"I have a surprise for you, Tony," he said, throwing back the lid of
what I had supposed was a big supply case. And with a sigh of relief,
Wilma stepped out of the case.

"If you 'go into zero' (a common expression of the day for being
annihilated by the disintegrator ray), you don't think I'm going to let
you go alone, do you, Tony? I couldn't believe my ears last night when
you spoke of going without me, until I realized that you are still five
hundred years behind the times in lots of ways. Don't you know, dear
heart, that you offered me the greatest insult a husband could give a
wife? You didn't, of course."

The others, it seemed, had all been in on the secret, and now they would
have kidded me unmercifully, except that Wilma's eyes blazed
dangerously.

At nightfall, we maneuvered to a position directly above the city. This
took some time and calculation on the part of Bill Barker, who explained
to me that he had to determine our point by ultronic bearings. The
slightest resort to an electronic instrument, he feared, might be
detected by our enemies' locators. In fact, we did not dare bring our
swooper any lower than five miles for fear that its capacity might be
reflected in their instruments.

Finally, however, he succeeded in locating above the central tower of
the city.

"If my calculations are as much as ten feet off," he remarked with
confidence, "I'll eat the tower. Now the rest is up to you, Mort. See
what you can do to hold her steady. No--here, watch this indicator--the
red beam, not the green one. See--if you keep it exactly centered on the
needle, you're O.K. The width of the beam represents seventeen feet. The
tower platform is fifty feet square, so we've got a good margin to work
on."

For several moments we watched as Gibbons bent over his levers,
constantly adjusting them with deft touches of his fingers. After a bit
of wavering, the beam remained centered on the needle.

"Now," I said, "let's drop."

I opened the trap and looked down, but quickly shut it again when I felt
the air rushing out of the ship into the rarefied atmosphere in a
torrent. Gibbons literally yelled a protest from his instrument board.

"I forgot," I mumbled. "Silly of me. Of course, we'll have to drop out
of compartment."

The compartment, to which I referred, was similar to those in some of
the 20th Century submarines. We all entered it. There was barely room
for us to stand, shoulder to shoulder. With some st