As they whirled to obey my orders with the other half of our men, some hundred and fifty in number, I was running toward the cage-lifts. With swift blows we destroyed the controls that guided them from level to level of the tower, and then we rushed toward the narrow stairs that led also downward. Another moment and we were rushing down those stairs, while as we did so there came a scuffle of battle above us, and we knew that the alarm had penetrated to the upper floors of the tower and that the guards there were pouring down to battle with Connell and Hilliard and their men. We leaped on downward, though, down until we had burst down into the fourth level. There our surprise was as complete, and before the guards there were aware of our presence, almost, we had sent our heat-cartridges flaring among them, had swept them from existence and were leaping down to the third level. And in that it went the same; and in the second below it, and then, with hearts pounding, we were rushing down into the first level! As we poured down into its ante-rooms, its guards rushed toward us and their own heat-pistols came up; but they too were falling in scorched heaps a moment later, and we were dashing through the ante-rooms toward the great circular inmost chamber that held the inmost controls of this great air-city of Berlin! Through those ante-rooms we burst, the surprised guards falling lifeless and burnt before us, and then into the inmost circular room! All around its panelled walls moved green-uniformed attendants who whirled with surprise from their switches and dials at our entrance; while at the room's center there was what seemed at first to be a great dull-glass globe! We knew that that globe enclosed within itself the great table-map and controls of Berlin; and now there were bursting out, through an opening in that globe, the three green-uniformed men who had been within it--the First Air Chief of the European Federation and the two officers who with him had been controlling the movements of all the mighty combined European and Asiatic cities! The Captured City