Toroh had fired a thunderbolt. The rush of electrons traveling at the speed of light from Toroh's plane to George's had been too slow. The mark was gone into a different time before the thunderbolt could reach it! The incident left George and Dee shuddering; but confident now that, so long as they kept moving through time, Toroh could not harm them. George's dials now registered the passage of some sixty-eight hundred years. He was amazed. Then he realized how long he and his companion had been talking, and the time-velocity at the twentieth intensity had been accelerating tremendously. He had forgotten to look beneath him; he did so now, and the island was not there. The channel was gone; the mountain range had disappeared. The cataclysm that had formed the island had been passed. Azeela's messages told that her plane was now nearly a hundred years nearer the Anglese time-world. Toroh, finding his attack ineffective, had given it up. He had started a horizontal flight; he was looking for a city in which he could land. George and Dee sat helpless, for Azeela could not describe which way she was flying. "Lost!" George exclaimed. "We've lost them! Of course, she can't tell us which way they're going when there's nothing down there but gray forests--and blurred gray sky overhead." It seemed probable that they would never see Toroh's plane again. Already it was many miles away from them in space, though in what direction they could not guess. The two planes swept back through time, invisible to each other, yet no more than a few hundred years apart. The rescue of Azeela--for the present at least--was certainly impossible. Toroh was looking for a civilization, some gigantic city where he might secure weapons. George decided he must do the same. He discussed it earnestly with Dee, and again, temporarily, Azeela's thought messages were ignored. At fifteen thousand years--more than halfway back to the time-world of the New York City of George's birth--structures began rising out of the forests. By retrograded changes made visible, at first they seemed moldering ruins; then, broken, neglected areas of deserted cities; then the inhabited cities themselves. At eighteen thousand years George and Dee were poised no more than a few miles from where Orleen stood so many centuries later. A huge river with a delta emptied into the open gulf; a broad expanse of lake was near by. And on both sides of the river and around the lake a gigantic city rose in terraced buildings of masonry and steel. Dee stared in awe at its towers, bridges, aerial streets with the monorail structures stretching above. "We might land here," George suggested. "Shall we, Dee? You'd think they'd have _something_ to help your father in the Anglese war." She nodded, and he prepared to land on an open space a few miles north of the city outskirts. They came to the ground at the third intensity of proton current. Everything was gray, soundless. "All ready, Dee?" "Yes."