And as they uttered that tremendous cry, as the swaying city flashed downward, their struggle at the door forgotten in that awful moment of doom, I was aware subconsciously that I was staggering with Connell and Hilliard and our remaining men, up the narrow stair. Up to the great tower's second level and to its windows, beside which hung our cruisers with Macklin and a skeleton crew, holding them there beside the tower even as the great city whirled with awful speed downward! Then we jumped through those windows into the cruisers. And the next moment, just as the cruisers with ourselves inside them drove upward like light from the falling city, Berlin had crashed into the earth just beneath us, with a terrific, annihilating shock that buckled it, broke it, made of it but a great twisted mass of rended metal! Then we were driving up toward the half-hundred remaining American air-cities that hung still high above, the giant city of New York still at their center. Up until we had soared above those cities and they lay beneath us, giant circles of brilliant light, scarred here and there with countless craters of fused metal! Their great crowds of peoples had surged, now, from their towers, out into their squares and streets. They gazed as if incredulously stunned by their deliverance, at the empty air and night about them, where so shortly before had hung the enemy that had been sending them to doom. In that moment, as we hung there high over them, in that moment of incredible surprise and dawning joy, it seemed that all the world was silent after the terrific thunder of that wild rushing battle that had riven earth and sky so short a time before. It was as though the night, and the winds about us, and the white stars overhead, were as silent with astonishment in that moment as the crowds on the cities that hung around and beneath us. Then suddenly, from those cities, there was coming up toward us as though from a single voice a single, mighty cry! Dawnward At dawn of the next day our half-hundred great air-cities prepared to separate, to move back to those positions that had been theirs before danger had brought them together. Through all of that night they had hung there together, their streets crowded with weeping yet rejoicing crowds; and, now that the dawn showed them the green plains far beneath, they were beginning to depart. And we five, sitting there within the periscopic screens in the power-tower of New York, were watching them as they prepared to go.