Jeter and Eyer looked at each other with protruding eyes. * * * * * Then they looked back at the Vandercook, whose base now was on a level with the roof of the Hadley building. "See?" said Hadley. "Not so much as a brick falls from the foundation. It's--it's--ghastly." Jeter would never forget the screams of mortal terror which came from the lips of the doomed who had been working late in the Vandercook building--for, horror piled upon horror, those who had sought to escape calamity did not fall to Earth at all, but, at the same speed of the rising building, traveled skyward with it, human flies outside those leering dark windows. Then, free of New York's skyline, the flying building was gone with a rush. A thousand feet above New York's tallest building, the Vandercook changed direction and moved directly into the west. The conference watched it go.... "Commissioner," Jeter yelled at the police chief of Manhattan, "get word out at once for all lights to be put out in the city! Hurry! Radio would be fastest." In ten minutes Manhattan was a darkened, silent city ... and now the conference could see why Jeter had asked for all lights to be extinguished. Five thousand feet aloft, directly over the Hudson River, the Vandercook building now hung motionless--and all eyes saw the thin column of light. It came down from the dark skies from a vast distance, widening to encompass the top of the Vandercook building. The Vandercook building might almost have been a mouse caught in the talons of some unbelievable night-hawk. As though some intellect had just realized the significance of New York's sudden darkness; as though that intellect had realized that the column was ordinarily invisible because of Manhattan's brilliant incandescents, and now was visible in the darkness--the column of light snapped out.... "God Almighty! May the Lord of Hosts save the world from destruction!" From New York's canyons, from the roof of the Hadley building, came the great composite prayer. A whistling shriek, growing second by second into enormous proportions, came out of the west, above the Hudson. CHAPTER IV _Frantic Scheming_ There was no mistaking the meaning of that whistling shriek. Whatever agency had held the Vandercook building aloft had now released its uncanny grip on the building, and thousands of tons of brick and mortar, of stone and steel, were plunging down in a mass from five thousand feet above the Hudson. The same force had also released the ill-fated men and women who had been carried aloft with the building. And there must have been hundreds of people inside side the building.