A vessel, like the crude steering devices of our own time, aerially controlled! Within some instrument room in the Turber section of the city this helmsman sat. We had no such ships. There was no need for such mechanism in this age. It had been lost and forgotten now with the passing centuries. But Turber had located it and brought it here--adapted it to this world-power with which the ether was flooded and which all ships used. We saw the collision. The great white liner turned over. The two ships, locked together with broken girders, wavered and fell. We turned away as the mirrors showed us close views of the strewn human forms on the roof-top. That was the first of the Turber suicide ships. He had others. One more was used when the next liner appeared. After that Great London ordered the others back. We were cut off from the world. That night of June 13, when the battle had been raging some thirty-eight hours, found Alan and me quartered for needed sleep in a building of northern Westchester. Exhausted beyond all ability to talk or even to think, we slept. Late in the evening we awoke. The tower still had not come. The battle raged everywhere with undiminished fury. The Turberites now had more than doubled their original area. The Hoboken power-house still held out; but in all the rest of the Jersey section the enemy was in full possession. Our forces at the power-house were surrounded; they could not hold it much longer. The harbor islands were all Turber now. And the Brooklyn and Queens sections. Lower Manhattan, without local lights, with its ventilation gone, was a tomb of black corridors and rooms strewn with the dead, while Turberites with gas masks and flash lights prowled among them. Broadway and all to its west toward the Hudson River was taken, up nearly to the Van Cortlandt region. But we still held the mid-section, which once had been Central Park; and Harlem, with widening lines into the Bronx. Still held the vital space of the tower. But it could not be held much longer! CHAPTER XX ON THE CITY ROOF Alan and I sat, that late evening of the battle's second day, upon our bed where we had just been sleeping. The news tapes and mirrors gave us the details of what had happened while we slept. Turber was winning. There could be no doubt of that. The sleep had refreshed us; and suddenly, as I met Alan's eyes, I realized that his thoughts were the same as mine. There must be something we could do to try and rescue Nanette. We were no longer total strangers here. We knew the city now; and by personal contact, or by reputation, we were known to most of the commanders of the city forces. "That fellow Van Dyne," said Alan, "the Marshal of the West Manhattan area, likes us. I was thinking--" I interrupted: "Get him to organize a small squad. It could be done without general orders. Make a secret raid into the Turber section--try to get to the aero--"