"Hey, Freddy!" Dave shouted, this time even louder. "Can you hear me? Anything wrong back there? Hey, Freddy!" Ten full seconds of silence ticked by, and an eerie chill started to close about Dawson's heart. Why hadn't Freddy at least answered if he wasn't coming forward just yet? Was something wrong? Had a chance shot from that rotten Jap submarine nailed old Freddy? But that couldn't be. He'd heard Freddy's port-slot guns still slugging away long after the last gun on the submarine had gone silent. Then what was wrong? Those, and a hundred and one other torturing thoughts raced through Dawson's brain as he put the Fortress back onto the automatic pilot, unhooked his safety harness, and scrambled out of the seat and went aft. As he pushed through the door leading into the bomb bay he stopped dead in his tracks and then instantly dropped flat on his hands and knees. A sea of acrid smelling smoke had come swirling through the compartment door opening, and although his own heart seemed to be pounding against his very eardrums he was able to hear the faint crackling of flames. And he could see that the swirling smoke inside the bomb-bay was tinted by fire. "Freddy! Freddy!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs. "Are you trapped in there? Can you hear me? Where are you, Freddy?" "Back here, Dave!" came the muffled reply through the swirling smoke. "Give me a hand, quick. The mail sacks. The blasted things are on fire. Mind the bomb-bay doors, Dave! I've opened them to toss these things out. Give me a hand, Dave. I don't think I can make it alone. Blast! That thing's hot!" Long before Freddy Farmer had stopped speaking Dawson was crawling through the door opening on his hands and knees. It was like crawling into the middle of a blast furnace. The acrid smoke stung his eyes and almost blinded him. It seemed to pour down his throat and gag him, and he was frightfully afraid that he might misjudge his movements and go hurtling down through the opened bomb-bay doors. But he did not misjudge, and after what seemed an eternity spent inside a hot stove, he reached Freddy Farmer, who was hauling smoking and flaming mail sacks along the floor of the compartment and then dropping them down through the opened bomb-bay doors. Young Farmer looked like a smudged-faced ghost in the red glow of the burning sacks. His helmet and goggles were gone, and his flying suit was badly scorched in a couple of places. "What happened, Freddy?" Dawson choked out as he grabbed a smoking mail sack off the pile and hurled it down toward the night-shrouded Pacific. "We stop some of their flak? But how the dickens did these sacks catch on fire?"