Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering light and with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was Berlin.  The left finger of the steersman verified roads and open spaces below upon the mica-covered square of map that was fastened by his wheel.  There in a series of lake-like expansions was the Havel away to the right; over by those forests must be Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdam island; and right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great thoroughfare that fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the imperial headquarters.  There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings, those clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices in which the Central European staff was housed.  It was all coldly clear and colourless in the dawn.

He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and became swiftly louder.  Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was circling down from an immense height to challenge him.  He made a gesture with his left arm to the gloomy man behind and then gripped his little wheel with both hands, crouched over it, and twisted his neck to look upward.  He was attentive, tightly strung, but quite contemptuous of their ability to hurt him.  No German alive, he was assured, could outfly him, or indeed any one of the best Frenchmen.  He imagined they might strike at him as a hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the bitter cold up there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came slanting down like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so rapidly but that he was able to slip away from under them and get between them and Berlin.  They began challenging him in German with a megaphone when they were still perhaps a mile away.  The words came to him, rolled up into a mere blob of hoarse sound.  Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave chase and swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of hundred behind.  They were beginning to understand what he was.  He ceased to watch them and concentrated himself on the city ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced....

A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one was tearing paper.  A second followed.  Something tapped the machine.

It was time to act.  The broad avenues, the park, the palaces below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them.  ‘Ready!’ said the steersman.

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side.  It was a black sphere two feet in diameter.  Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head until his lips touched it.  Then he had to bite in order to let the air in upon the inducive.  Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance.  Then very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.