_High Chaos_
The plane moved forward. Its tail swung around. Its wheels headed for
the door. They dropped through, into the faces of the foremost pursuers,
all of whom were thus effectually blocked off.
The plane was held as in a vise. The propeller vanished in a blur as
Jeter let the motor out. It was humming an even, steady note. The doors
came open again.
Jeter came out, his eyes glowing.
"We haven't the chance of the proverbial celluloid dog chasing the
asbestos cat," he shouted to be heard above the roar of the motor. "But
grab your high altitude suit, oxygen container, and parachute, and let's
get as far away from this plane as we can. Who knows? When the end comes
we may get a break at that!"
They ran until the bulge of the inner globe all but hid the plane from
them. They could see only the top wing. They did not go farther because
they wished to make sure that the enemy did not dislodge the plane and
nullify all their work.
"They won't be able to," said Jeter, "for that motor is pulling against
the wheels and holding them so tight against the side of that door that
a hundred men couldn't budge the plane. But we can't take chances."
Quickly the partners slipped into their suits, adjusted their oxygen
tanks and parachutes. Then Jeter slipped back the elastic sleeve of his
suit and motioned Eyer to do the same. The manacles were brought into
view again. They looked at each other. Eyer grinned and held out his
left hand. Jeter snapped the second cuff to Eyer's wrist.
The act was significant.
Whatever happened to them, would happen to both in equal measure. It was
a gesture which needed no words. If they were slain when their
friends--if their theory was correct--finally saw the space ship, they
would die together. If by some miracle they were hurled into outer space
and lived to use their parachutes--well, the discomfort was a small
price to pay to stay together.
Now they devoted all their attention to their own situation. Four planes
still spun warily above the space ship. Wang Li was patently trying with
all his might to get all four of them before the Jeter-Eyer plane, by
shattering the rind, disclosed the inner core to the bombs of the
remaining planes.
"Lucian!" said the fingers of Eyer. "Can you tell whether anything is
happening to the rind?"
Jeter hesitated for a long time. There was a distinct and almost
nauseating vibration throughout all the space ship. And was there not
something happening to the rind over a wide area, directly above the
Jeter-Eyer plane?
They could fancy the snapping of ice on a forest lake in mid-winter.
They couldn't hear, in their suits. They could only feel. But all at
once the outer rind, above their plane, vanished. At the same instant
the plane itself, propeller still spinning, rose swiftly up through the
hole in the rind. The air inside the globe was going out in a great
rush.
The partners looked at each other. At that moment the four planes
swooped over the space ship....
* * * * *
Jeter and Eyer knew that the inner globe had at last become visible, for
from the bellies of the four planes dropped bomb after bomb. They fell
into the great aperture. Jeter and Eyer flung themselves flat. But the
bombs had worked sufficient havoc. They had removed all protection from
the low-pressure stratosphere. The air inside the space ship went out
with a rush. Jeter and Eyer, hearing nothing, though they knew that the
explosions must have been cataclysmic, were picked up and whirled toward
that opening, like chips spun toward the heart of a whirlpool.
But for their space suits they would have been destroyed in the outrush
of air. Out of the inner globe came men that flew, sprawled out,
somersaulting up and out of apertures made by the crashing bombs.
Ludicrous they looked. Blood streamed from their mouths. Their faces
were set in masks of agony. There were Sitsumi and, one after another,
the Three.
Then fastened together by the cuffs, the partners were being whirled
over and over, out into space. Their last signals to each other had
been:
"Even if you're already dead, pull the ripcord ring of your chute!"
Crushed, buffeted, they still retained consciousness. They sought
through the spinning stratosphere for their rescuers. Thousands of feet
below--or was it above?--they saw them. Yes, below, for they looked at
the tops of the planes. Their upward flight had been dizzying. They
waited until their upward flight ceased.
Then, as they started the long fall to Earth, they pulled their rings
and waited for their chutes to flower above them.
Soon they were floating downward. Side by side they rode. Above them
their parachutes were like two umbrellas, pressed almost too closely
together.
They looked about them, seeking the space ship.
The devastation of its outer rind had been complete, for they now could
see the inner globe, and it too was like--well, like merely part of an
eggshell.
The doomed space ship--gyroscope still keeping the ray pointed
Earthward--describing an erratic course, was shooting farther upward
into the stratosphere, propelled by the ghastly ray which, now no longer
controlled by Wang Li, drove the space ship madly through the outer
cold.
Far below the partners many things were falling: broken furnishings of
mad dreamers' stratosphere laboratories, parts of strange machines,
whirling, somersaulting things that had once been men.
The partners looked at each other.
The same thought was in the mind of each, as the four remaining planes
came in toward them to convoy them down--that when the lords of the
stratosphere finally reached the far Earth, only God would know which
was Sitsumi and who were the Three.
* * * * *
End of Project Gutenberg's Lords of the Stratosphere, by Arthur J. Burks