LIGHTS!
At realization of the ghastly situation that confronted them,
Stern's heart stopped beating for a moment. Despite his courage, a
sick terror gripped his soul; he felt a sudden weakness, and in his
ears the rushing wind seemed shouting mockeries of death.
As in a dream he felt the girl's hand close in fear upon his arm, he
heard her crying something--but what, he knew not.
Then all at once he fought off the deadly horror. He realized that
now, if ever, he needed all his strength, resource, intelligence. And,
with a violent effort, he flung off his weakness. Again he gripped the
wheel. Thought returned. Though the end might be at hand, thank God
for even a minute's respite!
Again he looked at the indicator.
Yes, only too truly it showed the terrible fact! No hallucination,
this. Not much more than a pint of the precious fluid now lay in the
fuel tank. And though the engine still roared, he knew that in a
minute or two it must slacken, stop and die.
What then?
Even as the question flashed to him, the engine barked its protest. It
skipped, coughed, stuttered. Too well he knew the symptoms, the
imperative cry: "More fuel!"
But he had none to give. In vain for him to open wide the supply
valve. Vain to adjust the carburetor. Even as he made a despairing,
instinctive motion to perform these useless acts--while Beatrice,
deathly pale and shaking with terror, clutched at him--the engine spat
forth a last, convulsive bark, and grew silent.
The whirling screws hummed a lower note, then ceased their song and
came to rest.
The machine lurched forward, swooped, spiraled, and with a sickening
rush, a flailing tumult of the stays and planes, plunged into
nothingness!
Had Stern and the girl not been securely strapped to their seats, they
must have been precipitated into space by the violent, erratic dashes,
drops, swerves and rushes of the uncontrolled Pauillac.
For a moment or two, instinctively despite the knowledge that it could
do no good, Stern wrenched at the levers. A thousand confused, wild,
terrible impressions surged upon his consciousness.
Swifter, swifter dropped the plane; and now the wind that seemed to
rise had grown to be a hurricane! Its roaring in their ears was
deafening. They had to fight even for breath itself.
Beatrice was leaning forward now, sheltering her face in the hollow of
her arm. Had she fainted? Stern could not tell. He still was fighting
with the mechanism, striving to bring it into some control. But,
without headway, it defied him. And like a wounded hawk, dying even as
it struggled, the Pauillac staggered wildly down the unplumbed abyss.
How long did the first wild drop last? Stern knew not. He realized
only that, after a certain time, he felt a warm sensation; and,
looking, perceived that they were now plunging through vapors that
sped upward--so it seemed--with vertiginous rapidity.
No sensation now was there of falling. All motion seemed to lie in the
uprushing vapors, dense and warm and pale violet in hue. A vast and
rhythmic spiraling had possessed the Pauillac. As you have seen a
falling leaf turn in air, so the plane circled, boring with terrific
speed down, down, down through the mists, down into the unknown!
Nothing to be seen but vapors. No solid body, no land, no earth to
mark their fall and gauge it. Yet slowly, steadily, darkness was
shrouding them. And Stern, breathing with great difficulty even in the
shelter of his arms, could now hardly more than see as a pale blur the
white face of the girl beside him.
The vast wings of the machine, swirling, swooping, plunging down,
loomed hugely vague in the deepening shadows. Dizzy, sick with the
monstrous caroming through space, deafened by the thunderous roaring
of the up-draft, Stern was still able to retain enough of his
scientific curiosity to peer upward. The sun! Could he still see it?
Vanished utterly was now the glorious orb! There, seeming to circle
round and round in drunken spirals, he beheld a weird, diffused,
angry-looking blotch of light, tinted a hue different from any ever
seen on earth by men. And involuntarily, at sight of this, he
shuddered.
Already with the prescience of death full upon him, with a numb
despair clutching his soul, he shrank from that ghastly, hideous
aspect of what he knew must be his last sight of the sun.
Around the girl he drew his right arm; she felt his muscles tauten as
he clasped her to him. Useless now, he knew, any further struggles
with the aeroplane. Its speed, its plummetlike drop checked only by
the huge sweep of its parachute wings, Stern knew now it must fall
clear to the bottom of the abyss--if bottom there were. And if
not--what then?
Stern dared not think. All human concepts had been shattered by this
stupendous catastrophe. The sickly and unnatural hue of the rushing
vapors that tore and slatted the planes, confused his senses; and,
added to this, a stifling, numbing gas seemed diffused through the
inchoate void. He tried to speak, but could not. Against the girl's
cheek he pressed his own. Hers was cold!
In vain he struggled to cry out. Even had his parched tongue been able
to voice a sound, the howling tempest they themselves were creating as
they fell, would have whipped the shout away and drowned it in the
gloom.
In Stern's ears roared a droning as of a billion hornets. He felt a
vast, tremendous lassitude. Inside his head it seemed as though a
huge, merciless pressure were grinding at his very brain. His breath
came only slowly and with great difficulty.
"My God!" he panted. "Oh, for a little fuel! Oh, for a chance--a
chance to fight--for life!"
But chance there was none, now. Before his eyes there seemed to
darken, to dazzle, a strange and moving curtain. Through it, piercing
it with a supreme effort of the will, he caught dim sight of the dial
of the chronometer. Subconsciously he noted that it marked 11.25.
How long had they been falling? In vain his wavering intelligence
battered at the problem. Now, as in a delirium, he fancied it had been
only minutes; then it seemed hours. Like an insane man he laughed--he
tried to scream--he raved. And only the stout straps that had held
them both prevented him from leaping free of the hurtling machine.
"Crack!"
A lashing had given way! Part of the left hand plane had broken loose.
Drunkenly, whirling head over like an albatross shot in mid-air, the
Pauillac plunged.
It righted, swerved, shot far ahead, then once again somersaulted.
Stern had disjointed, crazy thoughts of air-pressure, condensation and
compression, resistance, abstruse formulae. To him it seemed that some
gigantic problem in stress-calculation were being hurled at him, to
solve--it seemed that, blind, deaf, dumb, some sinister and ghoul-like
demon were flailing him until he answered--and that he could not
answer!
He had a dim realization of straining madly at his straps till the
veins started big and swollen in his hammering brows. Then
consciousness lapsed.
Lapsed, yet came again--and with it pain. An awful pain in the
ear-drums, that roared and crackled without cease.
Breath! He was fighting for breath!
It was a nightmare--a horrible dream of darkness and a mighty booming
wind--a dream of stifling vapors and an endless void that sucked them
down, down, down, eternally!
Delusions came, and mocking visions of safety. Both hands flung out as
though to clutch the roaring gale, he fought the intangible.
Again he lost all knowledge.
And once again--how long after, how could he know?--he came to some
partial realization of tortured existence.
In one of the mad downward rushes--rushes which ended in a long spiral
slant--his staring, bloodshot eyes that sought to pierce the murk,
seemed to behold a glimmer, a dull gleam of light.
The engineer screamed imprecations, mingled with wild, demoniac
laughter.
"Another hallucination!" was his thought. "But if it's not--if it's
Hell--then welcome, Hell! Welcome even that, for a chance to stop!"
A sweep of the Pauillac hid the light from view. Even that faintest
ray vanished. But--what? It came again! Much nearer now, and brighter!
And--another gleam! Another still! Three of them--and they were
real!
With a tremendous effort, Stern fixed his fevered eyes upon the
lights.
Up, up at a tremendous rate they seemed speeding. Blue and ghastly
through the dense vapors, spinning in giddy gyrations, as the machine
wheeled, catapulted and slid from one long slant to another, their
relative positions still remained fixed.
And, with a final flicker of intelligence, Stern knew they were no
figment of his brain.
"Lights, Beatrice! Lights, lights, real lights!" he sought to scream.
But even as he fought to shake her from the swoon that wrapped her
senses, his own last fragment of strength deserted him.
He had one final sense impression of a swift upshooting of the lights,
a sudden brightening of those three radiant points.
Then came a sudden gleam as though of waters, black and still.
A gleam, blue and uncanny, across the inky surface of some vast,
mysterious, hidden sea.
Up rushed the lights at him; up rushed the sea of jetty black!
Stern shouted some wild, incoherent thing.
Crash!
A shock! A frightful impact, swift, sudden, annihilating!
Then in a mad and lashing struggle, all knowledge and all feeling
vanished utterly. And the blackness of oblivion received him into its
insensate bosom.