My eyes held his fixedly in that tense moment. "The hundred cruisers in the plaza outside!" I said: "The cruisers I had you keep waiting for me--that last crazy plan of mine is our one chance now!" "Your plan?" he cried, a flicker of hope rising into his eyes. But when I explained that plan in a few swift words his eyes widened with sudden stunned astonishment, and he cried out: "The thing's insane, Brant! You'll never make it!" "But it's our last chance!" I shouted to him as the thunderous drumming of doom all about us deepened, and two more of our cities crashed earthward. "It's the one last chance to save our cities!" He paused there silent a second, then reached, wrung my hand tightly. "Then go, Brant!" he said simply: "Take the hundred cruisers--and God grant that you are able to do the thing!" I shouted to the black-jacketed attendants who were working like madmen around the great room's instrument-panels, cutting out motors that the heat reached, switching in spare motors and tube-propellers, keeping the mighty sustaining power of New York steady. Two of them leaped swiftly at my call, to the side of Yarnall to take the places of Connell and myself. And then Macklin and Hilliard who had been working with them, were running toward us also, and we four were running across the room and through the ante-rooms until we issued out from the electrostatic tower's base into the great plaza. Standing there in that plaza with the darkness gathering about us, there stretched from horizon to horizon a boundless mass of gigantic light-gemmed cities, our own and the titanic ring that encircled us. The myriad lights of those cities, though, by which their gun-crews worked the great batteries, were feeble in comparison to the tremendous and blinding flares of brilliance in all directions that were fountaining up in giant gouts of dazzling light. Across all those cities floating, there leaped and flew the heat-shell flares, and the thunder of the guns was deafening, titanic, like the thunder of a stream of falling worlds! Beneath that thunder there came to us thin, high cries, the wild cries of crowds in the towers of cities and in their streets and plazas. And high, high above all these, far, far overhead, began to gleam the pale mocking eyes of the distant, watching stars.