsides had taken toll of hundreds of their blinded ships, and hardly more than our own forces did they number now! But, when they broke free from the cloud-masses and into open air again, they did not advance toward our awaiting ships; instead they shot back from either front toward their cities, in answer to some mysterious order. At once a similar order from Yarnall brought flashing back, to form again above our own cities, our own ships--still nearly two thousand strong and almost as many in number as the combined cruisers of our enemies. I heard dimly the great cheers that were rolling across all our cities, for this mighty blow which had beaten back our enemies' cruiser-fleets once more. Then those cheers died swiftly away; for, far away to east and west, the gigantic masses of the approaching air-cities loomed larger and larger, rushing through the air toward us! Eastward the European Federation was approaching, in a gigantic circle that seemed to fill the whole eastern sky. To us three sitting there amid our periscopic screens, it was as though all the eastern screen was filled with that great oncoming mass of cities: Paris, London, Moscow, Cairo, Rome--all the tremendous air-cities of the great European Federation--and their capital of Berlin still at the center.