The major, red with excitement and impatience, still had a hand on the machine-gun.  He was patting it slightly, his face eloquent of longing and regret.

“Still pinning your faith to steel-jacketed streams of bullets, are you, as against ion-jacketed streams of vibrations?” the Master rallied him.  “We shall see, immediately, whether you’re right or I am!  Bullets are all well enough in their place, Major, but electrons are sometimes necessary.  Vibrations, Major—­I pin my faith to vibrations.”

“Vibrate all you want to!” exclaimed the Celt, irefully, his eyes on the thickening swarm of flyers, some of them now plainly visible in detail against the aching smears of color flung across the eastern reaches of cloudland.  “Vibrate away; but give me this!” He fondled the gleaming gun as if it had been a pet.  “I tell you frankly, if I were in charge here, I’d let the vibrations go to Hell and begin pumping lead.  I’d have all gun-crews at stations, and the second we got in range I’d open with all six Lewises!”

“Yes, and Nissr would go crumpling down, a minute later, a blazing sieve fore-and-aft—­wings, tanks, fuselage, everything riddled with thousands of bullets.  Vibration is the trick, I tell you.  It’s everything.

“All life is vibration.  When it ceases, that is death—­and even dead matter vibrates.  All our senses depend on vibration.  Everything we feel, see, hear, taste, comes to our knowledge through vibrations.  And the receptive force in us is vibration, too.  The brain is just one great, central ganglion for the taking in of vibrations.

“The secret of life, of the universe itself, is vibration.  If we understood all about that, the cosmos would have no secrets from us.  So now—­ah, see there, will you?  See, Major, and be convinced!”

He pointed eastward, into the blazing sunrise.  The out-fling of his arm betrayed more human emotion than he had yet shown.  Exultation leaped to his usually impassive eyes.  Surely, had not this expedition—­which he had hoped would give surcease from ennui and stir the pulses—­had it not already yielded dividends?  Had it not already very richly repaid him?

“See there, now!” he cried again, and gripped the rail with nervous hands.

“Lord above!” ejaculated the major, squinting through his binoculars.

“Astonished, eh?” demanded the Master, smiling with malice.  “Didn’t think it would work, did you?  Well, which do you choose now, Major—­bullets or vibrations?”

“This—­this is extraordinary!” exclaimed Bohannan.  His glasses traveled to and fro, sweeping the fringelike fan of the attackers, still five or six miles away.  “Faith, but this is—­”

The binoculars lowered slowly, as Bohannan watched a falling plane.  Everywhere ahead there in the brazier of the dawn, as the two men stood watching from the wind-lashed gallery of the on-roaring liner, attackers were dropping.  All along the line they had begun to fall, like ripe fruit in a hurricane.