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He gestured outward with his hand, despairingly. She smiled with certain bitterness.

“Real women?” The girl exclaimed. “Show me a real man first! Extinct! I’ve always thought so; but until tonight I’ve always been too polite to say so. Somehow, with you, politeness and subterfuge seem as stupidly unreal as all the rest of this super-civilization. I wonder, now — ”

A sudden flare of light, far outshining the moon, interrupted her speech. The brilliance flooded the whole sky, dazzled upon the spinning clouds below, and for a second glared with noonday radiance. Every minutest detail of the ship stood out in startling relief.

A wailing, screeching note cleft the high air, grew swiftly louder as the light brightened, then ended in a thunderous crash that shook the liner from lookout to extremest rudder-plane.

Then, instantly, the light glared below. The novelist, leaning over the rail as the staggered liner heeled sickeningly far to port, saw a swift streak of bluish flame — flame that roared, that coruscated — plunge like a rocket into the enveloping fleeciness of the clouds, and vanish.

III

A DULL concussion shuddered through the Imperatrice, then two more in quick succession. Flames gushed, aft. Confused cries, shouts, and tumult rose on the night. Everywhere echoed that most terrible of all sounds; the shrieking of women. Came the trampling of feet running along the decks, which already — as the stupendous aerocraft slowed, drunkenly swaying — had begun to slant at a perilous angle.

Flung against him by a jostling of terrified passengers, the girl caught Norford Hale’s arm. She sensed how hard and rigid that arm was, as he stiffened himself to shield her and braced himself against the bending, creaking rail to meet the shock.

Still another detonation, aft, shivered through the mangled liner, now yawing off in a wide, descending spiral. All at once the lights died. The frozen moonlight stared in on a panic-maddened mob driving along the promenade past them, as the two clung to their sheltering corner behind the kinetogram house.

Groaning, suddenly splintering, a whole long section of the rail ripped outward. With a gasp, Jeanne buried her face on Norford’s breast to shut away the horrifying sight of more than a hundred human beings hurled in fantastic gyrations into black space. That sight she did not witness; but not even her gloved hands, pressed tight against her ears, could shut away the screams of the lost wretches — screams almost instantly muted, far below, to silence.”

“A meteor!” Cried the man, staring aghast. “Everything provided for — foreseen — but this!”

Scrambling away from the horrible void; clutching with mad hands, tearing at one another, grappling anything that promised any slightest hold, the stampeded horde of men and women — with all too many children — God knows — fought away from the blank vacancy where the rail had vanished.

On hands and knees they scrambled up the steeply-slanted deck, in the moonlight, utterly brutalized by sickening panic. No traditions of self-restraint and heroism controlled them, such as had prevailed in the old sea-days. All pretenses of organization and authority were instantly swept away. Discipline there was none, in that lax-fibred multitude. In one moment of time, decades of calm, sleek, full-fed civilization, civilization perfectly balanced and urbane, civilization poised, confident, and self-satisfied, had all been starkly swept away.

The primitive in man had instantly surged hot, brutal, raw, to the surface.

Unheeded now were the perfectly futile commands of such few officers as still strove to restore order. The shouts of the stewards — themselves paralyzed with terror — made no slightest impression as they tried to direct the donning of the life-preservers, crying that there was no danger — a palpable lie, since already the Imperatrice was staggering to her death.

Hale shuddered with a profound horror as he sheltered the half-fainting girl in his arms. He hears her crying out some unintelligible thing.

“There, there, Romney! Don’t look.” He mechanically