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His huge hand fastened in the throat of their keeper. Nobody neither Sitsumi nor the Three turned as Naka gasped and struggled. Eyer pulled the man back over the table and, his neck thus within reach of both hands, snapped it as he would have broken the neck of a chicken. Jeter was already searching the body for the keys. He found them. Their leg irons were just falling free when Sitsumi turned.
Eyer was making his dislike entirely too plain. Jeter nudged him, but the question had been asked. "With this space ship and others which are building," replied Sitsumi. "Haven't you guessed at any of our methods?"
The man would have struck Eyer for his grinning levity; but at that moment a door opened in the side of the large building and a man in Oriental robes stood there. "Bring then here at once, Naka!" he said. The man called Naka, the leader whom Jeter had first struck, bowed low, with deep respect, to the man in the doorway. "Yes, O Sitsumi!" he said.
He, of all the "lords of the stratosphere," seemed to possess endless courage. His example fired the three. "What do you plan?" asked Wang Li. Jeter and Eyer listened with all their ears. "We have only one weapon in this unexpected emergency," said Sitsumi quietly. "We cannot direct the ray upward or laterally: it is not so constructed. But we can attack with the space ship itself!
For an hour they studied the concerned faces of Sitsumi and the Three. They were fearful of something. What? To the Rescue "Why should we run?" the voice of Sitsumi suddenly rang out in the control room. "Must we admit in the very beginning of our revolution that we are vulnerable? Must we confess the fears to which all humanity is heir?
At a long table three men all Orientals were deeply immersed in some activity which bent their heads absorbedly over the very center of the table. It might have been a three-sided chess game, by their attitudes. "Gentlemen!" said Sitsumi. The three men turned. "My colleagues, Wang Li, Liao Wu and Yung Chan," Sitsumi introduced them. "Without them our great work would have been impossible."
"Queer, isn't it?" said Eyer. Jeter didn't answer. That preoccupied expression was on his face, that distant look which no man could erase from his face by any interruption until Jeter had finished his train of thought. "Queer," thought Jeter, "that Sitsumi should be so snooty and the three Chinese totally unavailable."
Now and again they stole glances at Sitsumi and the Three, who were watching the six planes with the intensity of eagles preparing to dive. Naka stepped up close to Jeter.
"What," said Jeter calmly "is Sitsumi's hurry? Why is he scared?" "Scared?" Naka seemed on the point of hitting Jeter for the blasphemy. "Scared? He fears nothing. We'll down your friends long before their motors " Sitsumi suddenly turned and looked at Naka. The look in Sitsumi's eyes was murderous, Naka went dead white.
To the five other pilots it must have seemed that the plane had struck some invisible obstruction, been smashed, and now was whirling away to destruction after a strange, incomprehensible hesitation in the heart of the stratosphere. "Quickly, you fool!" shouted Sitsumi at Wang Li. "You're napping! You should have got all those planes!
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