d already been
launched.

"I don't know. We don't even know whether we have a super-ship or not,"
and Samms described briefly the beginning--and very probably the
ending--of the trial flight, concluding: "It looks bad, but if there was
any possible way of handling her, Rodebush and Cleveland did it. All our
tracers are negative yet, so nothing definite has...."

He broke off as a frantic call came in from the Pittsburgh station for
the Commissioner; a call which Samms both heard and saw.

"The city is being attacked!" came the urgent message. "We need all the
reenforcements you can send us!" and a picture of the beleaguered city
appeared in ghastly detail upon the screens of the observers; a view
being recorded from the air. It required only seconds for the
commissioner to order every available man and engine of war to the seat
of conflict; then, having done everything they could do, Kinnison and
Samms stared in helpless, fascinated horror into their plates, watching
the scenes of carnage and destruction depicted there.

The Nevian vessel--the sister-ship, the craft which Costigan had seen in
mid-space as it hurtled Earthward in response to Nerado's summons--hung
poised in full visibility high above the metropolis. Scornful of the
pitiful weapons wielded by man, she hung there, her sinister beauty of
line sharply defined against the cloudless sky. From her shining hull
there reached down a tenuous but rigid rod of crimson energy; a rod
which slowly swept hither and thither as the Nevians searched out the
richest deposits of the precious metal for which they had come so far.
Iron, once solid, now a viscous red liquid, was sluggishly flowing in an
ever-thickening stream up that intangible crimson duct and into the
capacious storage tanks of the Nevian raider; and wherever that flaming
beam went there went also ruin, destruction and death. Office buildings,
skyscrapers towering majestically in their architectural symmetry and
beauty, collapsed into heaps of debris as their steel skeletons were
abstracted. Deep into the ground the beam bored; flood, fire, and
explosion following in its wake as the mazes of underground piping
disappeared. And the humanity of the buildings died: instantaneously and
painlessly, never knowing what struck them, as the life-bearing iron of
their bodies went to swell the Nevian stream.

Pittsburgh's defenses had been feeble indeed. A few antiquated railway
rifles had hurled their shells upwar