The ensign said in a very quiet voice: "The fight's coming lower."

There was a crashing thump in the air. A battleship was firing
eight-inch guns almost straight up. Other guns began.

Guns began to fire on the carrier, too, below the deck and beyond it.
Concussion waves beat at Coburn's body. He thrust Janice behind him to
shield her, but there could be no shielding.

The air was filled with barkings and snarlings and the unbelievably
abrupt roar of heavy guns. The carrier swerved, so swiftly that it
tilted and swerved again. The other ships of the fleet broke their
straight-away formation and began to move in bewildering patterns. The
blue sea was criss-crossed with wakes. Once a destroyer seemed to slide
almost under the bow of the carrier. The destroyer appeared unharmed on
the other side, its guns all pointed skyward and emitting seemingly
continuous blasts of flame and thunder.

* * * * *

The ensign grabbed Coburn's shoulder and pointed, his hands shaking.

There was the Invader ship. It was exactly as Coburn had known it would
be. It was tiny. It seemed hardly larger than some of the planes that
swooped at it. But the planes were drawing back now. The shining metal
thing was no more than two thousand feet up and it was moving in
erratic, unpredictable darts and dashes here and there, like a
dragon-fly's movements, but a hundred times more swift. Proximity-fused
shells burst everywhere about it. It burst through a still-expanding
puff of explosive smoke, darted down a hundred feet, and took a zig-zag
course of such violent and angular changes of position that it looked
more like a streak of metal lightning than anything else.

It was down to a thousand feet. It shot toward the fleet at a speed
which was literally that of a projectile. It angled off to one side and
back, and suddenly dropped again and plunged crazily through the maze of
ships from one end to the other, no more than fifty feet above the water
and with geysers of up-flung sea all about it from the shells that
missed.

Then it sped away with a velocity which simply was not conceivable. It
was the speed of a cannonball. It was headed straight toward a distant,
stubby, draggled tramp-steamer which plodded toward the Bay of Naples.

It rose a little as it flew. And then it checked, in mid-air. It hung
above the dumpy freighter, and there were salvoes of all the guns in the
fleet. But at the flashes it shot sk