All about us, in that moment that we burst out onto the plaza, it seemed that heat-shells were striking and flaring. But the static-tower itself was of a composition that the shells could not harm, the rare refractory alloy that in air-cities is used only for the vital power-towers. And, though shells had struck here and there at the plaza's edge and on its surface, though there were on it and around it still-glowing craters of fusing metal, few of the hundred close-massed cruisers that waited with their crews upon it had suffered serious injury in the awful course of the battle so far. And now Macklin and Connell and Hilliard and I were racing across the plaza toward those cruisers, into the foremost of them and up to its bridge-room. Then Macklin jumped to the controls, as I called an order into the distance-phone over the titanic drumming of guns. In the next moment our hundred cruisers were driving up like mad things above the titanic battle raging there above. Up--up--through a wild inferno of rushing shells, up over all the struggling, thundering, reeling cities we sped, on the wild venture that was our last wild chance. As we drove upward, I now saw others of our central mass of air-cities falling. Atlanta and Cleveland and Mexico City were whirling downward, giant masses of lights in which glowed countless great fusing craters of metal, gyrating insanely down through the darkness to crash in awful destruction on the surface of the affrighted earth far below! Hardly more than a half-hundred, indeed, remained of all our air-cities now; and the odds against them swiftly lengthened, as they were hammered still upon an anvil of fire and death by the circle that hemmed them in. They were staggering ever swifter, were reeling and swaying so that within a few minutes, even as I had said, the remorseless fire from all about them would send them to earth also, and wipe the last of the cities and peoples of the American Federation from above the earth! But, as I saw that, our own cruisers were whirling on above that giant central mass, toward the great ring of enemy cities about them. Macklin at the controls, with teeth set, sent our ship and those behind it driving low above the awful combat with the storms of rushing shells from both sides thick about us. Ship after ship behind us was flaring and fusing and falling in white-glowing meteoric destruction, unnoticed and unheeded by any in the titanic thundering battle beneath! On--on--we sped, rocketing through the night, seemingly the only cruisers now in the air, since the two great fleets had all but annihilated themselves. Yet as we shot on, it seemed almost that no cruisers could exist in the air over that great battle; since in dozens, in scores, our own ships were falling, stricken by the tempests of shells through which we were rushing!