The ship was floating in the air, a hundred feet above the waves! The air was still, the sea was smooth and black.... The eastern sky was lit by the silver curtain of the dawn, with the old moon hanging in it. Before us, and below, two hundred yards away, was a queer luminous hill--a shining cloud of red-purple vapor that rolled spread heavily upon the black water. I saw two similar twisting mounds of gas astern, gleaming with a painful radiance. And the ship was rising into the air! It was drifting swiftly up, through the still air, so that a wind seemed to blow down upon us. I saw a rifle hanging in the air ten feet above me, and a steel boat rising a dozen feet over the mast. Suddenly it came to me that something had negated the gravity of the metal parts of the ship. I thought of the story of the gravity-destroying bombs used in the raid of the night before upon the thorium stores. The forward gun was still firing steadily, though the terrorized men had deserted the others. I saw a man point above us, and looked. A red airplane, with thick fuselage and short wings, was flying silently and swiftly across our bows. As it passed, something fell from it. It was a dark object that fell and exploded just above us, bursting into a thick, roily cloud of shining purple mist. The light of it hurt my eyes. And the ship plunged upward faster. In view of what happened later, there can be no doubt that the luminous gas was a radioactive element derived by the forced acceleration of the decomposition of thorium. It was similar to the inert radioactive gas niton, or "radium emanation," which is formed by the expulsion of an alpha particle from the radium atom. And there can be no doubt that its emanations affected the magnetic elements, iron, nickel, cobalt, and oxygen in such a manner as to reverse the pull of gravity. With the invention of permalloy and other similar substances in the past decade, such a thing is much less incredible than it might have seemed ten years ago. In a few moments the red ship had passed out of sight. Looking dazedly to the west, I saw a number of bright points of purple fire against the deep blue of the sky--radioactive clouds sending out the gravity-nullifying radiations. The dark shape of the other destroyer, upside down, was floating up among them. It must have been almost a mile up, already. As I stood there astounded, the officers seemed to be making a furious attempt to restore order. Then men were running about, babbling and cursing in utter confusion. I saw one man don a life belt and jump insanely over the rail--to plunge like a plummet to the water five hundred yards below. A dozen more poor fellows followed him before the mate could stop the rush. And perhaps their fate is as good as that of the others.