It was with this gathering storm that the disks raced down toward the city, never glimpsing the line of planes above. For a space of minutes, they hung motionless, surveying the shining, splendid metropolis. The streets below, temporarily deserted beneath the coming storm, were like brilliant rivers of light, connecting the lakes of luminescence that were the squares. One imagines the invaders in the disks staring down at the city in amazement, if their reptilian natures possessed the power. As they hung there, the beam of one of the questing searchlights caught them and held them, and the stabbing rays of the other lights shifted to them at once, bathing the disks in a flood of white light. Then, from high above, the airplanes drove down upon them and the battle had begun.

One can see that battle clearest, perhaps, through the eyes of a single individual, a certain young Brownell who was the pilot of a single-seater combat plane. At the first orders he had taken the air almost joyously, with the exciting thought that at last his training was to be tested in actual battle. He thrilled to the thought, as with the other planes he swooped down upon the disks.

Down he went and down, diving toward a single disk that hung at some distance from the mass of its fellows. His hands grasped the control of the plane’s machine-gun, and even above the roar of the motor he heard the pup-pup-pup-pup of the gun, spraying bullets on the disk. He swept down onto that disk and over it in a great curve, passing above it at a height of a few yards. As he flashed over it, the lightning flared out blindingly above, and as he caught momentary sight of the things on the disk, his hands trembled on the controls. He had glimpsed a mass of upturned heads, scaled and peaked, with fanged and gaping mouths. For the first time he saw the creatures of dread he was fighting. As he drove up above the battle and banked and circled for another swoop, his hands were still trembling.

From below came the popping of bombs, a few of which scored hits on the disks, most of which plunged down toward the city below, misses. The roar of their detonation seemed feeble beside the crash of the thunder, which was now rumbling forth almost continuously. Away to the left of the battle, two planes collided and dropped swiftly to earth, trailing long streamers of red flames, blazing comets plunging earthward through the upper darkness.

And now, their first shock of surprise over, the invaders struck back, and the blue ray flashed up, searching out and finding the planes, whose wings shriveled and collapsed beneath its touch. Two of the disks had been forced down by lucky hits with bombs, but the others were almost unscathed, and now the planes were falling ever more rapidly beneath the Cold Ray.