The commander bent over Alan and seized the projector. The light swung to Turber and the woman. They staggered, but kept on. Then the woman fell. She lay twitching. Turber left her. He stumbled, fell; but got up. Gruesomely contorted--staggering with twitching steps. Almost at the aero's entrance he fell again. Relief surged over me. The aero, bathed in the white and yellow glare, went thin as a ghost. An apparition--with the solid broken figure of Turber lying huddled. A wraith of the vehicle. It was gone! But only for a moment! Why, what was this? The horror surged back to me. Unimaginable horror! The aero had gone. But had gone only a moment into our future, and then had stopped. And in that moment we had caught up with it. As we stared at the empty space, with that passing moment the Time-aero materialized again. It lay in a tangled, disintegrating heap of metal with lurid green tongues of gas-flame licking at it! CHAPTER XXIII UNRECORDED HISTORY To me, the rest of those sixty minutes were a vague, drab dream of things horrible to see. Awesome--but though the rocking, shattering Turber city went down while I watched, it all seemed dreamlike. My mind was on that torn heap of wreckage which had been Turber's Time-vehicle. Nanette's body lying somewhere there. Alan seemed dazed. A man shoved him away and took his place. He sat huddled by Lea. I sat, numbly staring. Then someone said: "Two minutes! That's enough, Grantson! Get the girl and those ancients to insulate the projector. Hurry! We won't need it any more, but no use ruining it." The world-power was about to come on again. We hastened to insulate our projecting mechanism. The light-beam died. But its work was through. All this end of the Turber-owned city was in ruins. The black waters of what had once been New York Bay were exposed. The islands and the causeways and all the structure there was strewn and tumbled and broken. All of what had been Staten Island was wrecked. Fires and explosions everywhere, and masses of lurid smoke mounting; and all the upper air pungent with the smell of chemicals. The gas clouds hid the Staten Island hill, with its wrecked aero. We swung back toward Manhattan as the world-power flashed on. Our sixty minutes were over. Aftermath of the battle; I need not detail it. To Alan and me it was all unimportant. We kept Lea close with us. Gentle little creature! Why, I suppose her ethereal beauty could not be matched in all the world. But my mind went always to Nanette.