Elza, staring with her heart in her throat, saw a ball of yellow fire mount from the house. It swung into the air in a slow, lazy parabola, came down and dropped into the lake. But it fell where the marksman saw the boat, a safe distance to one side. A ball of fire dropping into the water, exploding the water all around it for a distance of a dozen feet. Like a cascade, the water mounted.
Other bombs came. It turns me cold when I think how orders like this could have come from the Great City--these bombs which had they found their mark would have killed Tarrano, but at the expense of the life of Elza. They did not find their mark. Tarrano continually changed the curve of his beam. The image of the boat shifted. A few moments only; and riding the waves of the bomb-tossed water, they rounded a bend, back into the narrow river and were beyond range.
Tarrano snapped off his ray. "Quite safe, Lady Elza. Do not be alarmed. I doubt if they will locate us again. They should be very busy now in the Great City. I'm surprised they could even think to notify this Station we have just passed."
We were indeed very busy in the Great City during those hours, as you shall presently hear.
Tarrano and Elza were not again disturbed. How far they went in the boat she does not know, but at last they landed in a sheltered cove. An air vehicle was there. Tarrano transferred Elza to it, and in a moment more they were aloft.
The vehicle was little more than an oblong platform, with a low railing. A platform of a substance resembling _glascite-transparent_; and with a _glascite_ shield V-shaped in front to break the rush of wind and yet give vision. A mechanism, not of radio-power, but of gravity like the space-flyers. Such platforms had been, but were no longer in use on Earth. Elza had never seen one. It was a new experience for her, this flying with nothing above one, nothing to the side, or underneath save that transparent substance. To her it was like floating, and at times falling headlong through the air.
They rose no more than a thousand feet at first, and then swept parallel with the ground. At a tremendous speed; even at this height the forests seemed moving backward as the ground moves beneath a surface vehicle.