into their wet obscurities should some hostile flier range into vision.
The tense young steersman divided his attention between the guiding
stars above and the level, tumbled surfaces of the vapour strata that
hid the world below. Over great spaces those banks lay as even as a
frozen lava-flow and almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged
areas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches
of the land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite
distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps and
signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid through a
boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. But if the world
was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through that vapour floor came
the deep roar of trains, the whistles of horns of motor-cars, a sound
of rifle fire away to the south, and as he drew near his destination the
crowing of cocks....

The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first
starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to east as the
dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesser
stars vanished. The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel, darkly
visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass face,
had something of that firm beauty which all concentrated purpose gives,
and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at last got
hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with
his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained
in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would
continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen
in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had been
tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers
embedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction slumbering
in the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out