'We'll give them tit-for-tat,' he said. 'We'll give them tit-for-tat. No
time to lose, boys....'
And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony
the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing
sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to
the heart of the Central European hosts.
It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above the
banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to plunge at once
into their wet obscurities should some hostile flier range into vision.
The tense young steersman divided his attention between the guiding
stars above and the level, tumbled surfaces of the vapour strata that
hid the world below. Over great spaces those banks lay as even as a
frozen lava-flow and almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged
areas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches
of the land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite
distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps and
signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid through a
boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. But if the world
was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through that vapour floor came
the deep roar of trains, the whistles of horns of motor-cars, a sound
of rifle fire away to the south, and as he drew near his destination the
crowing of cocks.
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