_Into Space_
A pulsing pain that stabbed through his head was Chet's first conscious
impression. Then, as objects came slowly into focus before his eyes, he
knew that above him a ray of light was striking slantingly through the
thick glass of a control-room lookout.
Other lookouts were black, the dead black of empty space. Through them,
sparkling points of fire showed here and there--suns, sending their
light across millions of years to strike at last on a speeding ship.
But, from the one port that caught the brighter light, came that
straight ray to illumine the room.
"Space," thought Chet vaguely. "That is the sunlight of space!"
He was trying to arrange his thoughts in some sensible sequence. His
head!--what had happened to his head?... And then he remembered. Again
he saw a clubbed weapon descending, while the face of Schwartzmann
stared at him through bulbous eyes....
And this control-room where he lay--he knew in an instant where he was.
It was his own ship that was roaring and trembling beneath him--his and
Walt Harkness'--it was flying through space! And, with the sudden
realization of what this meant, he struggled to arise. Only then did he
see the figure at the controls.
The man was leaning above an instrument board; he straightened to stare
from a rear port while he spoke to someone Chet could not see.
"There's more of 'em coming!" he said in a choked voice. "_Mein Gott!_
Neffer can we get away!"
* * * * *
He fumbled with shaking hands at instruments and controls; and now Chet
saw his chalk-white face and read plainly the terror that was written
there. But the cords that cut into his own wrists and ankles reminded
him that he was bound; he settled back upon the floor. Why struggle? If
this other pilot was having trouble let him get out of it by
himself--let him kill his own snakes!
That the man was having trouble there was no doubt. He looked once more
behind him as if at something that pursued; then swung the ball-control
to throw the ship off her course.
The craft answered sluggishly, and Chet Bullard grinned where he lay
helpless upon the floor; for he knew that his ship should have been
thrown crashingly aside with such a motion as that. The answer was
plain: the flask of super-detonite was exhausted; here was the last
feeble explosion of the final atoms of the terrible explosive that was
being admitted to the generator. And to cut in another flask meant the
opening of a hidden valve.
Chet forgot the pain of his swelling hands to shake with suppressed
mirth. This was going to be good! He forgot it until, through a lookout,
he saw a writhing, circling fire that wrapped itself about the ship and
jarred them to a halt.
The serpents!--those horrors from space that had come with the coming of
the Dark Moon! They had disrupted the high-level traffic of the world;
had seized great, liners; torn their way in; stripped them of every
living thing, and let the empty shells crash back to earth. Chet had
forgotten or he had failed to realize the height at which this new pilot
was flying. Only speed could save them; the monsters, with their snouts
that were great suction-cups, could wrench off a metal door--tear out
the glass from a port!
* * * * *
He saw the luminous mass crush itself against a forward lookout and felt
the jar of its body against their ship. Soft and vaporous, these
cloud-like serpents seemed as they drifted through space; yet the
impact, when they struck, proved that this new matter had mass.
Chet saw the figure at the controls stagger back and cower in fear; the
man's bullet-shaped head was covered by his upraised arms: there was
some horror outside those windows that his eyes had no wish to see.
Beside him the towering figure of Schwartzmann appeared; he had sprung
into Chet's view, and he screamed orders at the fear-stricken pilot.
"Fool! Swine!" Schwartzmann was shouting. "Do something! You said you
could fly this ship!" In desperation he leaped forward and reached for
the controls himself.
Chet's blurred faculties snapped sharply to attention. That yellow glow
against the port--the jarring of their ship--it meant instant
destruction once that searching snout found some place where it could
secure a hold. If the air-pressure within the ship were released; if
even a crack were opened!--
"Here, you!" he shouted to the frantic Schwartzmann who was jerking
frenziedly at the controls that no longer gave response. "Cut these
ropes!--leave those instruments alone, you fool!" He was suddenly
vibrant with hate as he realized what this man had done: he had struck
him, Chet, down as he would have felled an animal for butchery; he had
stolen their ship; and now he was losing it. Chet hardly thought of his
own desperate plight in his rage at this threat to their ship, and at
Schwartzmann's inability to help himself.
"Cut these ropes!" he repeated. "Damn it all, turn me loose; I can fly
us out!" He added his frank opinion of Schwartzmann and all his men. And
Schwartzmann, though his dark face flushed angrily red for one instant,
leaped to Chet's side and slashed at the cords with a knife.
The room swam before Chet's dizzy eyes as he came to his feet. He half
fell, half drew himself full length toward the valve that he alone knew.
Then again he was on his feet, and he gripped at the ball-control with
one hand while he opened a master throttle that cut in this new supply
of explosive.
* * * * *
The room had been silent with the silence of empty space, save only for
the scraping of a horrid body across the ship's outer shell. The silence
was shattered now as if by the thunder of many guns. There was no time
for easing themselves into gradual flight. Chet thrust forward on the
ball-control, and the blast from their stern threw the ship as if it had
been fired from a giant cannon.
The self-compensating floor swung back and up; Chet's weight was almost
unbearable as the ship beneath him leaped out and on, and the terrific
blast that screamed and thundered urged this speeding shell to greater
and still greater speed. And then, with the facility that that speed
gave, Chet's careful hands moved a tiny metal ball within its magnetic
cage, and the great ship bellowed from many ports as it followed the
motion of that ball.
Could an eye have seen the wild, twisting flight, it must have seemed as
if pilot and ship had gone suddenly mad. The craft corkscrewed and
whirled; it leaped upward and aside; and, as the glowing mass was thrown
clear of the lookout, Chet's hand moved again to that maximum forward
position, and again the titanic blast from astern drove them on and out.
There were other shapes ahead, glowing lines of fire, luminous masses
like streamers of cloud that looped themselves into contorted forms and
writhed vividly until they straightened into sharp lines of speed that
bore down upon the fleeing craft and the human food that was escaping
these hungry snouts.
Chet saw them dead ahead; he saw the outthrust heads, each ending in a
great suction-cup, the row of disks that were eyes blazing above, and
the gaping maw below. He altered their course not a hair's breadth as he
bore down upon them, while the monsters swelled prodigiously before his
eyes. And the thunderous roar from astern came with never a break, while
the ship itself ceased its trembling protest against the sudden blast
and drove smoothly on and into the waiting beasts.
There was a hardly perceptible thudding jar. They were free! And the
forward lookouts showed only the brilliant fires of distant suns and one
more glorious than the rest that meant a planet.
* * * * *
Chet turned at last to face Schwartzmann and his pilot where they had
clung helplessly to a metal stanchion. Four or five others crept in from
the cabin aft; their blanched faces told of the fear that had gripped
them--fear of the serpents; fear, too, of the terrific plunges into
which the ship had been thrown. Chet Bullard drew the metal control-ball
back into neutral and permitted himself the luxury of a laugh.
"You're a fine bunch of highwaymen," he told Schwartzmann; "you'll steal
a ship you can't fly; then come up here above the R. A. level and get
mixed up with those brutes. What's the idea? Did you think you would
just hop over to the Dark Moon? Some little plan like that in your
mind?"
Again the dark, heavy face of Schwartzmann flushed deeply; but it was
his own men upon whom he turned.
"You," he told the pilot--"you were so clever; you would knock this man
senseless! You would insist that you could fly the ship!"
The pilot's eyes still bulged with the fear he had just experienced.
"But, Herr Schwartzmann, it was you who told me--"
A barrage of unintelligible words cut his protest short. Schwartzmann
poured forth imprecations in an unknown tongue, then turned to the
others.
"Back!" he ordered. "Bah!--such men! The danger it iss over--yess! This
pilot, he will take us back safely."
He turned his attention now to the waiting Chet. "Herr Bullard, iss it
not--yess?"
He launched into extended apologies--he had wanted a look at this so
marvelous ship--he had spied upon it; he admitted it. But this murderous
attack was none of his doing; his men had got out of hand; and then he
had thought it best to take Chet, unconscious as he was and return with
him where he could have care.
* * * * *
And Chet Bullard kept his eyes steadily upon the protesting man and said
nothing, but he was thinking of a number of things. There was Walt's
warning, "this Schwartzmann means mischief," and the faked message that
had brought him from the hospital to get the ship from its hiding place;
no, it was too much to believe. But Chet's eyes were unchanging, and he
nodded shortly in agreement as the other concluded.
"You will take us back?" Schwartzmann was asking. "I will repay you well
for what inconvenience we have caused. The ship, you will return it
safely to the place where it was?"
And Chet, after making and discarding a score of plans, knew there was
nothing else he could do. He swung the little metal ball into a
sharply-banked turn. The straight ray of light from an impossibly
brilliant sun struck now on a forward lookout; it shone across the
shoulder of a great globe to make a white, shining crescent as of a
giant moon. It was Earth; and Chet brought the bow-sights to bear on
that far-off target, while again the thunderous blast was built up to
drive them back along the trackless path on which they had come. But he
wondered, as he pressed forward on the control, what the real plan of
this man, Schwartzmann, might be....
* * * * *
Less than half an hour brought them to the Repelling Area, and Chet felt
the upward surge as he approached it. Here, above this magnetic field
where gravitation's pull was nullified, had been the air-lanes for fast
liners. Empty lanes they were now; for the R. A., as the flying
fraternity knew it--the Heaviside Layer of an earlier day--marked the
danger line above which the mysterious serpents lay in wait. Only the
speed of Chet's ship saved them; more than one of the luminous monsters
was in sight as he plunged through the invisible R. A. and threw on
their bow-blast strongly to check their fall.
Then, as he set a course that would take them to that section of the
Arctic waste where the ship had been, he pondered once more upon the
subject of this Schwartzmann of the shifty eyes and the glib tongue and
of his men who had "got out of hand" and had captured this ship.
"Why in thunder are we back here?" Chet asked himself in perplexity.
"This big boy means to keep the ship; and, whatever his plans may have
been before, he will never stop short of the Dark Moon now that he has
seen the old boat perform. Then why didn't he keep on when he was
started? Had the serpents frightened him back?"
He was still mentally proposing questions to which there seemed no
answer when he felt the pressure of a metal tube against his back. The
voice of Schwartzmann was in his ears.
"This is a detonite pistol"--that voice was no longer unctuous and
self-deprecating--"one move and I'll plant a charge inside you that will
smash you to a jelly!"
* * * * *
There were hands that gripped Chet before he could turn; his arms were
wrenched backward; he was helpless in the grip of Schwartzmann's men.
The former pilot sprang forward.
"Take control, Max!" Schwartzmann snapped; but he followed it with a
question while the pilot was reaching for the ball. "You can fly it for
sure, Max?"
The man called Max answered confidently.
"_Ja wohl!_" he said with eager assurance. "Up top there would have been
no trouble yet for that _verdammt, verloren_ valve. That one
experimental trip is enough--I fly it!"
Those who held Chet were binding his wrists. He was thrown to the floor
while his feet were tied, and, as a last precaution, a gag was forced
into his mouth. Schwartzmann left this work to his men. He paid no
attention to Chet; he was busy at the radio.
He placed the sending-levers in strange positions that would effect a
blending of wave lengths which only one receiving instrument could pick
up. He spoke cryptic words into the microphone, then dropped into a
language that was unfamiliar to Chet. Yet, even then, it was plain that
he was giving instructions, and he repeated familiar words.
"Harkness," Chet heard him say, and, "--Delacouer--_ja!_--Mam'selle
Delacouer!"
Then, leaving the radio, he said, "Put my ship inside the hangar;" and
the pilot, Max, grounded their own ship to allow the men to leap out and
float into the big building the big aircraft in which Schwartzmann had
come.
"Now close the doors!" their leader ordered. "Leave everything as it
was!" And to the pilot he gave added instructions: "There iss no air
traffic here. You will to forty thousand ascend, und you will wait over
this spot." Contemptuously he kicked aside the legs of the bound man
that he might walk back into the cabin.
* * * * *
The take-off was not as smooth as it would have been had Chet's slim
hands been on the controls; this burly one who handled them now was not
accustomed to such sensitivity. But Chet felt the ship lift and lurch,
then settle down to a swift, spiralling ascent. Now he lay still as he
tried to ponder the situation.
"Now what dirty work are they up to?" he asked himself. He had seen a
sullen fury on the dark face of Herr Schwartzmann as he spoke the names
of Walt and Diane into the radio. Chet remembered the look now, and he
struggled vainly with the cords about his wrists. Even a detonite pistol
with its tiny grain of explosive in the end of each bullet would not
check him--not when Walt and Diane were endangered. And the expression
on that heavy, scowling face had told him all too clearly that some real
danger threatened.
But the cords held fast on his swollen wrists. His head was still
throbbing; and even his side, not entirely healed, was adding to the
torment that beat upon him--beat and beat with his pulsing blood--until
the beating faded out into unconsciousness....
Dimly he knew they were soaring still higher as their radio picked up
the warning of an approaching patrol ship; vaguely, he realized that
they descended again to a level of observation. Chet knew in some corner
of his brain that Schwartzmann was watching from an under lookout with a
powerful glass, and he heard his excited command:
"Down--go slowly, down!... They are landing.... They have entered the
hangar. Now, down with it. Max! Down! down!"
* * * * *
The plunging fall of the ship roused Chet from his stupor. He felt the
jolt of the clumsy landing despite the snow-cushioned ground; he heard
plainly the exclamations from beyond an open port--the startled oath in
Walter Harkness' voice, and the stinging scorn in the words of Diane
Delacouer.
Herr Schwartzmann had been in the employ of Mademoiselle Delacouer, but
he was taking orders no longer. There was a sound of scuffling feet, and
once the thud of a blow.... Then Chet watched with heavy, hopeless eyes
as the familiar faces of Diane and Walt appeared in the doorway. Their
hands were bound; they, too, were threatened with a slim-barreled pistol
in the hands of the smirking, exultant Schwartzmann.
A tall, thin-faced man whom Chet had not seen before followed them into
the room. The newcomer was motioned forward now, as Schwartzmann called
an order to the pilot:
"All right; now we go. Max! Herr Doktor Kreiss will give you the
bearings; he knows his way among the stars."
Herr Schwartzmann doubled over in laughing appreciation of his own
success before he straightened up and regarded his captives with cold
eyes.
"Such a pleasure!" he mocked; "such charming passengers to take with me
on my first trip into space; this ship, it iss not so goot. I will build
better ships later on; I will let you see them when I shall come to
visit you."
He laughed again at sight of the wondering looks in the eyes of the
three; stooping, he jerked the gag from Chet's mouth.
"You do not understand," he exclaimed. "I should haff explained. You
see, _meine guten Freunde_, we go--ach!--you have guessed it already! We
go to the Dark Moon. I am pleased to take you with me on the trip out;
but coming back, I will have so much to bring--there will be no room for
passengers.
"I could have killed you here," he said; and his mockery gave place for
a moment to a savage tone, "but the patrol ships, they are everywhere.
But I have influence here und there--I arranged that your flask of gas
should be charged with explosive, I discredited you, and yet I could not
so great a risk take as to kill you all.
"So came inspiration! I called your foolish young friend here from the
hospital. I ordered him to go at once to the ship hidden where I could
not find, and I signed the name of Herr Harkness."
* * * * *
Chet caught the silent glances of his friends who could yet smile
hopefully through the other emotions that possessed them. He ground his
teeth as the smooth voice of Herr Schwartzmann went on:
"He led me here: the young fool! Then I sent for you--und this time I
signed his name--und you came. So simple!
"Und now we go in _my_ ship to _my_ new world. And," he added savagely,
"if one of you makes the least trouble, he will land on the Dark
Moon--yess!--but he will land hard, from ten thousand feet up!"
The great generator was roaring. To Chet came the familiar lift of the
R. A. effect. They were beyond the R. A.; they were heading out and away
from Earth; and his friends were captives through his own unconscious
treachery, carried out into space in their own ship, with the hands of
an enemy gripping the controls....
Chet's groan, as he turned his face away from the others who had tried
to smile cheerfully, had nothing to do with the pain of his body. It was
his mind that was torturing him.
But he muttered broken words as he lay there, words that had reference
to one Schwartzmann. "I'll get him, damn him! I'll get him!" he was
promising himself.
And Herr Schwartzmann, who was clever, would have proved his cleverness
still more by listening. For a Mister Pilot of the World does not get
his rating on vain boasts. He must know first his flying, his ships and
his air--but he is apt to make good in other ways as well.