lines, in the great Last War.]

We sat, Eric Bolton and I, at a parapet table atop the 200-story
General Aviation Building. The efficient robot waiter of the Sky Club
had cleared away the remnants of an epicurean meal. Only a bowl of
golden fruit remained--globes of nectar picked in the citrus groves of
California that morning.

My eye wandered over the scene spread before us, the vast piling of
masonry that is New York. The dying beams of the setting sun glinted
golden from the roofs of the pleasure palaces topping the soaring
structures. Lower, amid interlacing archings of the mid-air
thoroughfares, darkness had already piled its blackness. Two thousand
feet below, in the region of perpetual night, the green-blue factory
lights flared.

On three sides, the unbroken serration of the Empire City's beehives
stretched in a semicircle of twenty miles radius. Long since, the
rivers that had made old Manhattan an island had been roofed over.
But, to the east, the heaving sea still stretched its green expanse.
On the horizon a vast cloud mountain billowed upward from the watery
surface, white, and pink and many shades of violet.

"That's just the way it looked," Bolton muttered, as he drew my
attention to the cloud mass. "See that air-liner just diving into it?
Just so I saw the _New York_--five thousand men--pride of the Air
Service--dive into that mountain of smoke. And she never came out!
Gone--like that!" And he snapped his fingers.

He fell silent again, gazing dreamily at the drifting rings of pipe
smoke. He smiled, the twisted smile which was the sole indication that
one side of his face was the master work of a great surgeon-sculptor.
A marvelous piece of work, that, but no less marvelous than the
protean changes that Bolton himself could make in his appearance. It
was this genius at impersonation that had won Bolton his commission in
the Intelligence Service, when, in 1992, the world burst into flame.

"Would you like to hear about it?" The obtuseness of the man!

"If you'd care to tell me." I spoke off-handedly. This was like
hunting birds on the wing: too abrupt a movement of the glider, and
the game was lost.

This is the story he told me, in the low, modulated voice of the
trained actor. He told it simply, with no dramatic tricks, no
stressing, no climatic crescendos. But I saw the scenes he described,
dodged with him through black caverns of dread, felt an icy hand
clutch my heart as the Ferret star