surface, the largest of our little cylinders with Peters and two of his skilled men led us in a line. And behind us came the girls, in squads of twenty, each with a leader. They had often practiced it, for sport and for the possibility of such a time as this.

As we passed the Water City, we submerged to fifty feet. I turned to look back through our turret. Like darting fishes the girls came down, still holding their formation as we swept on through the green-black depths to battle.

VII

For a time we ran with short-range headlight beams preceding us, then, as we neared the area where we knew Tollgamo's ships should now be, we ran dark. But still there were the glowing, bubbling rocket-stream tails of our fifty little cylinder boats; and the rocket-streams of the girls' diving sleds. And our swift passage through the water left a phosphorescent wake so that the area all around us glowed, opalescent with a pallid, eerie light.

Leh and his father had arranged the tactics of battle which we hoped we could employ. He explained them to us now. Peters' larger cylinder was banded with white alumite stripes so as to be easily distinguishable. Its light signals would give us orders.

"There is a ridge," Leh was saying. "It crosses from the promontory head of the metal mountains across to the Arron forests. We think Tollgamo will follow it as his best method of approach."

It was a transverse ridge, lying at an average of not much more than fifty feet beneath the surface. A submarine plateau, in main extent some ten miles long and a quarter of a mile wide, with deeps on both sides of it where the bottom dropped sharply away, in places to unfathomable depths. If we could catch the Tollgamo vehicles in that area it was our best chance for a shallow attack. And that, we needed. The girls especially, could not dive into the lower, higher pressures.

Then presently ahead of us, Peters signalled and we all slackened, wheeling, gathering in a group.

"There they are!" Leh murmured tensely. "Just climbing to the ridge."

The shallower water here was bright with the upper light filtering down. Astonishingly bright; and suddenly I realized that the Venus night was over. Dawn had come to the world of air above us, penetrating the cloud-masses of the Venus atmosphere. It came down here with a faint ruddy glow, so that now we could see miles of the area before us. At first it was 

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