"We haven't the chance of the proverbial celluloid dog chasing the asbestos cat," he shouted to be heard above the roar of the motor. "But grab your high alt.i.tude suit, oxygen container, and parachute, and let's get as far away from this plane as we can. Who knows? When the end comes we may get a break at that!"

They ran until the bulge of the inner globe all but hid the plane from them. They could see only the top wing. They did not go farther because they wished to make sure that the enemy did not dislodge the plane and nullify all their work.

"They won't be able to," said Jeter, "for that motor is pulling against the wheels and holding them so tight against the side of that door that a hundred men couldn't budge the plane. But we can't take chances."

Quickly the partners slipped into their suits, adjusted their oxygen tanks and parachutes. Then Jeter slipped back the elastic sleeve of his suit and motioned Eyer to do the same. The manacles were brought into view again. They looked at each other. Eyer grinned and held out his left hand. Jeter snapped the second cuff to Eyer's wrist.

The act was significant.

Whatever happened to them, would happen to both in equal measure. It was a gesture which needed no words. If they were slain when their friends--if their theory was correct--finally saw the s.p.a.ce ship, they would die together. If by some miracle they were hurled into outer s.p.a.ce and lived to use their parachutes--well, the discomfort was a small price to pay to stay together.

Now they devoted all their attention to their own situation. Four planes still spun warily above the s.p.a.ce ship. w.a.n.g Li was patently trying with all his might to get all four of them before the Jeter-Eyer plane, by shattering the rind, disclosed the inner core to the bombs of the remaining planes.

"Lucian!" said the fingers of Eyer. "Can you tell whether anything is happening to the rind?"

Jeter hesitated for a long time. There was a distinct and almost nauseating vibration throughout all the s.p.a.ce ship. And was there not something happening to the rind over a wide area, directly above the Jeter-Eyer plane?

They could fancy the snapping of ice on a forest lake in mid-winter.

They couldn't hear, in their suits. They could only feel. But all at once the outer rind, above their plane, vanished. At the same instant the plane itself, propeller still spinning, rose swiftly up through the hole in the rind. The air inside the globe was going out in a great rush.

The partners looked at each other. At that moment the four planes swooped over the s.p.a.ce ship....

Jeter and Eyer knew that the inner globe had at last become visible, for from the bellies of the four planes dropped bomb after bomb. They fell into the great aperture. Jeter and Eyer flung themselves flat. But the bombs had worked sufficient havoc. They had removed all protection from the low-pressure stratosphere. The air inside the s.p.a.ce ship went out with a rush. Jeter and Eyer, hearing nothing, though they knew that the explosions must have been cataclysmic, were picked up and whirled toward that opening, like chips spun toward the heart of a whirlpool.

But for their s.p.a.ce suits they would have been destroyed in the outrush of air. Out of the inner globe came men that flew, sprawled out, somersaulting up and out of apertures made by the crashing bombs.

Ludicrous they looked. Blood streamed from their mouths. Their faces were set in masks of agony. There were Sitsumi and, one after another, the Three.

Then fastened together by the cuffs, the partners were being whirled over and over, out into s.p.a.ce. Their last signals to each other had been:

"Even if you're already dead, pull the ripcord ring of your chute!"

Crushed, buffeted, they still retained consciousness. They sought through the spinning stratosphere for their rescuers. Thousands of feet below--or was it above?--they saw them. Yes, below, for they looked at the tops of the planes. Their upward flight had been dizzying. They waited until their upward flight ceased.

Then, as they started the long fall to Earth, they pulled their rings and waited for their chutes to flower above them.

Soon they were floating downward. Side by side they rode. Above them their parachutes were like two umbrellas, pressed almost too closely together.

They looked about them, seeking the s.p.a.ce ship.

The devastation of its outer rind had been complete, for they now could see the inner globe, and it too was like--well, like merely part of an eggsh.e.l.l.

The doomed s.p.a.ce ship--gyroscope still keeping the ray pointed Earthward--describing an erratic course, was shooting farther upward into the stratosphere, propelled by the ghastly ray which, now no longer controlled by w.a.n.g Li, drove the s.p.a.ce ship madly through the outer cold.

Far below the partners many things were falling: broken furnishings of mad dreamers' stratosphere laboratories, parts of strange machines, whirling, somersaulting things that had once been men.

The partners looked at each other.

The same thought was in the mind of each, as the four remaining planes came in toward them to convoy them down--that when the lords of the stratosphere finally reached the far Earth, only G.o.d would know which was Sitsumi and who were the Three.