with his new official mistress, for his semi-barbaric court was
arranged on the best romantic models. His tactics were ably

seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister. Failing to
establish his claims to complete independence, King Ferdinand

Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as a
protected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing

submission, and put a mass of obstacles in the way of the
transfer of his national officials to the new government. In

these things he was enthusiastically supported by his subjects,
still for the most part an illiterate peasantry, passionately if

confusedly patriotic, and so far with no practical knowledge of
the effect of atomic bombs. More particularly he retained control

of all the Balkan aeroplanes.
For once the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been

mitigated by duplicity. He went on with the general pacification
of the world as if the Balkan submission was made in absolute

good faith, and he announced the disbandment of the force of
aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the council at Brissago upon the

approaching fifteenth of July. But instead he doubled the number
upon duty on that eventful day, and made various arrangements for

their disposition. He consulted certain experts, and when he took
King Egbert into his confidence there was something in his neat

and explicit foresight that brought back to that ex-monarch's
mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a

green umbrella.
About five o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one

of the outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring
unobtrusively over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted

and hailed a strange aeroplane that was flying westward, and,
failing to get a satisfactory reply, set its wireless apparatus

talking and gave chase. A swarm of consorts appeared very
promptly over the westward mountains, and before the unknown

aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants
closing in upon it. Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped

down among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight,
only to find an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He

then went round into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within
a hundred yards of his original pursuer.

The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an
intelligent grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger

first. The man at the wheel must have heard his companion cry out
behind him, but he was too intent on getting away to waste even a

glance behind. Twice after that he must have heard shots. He let
his engine go, he crouched down, and for twenty minutes he must

have steered in the continualexpectation of a bullet. It never
came, and when at last he glanced round, three great planes were

close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead across
his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset

or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down. At last
he was curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level

fields of rice and maize. Ahead of him and dark against the
morning sunrise was a village with a very tall and slender

campanile and a line of cable bearing metal standards that he
could not clear. He stopped his engine abruptly and dropped flat.

He may have hoped to get at the bombs when he came down, but his
pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot him as he fell.

Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass
close by the smashed machine. Their passengers descended, and

ran, holding their light rifles in their hands towards the debris
and the two dead men. The coffin-shaped box that had occupied

the centre of the machine had broken, and three black objects,
each with two handles like the ears of a pitcher, lay peacefully

amidst the litter.
These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their

captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and
broken amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead

frogs by a country pathway.
'By God,' cried the first. 'Here they are!'

'And unbroken!' said the second.
'I've never seen the things before,' said the first.

'Bigger than I thought,' said the second.
The third comer arrived. He stared for a moment at the bombs and

then turned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay
in a muddy place among the green stems under the centre of the

machine.
'One can take no risks,' he said, with a faint suggestion of

apology.
The other two now also turned to the victims. 'We must signal,'

said the first man. A shadow passed between them and the sun,
and they looked up to see the aeroplane that had fired the last

shot. 'Shall we signal?' came a megaphone hail.
'Three bombs,' they answered together.

'Where do they come from?' asked the megaphone.
The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved

towards the dead men. One of them had an idea. 'Signal that
first,' he said, 'while we look.' They were joined by their

aviators for the search, and all six men began a hunt that was
necessarily brutal in its haste, for some indication of identity.

They examined the men's pockets, their bloodstained clothes, the
machine, the framework. They turned the bodies over and flung

them aside. There was not a tattoo mark. . . . Everything was
elaborately free of any indication of its origin.

'We can't find out!' they called at last.
'Not a sign?'

'Not a sign.'
'I'm coming down,' said the man overhead....

Section 7
The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art

Nouveau palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his
bright little capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled

and cunning, and now full of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind
them the window opened into a large room, richly decorated in

aluminium and crimsonenamel, across which the king, as he
glanced ever and again over his shoulder with a gesture of

inquiry, could see through the two open doors of a little azure
walled antechamber the wireless operator in the turretworking at

his incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed messengers
waited listlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished with

a statelydignity, and had in the middle of it a big green
baize-covered table with the massive white metal inkpots and

antiquated sandboxes natural to a new but romanticmonarchy. It
was the king's council chamber and about it now, in attitudes of

suspended intrigue, stood the half-dozen ministers who
constituted his cabinet. They had been summoned for twelve

o'clock, but still at half-past twelve the king loitered in the
balcony and seemed to be waiting for some news that did not come.

The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they
had fallen silent, for they found little now to express except a

vague anxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white
metal roofs of the long farm buildings beneath which the bomb

factory and the bombs were hidden. (The chemist who had made all
these for the king had died suddenly after the declaration of

Brissago.) Nobody knew of that store of mischief now but the king
and his adviser and three heavily faithful attendants; the

aviators who waited now in the midday blaze with their
bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in the

exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still
in ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were

presently to take up. It was time they started if the scheme was
to work as Pestovitch had planned it. It was a magnificent plan.

It aimed at no less than the Empire of the World. The government
of idealists and professors away there at Brissago was to be

blown to fragments, and then east, west, north, and south those
aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that had disarmed

itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Caesar, the
Master, Lord of the Earth. It was a magnificent plan. But the