"Easy, Wade. We are near now." Mile after mile they flashed ahead at about a thousand miles an hour--then suddenly they saw far off to the east a vast glow that reached into the sky, painting itself on the eternal clouds miles above. "There it is, Wade. Go high, and take it easy!" Swiftly the _Solarite_ climbed, hovering at last on the very rim of the cloud blanket, an invisible mote in a sea of gray mist. Below them they saw a tremendous field carved, it seemed, out of the ancient hills. From this height all sense of proportion was lost. It seemed but an ordinary field, with eighteen ordinary airplanes resting on it. One of these now was moving, and in a moment it rose into the air! But there seemed to be no men on all the great field. They were invisibly small from this height. Abruptly Arcot gave a great shout. "That's their surprise! They're ready far ahead of the time we expected! If all that armada gets in the air, we're done! Down, Wade, to within a few hundred feet of the ground, and close to the field!" The _Solarite_ flashed down in a power dive--down with a sickening lurch. A sudden tremendous weight seemed to crush them as the ship was brought out of the dive not more than two hundred feet from the ground. Close to blacking out, Wade nevertheless shot it in as close to the field as he dared. Anxiously he called to Arcot, who answered with a brief "Okay!" The planes loomed gigantic now, their true proportions showing clearly against the brilliant light of the field. A tremendous wave of sound burst from the loudspeaker as the planes rolled across the ground to leap gracefully into the air--half a million tons of metal! From the _Solarite_ there darted a pale beam of ghostly light, faintly gray, tinged with red and green--the ionized air of the beam. It moved in a swift half circle. In an instant the whirr of the hundreds, thousands of giant propellers was drowned in a terrific roar of air. Great snowflakes fell from the air before them; it was white with the solidified water vapor. Then came a titanic roar and the planet itself seemed to shake! A crash, a snapping and rending as a mighty fountain of soil and rock cascaded skyward, and with it, twisting, turning, hurled in a dozen directions at once, twelve titanic ships reeled drunkenly into the air! For a barely perceptible interval there was an oppressive silence as the ray was shut off. Then a bedlam of deafening sound burst forth anew, a mighty deluge of unbearable noise as the millions of tons of pulverized rock, humus and metal fell back. Some of it had ascended for miles; it settled amid a howling blizzard--snow that melted as it touched the madly churned airfield.