inging the others. "The rest are smashed up some," the officer
told him, "but I think they'll pull through."

* * * * *

The Secretary of War for the United States lay beside him. Men with red
on their sleeves were slitting his coat. Through one good eye he
squinted at Thurston. He even managed a smile.

"Well, I wanted to see them up close," he said. "They say you saved us,
old man."

Thurston waved that aside. "Thank Riley--" he began, but the words ended
in the roar of an exhaust. A plane darted swiftly away to shoot
vertically a hundred feet in the air. Another followed and another. In a
cloud of brown dust they streamed endlessly out, zooming up like angry
hornets, eager to get into the fight.

"Fast little devils!" the ambulance man observed. "Here come the big
boys."

A leviathan went deafeningly past. And again others came on in quick
succession. Farther up the field, silvery gray planes with rudders
flaunting their red, white and blue rose circling to the heights.

"That's the Navy," was the explanation. The surgeon straightened the
Secretary's arm. "See them come off the big airplane carriers!"

If his remarks were part of his professional training in removing a
patient's thoughts from his pain, they were effective. The Secretary
stared out to sea, where two great flat-decked craft were shooting
planes with the regularity of a rapid fire gun. They stood out sharply
against a bank of gray fog. Cyrus Thurston forgot his bruised body,
forgot his own peril--even the inferno that raged back across the bay:
he was lost in the sheer thrill of the spectacle.

* * * * *

Above them the sky was alive with winged shapes. And from all the
disorder there was order appearing. Squadron after squadron swept to
battle formation. Like flights of wild ducks the true sharp-pointed Vs
soared off into the sky. Far above and beyond, rows of dots marked the
race of swift scouts for the upper levels. And high in the clear air
shone the glittering menace trailing their five plumes of gas.

A deeper detonation was merging into the uproar. It came from the ships,
Thurston knew, where anti-aircraft guns poured a rain of shells into the
sky. About the invaders they bloomed into clusters of smoke balls. The
globes shot a thousand feet into the air. Again the shells found them,
and again they retreated.

"Look!" said Thurston. "They got one!"

He groaned as a long