The next instant our whole great mass of cities was moving, was moving with swiftly mounting speed northward! For, as his order sounded I had jerked open the speed-control before me, had flung back one of the direction-levers. And, as I did so, there had come a great droning of motors from beneath, resounding even above the madly-thundering guns, flinging all the mighty city of New York northward. Also there came the great hissing of the numberless new tube-propellers that were jerking it swiftly forward! And, as New York leaped northward at my touch, all its great batteries still detonating, so were all the great air-cities that ringed us leaping northward, and all their guns were still thundering toward the advancing armadas! But now the enemy had seen our swift leap northward, and, as their commanders guessed our purpose, they sent their own two crescents whirling toward us with even greater speed to enclose us before we could escape! For the next moment it was a race between the three great city-masses, a race in which our own sought to evade the two that closed upon it from either side. And, as our cities and theirs raced through the air at tremendous speed, every gun still firing, it seemed that we must lose! For, just north of us, the two northward horns of the closing crescents had almost met, were almost joined before us! That northward horn of the Asiatic crescent held Shanghai and Colombo and Singapore and others; while the horn that projected from the European mass had foremost in it Moscow and Brussels and Algiers. And as we shot northward in that wild moment, to escape before those two horns could join, Yarnall sent flying forth a swift order for all batteries in all our cities to concentrate their fire now upon the foremost cities in the two closing horns to the north! At once our own guns were thundering with redoubled fury; for, unless we could destroy in the next few minutes the foremost of those cities north of us, they would have closed upon us and brought our irretrievable doom. So, disregarding for the time all the other air-cities of the two closing crescents about us, all fire was concentrated upon the foremost cities of the two horns closing northward. A storm of heat-shells rushed thick through the air toward them; but at the same time the masses of European and Asiatic cities east and west of us were pouring down upon us the broadsides of their own giant batteries! And beneath that terrific fire, cities among our mass were falling swift in fusing destruction. St. Louis and Miami and Seattle were whirling to death as we raced onward; all the people in them who had been left alive by the shells were meeting annihilation in the great crash far below!