able chairs.
They were designed to put every muscle and every nerve at rest.
Luxuriously, almost in spite of themselves, they relaxed.

Dimly Arcot felt a wave of sleepiness sweep over him; he yawned
prodigiously. There was no conscious awareness of his sinking into a
deep slumber. It seemed that suddenly visions began to fill his
mind--visions that developed with a returning consciousness--up from the
dark, into a dream world. He saw a mighty fleet whose individual planes
were a mile long, with three-quarters of a mile wingspread--titanic
monoplanes, whose droning thunder seemed to roar through all space. Then
suddenly they were above him, and from each there spurted a great stream
of dazzling brilliance, an intense glow that reached down, and touched
the city. An awful concussion blasted his ears. All the world about him
erupted in unimaginable brilliance; then darkness fell.

Another vision filled his mind--a vision of the same fleet hanging over
a giant crater of molten rock, a crater that gaped angrily in a plain
beside low green hills--a crater that had been a city. The giants of the
air circled, turned, and sped over the horizon. Again he was with
them--and again he saw a great city fuse in a blazing flash of blinding
light--again and yet again--until around all that world he saw smoking
ruins of great cities, now blasted crimson craters in a world of fearful
desolation.

The destroyers rode up, up, up--out of the clouds--and he was with them.
Out beyond the swirling mists, where the cold of space seemed to reach
in at them, and the roaring of the mighty propellers was a thin
whine--then suddenly that was gone, and from the tail of each of the
titanic machines there burst a great stream of light, a blazing column
that roared back, and lit all space for miles around--rocket jets that
sent them swiftly across space!

He saw them approaching another world, a world that shone a dull red,
but he saw the markings and knew that it was Earth, not Mars. The great
planes began falling now--falling at an awful speed into the upper air
of the planet, and in an instant the rocket flares were gone, fading and
dying in the dense air. Again there came the roar of the mighty
propellers. Then swiftly the fleet of giants swooped down, lower and
lower. He became aware of its destination--a spot he knew must be New
York--but a strangely distorted New York--a Venerian city, where New
York should have been. And again, the bombs rai