"Here Flint and Waldron have what may be called a citadel within a citadel--twelve acres of administration buildings, laboratories (in charge of your old friend Herzog, by the way!) and experimental works, including also the big steel chambers, vacuum-lined, where they are already storing their liquid oxygen to be turned into their pipe-lines and tank-cars. This Goat Island central plant will be the real kernel in the nut, Gabriel. Once _that_ is gone, you'll have ripped the heart out of the beast, smashed the vital ganglia, and given the world the respite, the breathing-space it must have, to free itself!" "And if I don't?" asked Gabriel. "If anything happens to upset our blockading tactics, or if our attacking forces are defeated or our aeroplanes shot down, what then?" "Then," said Brevard, slowly, "then the world had better die than survive under the abominable slavery now impending. Already the pipe-lines have been laid to Buffalo, Cleveland, Albany and Scranton. Already they're under way to New York City itself, and to Cincinnati. Already other plants have been projected for Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and New Orleans, to say nothing of half a dozen in the Old World. At this present moment, as we all sit here in this quiet room on this remote mountain-slope, the world's air is being cornered! All the atmospheric nitrogen is planned for, by Flint and Waldron, to pass under their control--and with it, every crop that grows. All the oxygen will follow. They're already having their domestic-service apparatus manufactured--their cold-pipe radiators, meters, evaporators and respirators. I tell you, comrades, this thing is close upon us, not as a theory, now, but as a terrible, an inconceivably ghastly reality! "Even as we talk this thing over, those devils in human form are at work impoverishing the atmosphere, the very basis of all life. My oxymeter, today, showed a diminution of .047 per cent. in the amount of free oxygen in the air right on this mountain. And their plant is hardly running yet! Wait till they get it under full swing--wait till their pipe-lines and tanks and instruments and all their vast, infernal apparatus of exploitation and enslavement are in operation! Even in a week from now, or less, by the time you issue the call, Gabriel, you may see wretches gasping in vain for breath, in some dark alley of Niagara where the air is being drained!" "Oh, devilish and infernal plot against the world!" said Gabriel, bitterly. "Yet in essence, after all, no different from the system of ten years ago, which kept food and shelter, light and fuel, under lock and key--and made the dollar the only key to fit the lock! Yet this seems worse, somehow; and though I die for it, my last supreme blow shall be against such unutterable, such murderous villainy! So then, comrades--" He paused, suddenly, as Kate laid a hand on his arm. "Hark! What's that?" she whispered.