News of Anita and Venza! I could see in the mirror-image, behind Dud's head the outlines of the little public cubby from which he was calling. He and his brother, on some illicit errand of their own in East Side lower Manhattan, had seen figures alighting from a fare-car. They had caught a glimpse of the faces of Anita and Venza. The girls were hooded and cloaked; a hooded man was with them. The fare-car quickly rolled away, and the hooded figures, suddenly becoming invisible within their magnetic cloaks, had vanished. "S'elp me, we couldn't do nothin'. You know we take no chances with the police by carryin' cylinders. So I paged you in a hurry." "Dud, that's damn nice of you. Where are you now? Tell me again." The Ardleys, knowing nothing of the events of this night, supposed that the girls were being abducted, and decided I should be informed. "Damn right, Dud. We'll come at once. You two wait for us?" "Sure. If you got instruments, maybe we can track 'em. It wasn't a quarter of a mile from here, over toward the river. Plenty of rotten dumps down there." "Wait for us, Dud. We'll come in a rush." I slammed shut the audiphone. Snap, beside me, had heard it all. He shoved the astonished orderly out of the way. "What's the nearest exit-route out of here?" "To the city roof, sir. Up this incline." We dashed up the spiral incline, through a low exit-port, and were in the starlight of the city roof. * * * * * "Connect it, Gregg! You can't tell; her message might come over any minute." I tuned my coils to the seldom used oscillation frequency which Halsey had told us Anita's transmitter was sending. "Anything, Gregg?" "No. Dead channel." The air, in Anita's channel, was bafflingly silent. We had been challenged by a roof-guard when we appeared from the upper port of the Conclave Hall; the city roof was not open to public traffic. But with our identifications, he found us a single-seat hand-tram, and started us southward on the deserted route. It was a cloudless night, with stars like thickly-strewn diamonds on purple velvet. The city roof lay glistening in the starlight. In my great-grandfather's time there had been no roof here; the open city was exposed to all the inclement weather. But gradually the arcades and overhead viaducts, cross balconies and catwalks which spanned the canyon street between the giant buildings became a roof. It spread, now terraced and sloped to top the lofty buildings, like a great rumpled sheet propped by the knees of sleeping giants. Some of the roof was of opaque alumite, dark patches, alternating with the great glassite panes which in places admitted the daylight.