*

Jeter and Eyer knew that the inner globe had at last become visible, for
from the bellies of the four planes dropped bomb after bomb. They fell
into the great aperture. Jeter and Eyer flung themselves flat. But the
bombs had worked sufficient havoc. They had removed all protection from
the low-pressure stratosphere. The air inside the space ship went out
with a rush. Jeter and Eyer, hearing nothing, though they knew that the
explosions must have been cataclysmic, were picked up and whirled toward
that opening, like chips spun toward the heart of a whirlpool.

But for their space suits they would have been destroyed in the outrush
of air. Out of the inner globe came men that flew, sprawled out,
somersaulting up and out of apertures made by the crashing bombs.
Ludicrous they looked. Blood streamed from their mouths. Their faces
were set in masks of agony. There were Sitsumi and, one after another,
the Three.

Then fastened together by the cuffs, the partners were being whirled
over and over, out into space. Their last signals to each other had
been:

"Even if you're already dead, pull the ripcord ring of your chute!"

Crushed, buffeted, they still retained consciousness. They sought
through the spinning stratosphere for their rescuers. Thousands of feet
below--or was it above?--they saw them. Yes, below, for they looked at
the tops of the planes. Their upward flight had been dizzying. They
waited until their upward flight ceased.

Then, as they started the long fall to Earth, they pulled their rings
and waited for their chutes to flower above them.

Soon they were floating downward. Side by side they rode. Above them
their parachutes were like two umbrellas, pressed almost too closely
together.

They looked about them, seeking the space ship.

The devastation of its outer rind had been complete, for they now could
see the inner globe, and it too was like--well, like merely part of an
eggshell.

The doomed space ship--gyroscope still keeping the ray pointed
Earthward--describing an erratic course, was shooting farther upward
into the stratosphere, propelled by the ghastly ray which, now no longer
controlled by Wang Li, drove the space ship madly through the outer
cold.

Far below the partners many things were falling: broken furnishings of
mad dreamers' stratosphere laboratories, parts of strange machines,
whirling, somersaulting things that had once been men.

The partners looked at each other.

The s