nnon, the howling
of airplane jets, and the crash of explosions. Everybody in the room
jerked up and stood frozen, then Prestonby jumped for the TV-screen
and pawed at the dials. A moment later, after the screen flashed and
went black twice, they were looking across the topside landing stage
from a pickup at one corner.

A slim fighter-bomber, with square-tipped, backswept, wings, was
jetting up in almost perpendicular flight; another was coming in
toward the landing stage, and, as they watched, a flight of rockets
leaped forward from under its wings. Cardon saw the orderly-driver of
the ambulance jump down and start to run for the open lift-shaft. He
got five steps away from his vehicle. Then the rockets came in, and
one of them struck the tarpaulin-covered pile of boxes beside the
ambulance. There was a flash of multicolored flame, in which the man
and the vehicle he had left both vanished. Immediately, the screen
went black.

The fireworks had mostly exploded at the first blast; however, when
Cardon and Major Slater and one or two others reached the top landing
stage, there were still explosions. A thing the size and shape of a
two-gallon kettle, covered with red paper, came rolling toward them,
and suddenly let go with a blue-green flash, throwing a column of
smoke, in miniature imitation of an A-bomb, into the air. Something
about three feet long came whizzing at them on the end of a tail of
fire, causing them to fling themselves flat; involuntarily, Cardon's
head jerked about and his eyes followed it until it blew up with a
flash and a bang three blocks uptown. Here and there, colored fire
flared, small rockets flew about, and firecrackers popped.

The ambulance was gone, blown clear off the roof. The other 'copters
on the landing stage were a tangled mass of wreckage. The 20-mm was
toppled over; the gunner was dead, and one of the crew, half-dazed,
was trying to drag a third man from under the overturned gun. The
control tower, with the two 12-mm machine guns, was wrecked. The two
7-mm's that had been left on the top had vanished, along with the
machine gunners, in a hole that had been blown in the landing stage.

Cardon, Slater, and the others dashed forward and pulled the
auto-cannon off the injured man, hauling him and his companion over to
the lift. The two rakish-winged fighter-bombers were returning,
spraying the roof with machine-gun bullets, and behind them came a
procession of fifteen big 'copters.