with the specks which were men and women and children fleeing the ship.
I watched the wave, from the burst of the bomb, sweep upon them; I watched it toss and swamp them and smash them against the flank of the ship. I watched, wrenching at my wrists in the clamps binding me; and, watching helpless to move a hand, I thought of Helen Lacey, in some airplane below there with Bane, also watching and seeing the little boats, crowded with specks, become boat bottoms and the specks bestrew the sea. In some way like me, she was held, I supposed—held and shown what I had seen and was to see.
The ship and all its people utterly at Bane's mercy, as he had boasted. With the roar of the airscrew, his boast rang in my head: "How they heap up wealth which they can not possibly defend from me! How they organize and superorganize themselves to make themselves safe, and then make airplanes and TNT and—me!"
In one of those airplanes below me, he sat staring down at those specks struggling in the sea; and triumph throbbed in his broken
