Avanel is the only reporter her father will trust tonight and she has come to the top room of the Truth Tower, because it is the observation and news gathering room for things that may be untangled from a tower. All the papers have made common cause tonight. All the telescopes are in use, looking to the borders just beyond the City Wall, the borders of Morgan, Menard, Logan, Macon, Christian, Montgomery and Macoupin Counties. The news is assembled and everything observed is explained by telephones from these regions and re-telephoned into the various offices and rewritten there and then telegraphed to all the world that cares. Newsgathering remains what it has been for a century and a half. Boone is at the opposite end of the phone from Avanel and the first definite effects of the threatened air-riot are to make that gentleman quite profane. The flying machines were at first not public property. But so much crowding out of the truly skilled flyers came about by the monopolists with buried gold, that machines are now rented to private citizens by the state or city for a nominal fee and deposit for damages. To enter the examinations in the autumn and to fly for the year is, in theory, one of the privileges of highly skilled, athletic people. Our friend, Portia, the Singing Aviator, is with us tonight and helping unravel the story of the rise of factions. And the gentle creature has written of the uppermost blue and of the dawn clouds and of the map of the earth and of sailing around the curve of the earth. This young girl is appalled to be obliged to take sides in the controversy and enlist for a possible battle of mere children. The most famous aviators on each side come from the High Schools. She does not want to paint war insignia upon her machine. But already her literary imitators have done so. Her three most sedulous apes in the High School, John Nash and Findlay Bryson and Margaret Rand, who have diluted her innocent and heroic songs, turning them into society verses, now demand that she put the death’s head upon her machine, or lose them as disciples. And Portia is appalled to find that the names she once chose in sport to classify the machines are now used to represent actual factions in the threatened war. The Robin Redbreast and Carrier-Pigeon machines are all on the side of the Robins, and the Snobs are subdivided into the Don Juan, the Raider, the Flamboyant, the Brahmin and the Bird of Paradise. It is the exceedingly high priced Brahmin and Bird of Paradise machines that make the trouble.