IX
Eastward Ho!
Not all the stern discipline that had been enforced by the Master—discipline already like a second nature to this band of adventurous men—could quite prevent a little confusion on board the Eagle of the Sky.
As the huge machine crashed, plunged, staggered, then righted herself and soared aloft, shouts echoed down the corridors, shots crackled from the lower gallery and from a few open ports.
At sound of them, and of faint, far cries from the Palisades, with a futile spatter of pistol-and rifle-fire, the Master frowned. This intrusion of disorder lay quite outside his plans. He had hoped for a swift and quiet getaway. Complications had been introduced. Under his breath he muttered something as he manipulated the controls.
The major, laughing a bit wildly, leaned from the shattered window and let drive a few last pot-shots into the dark, at the faint flicker of lights along the crest of the black cliff. In the gloom of the pilot-house, his shoulders bulked huge as he fired. Captain Alden, staggering back, sat down heavily on one of the sofa-lockers.
One or two faint shots still popped, along the cliff, with little pinpricks of fire in the dark. Then all sounds of opposition vanished. The Nissr, upborne at her wonderful climbing-angle toward the clouds painted by her searchlight—clouds like a rippled, moonlit veil through which peeped faint stars—spiraled above the Hudson and in a vast arc turned her beak into the south.
Disorder died. Silence fell, save for the whistling of the sudden wind of the airship’s own motion, and for the steadily mounting drone of the huge propellers.
“Made it all right, by God!” exclaimed Bohannan, excitedly. “No damage, either. If the floats had smashed when they hit the gate, there’d have been a devil of an explosion—vacuum collapsing, you know. Close call, but we made it! Now, if—”
“That will do!” the Master curtly interrupted, with steadfast eyes peering out through the conning windows. Now that the first elan of excitement had spent itself, this strange man had once more resumed his mantle of calm. Upborne on the wings of wondrous power, wings all aquiver with their first stupendous leap into the night-sky, the Master—impassive, watchful, cool—seemed as if seated in his easy-chair at Niss’rosh.
“That will do, Major!” he repeated. “None of your extravagance, sir! No time now for rodomontade!” He glanced swiftly round, saw Captain Alden by the dim aura of light reflected from the instrument-board. Blood reddened the captain’s left sleeve.
“Wounded, Captain?”
“Only a scratch!”
“Report to Dr. Lombardo. And have Simonds, in charge of the stores, replace this broken pane.”
“Yes, sir!”
Alden saluted with a blood-stained hand, slipped his gun back into its holster and got up. He swayed a little, with the swinging slide of the air-liner and with the weakness that nerve-shock of a wound brings. But coolly enough he slid open the door leading into the main corridor, and passed through, closing the door after him. Where his hand touched the metal, red stains showed. Neither man of the pair now left in the pilothouse made any comments. This was all in the day’s work—this and whatever else might befall.
Spiraling vastly, up, up climbed the giant plane. A colder air nipped through the broken window. Cloud-wisps began to blur the glass; the stars began to burn more whitely in a blacker sky.
The Master touched a button at the left side of the steering-post. Below his feet, as they rested in their metal stirrups, an aluminum plate silently slid back. An oblong of dim light blurred up through the heavy plate-glass sheet it had masked.
Glancing down, the Master saw far, far below him a slowly rotating vagueness of waters black and burnished, of faintly twinkling lights. Lights and water drew backward, as the rotary motion gave way to a southern course. The Master slowed the helicopters. A glance at the altimeter showed him 1,965 feet. The compass in its binnacle gave him direction.
“Pit number one!” he sharply exclaimed into the phone connecting therewith.
“Yes, sir!” came back the observer’s voice.
“Keep a sharp eye out for Niss’rosh! Remember, two red lights showing there!”
“Yes, sir. I’ll report as soon as I pick them up.”
The Master, knowing his course thither should be S.E. by S., drew the liner to that exact angle. Under his skilled touch at the wheel, the compass needle steadied to the dot. The searchlight lanced its way ahead, into the vague drift of the smoke arising from New York.
“Sight it, yet?” demanded the Master, presently.
“Yes, sir. Just picked it up. Hold hard, sir!”
Almost at once, the Master also got a glimpse of two tiny pinpricks of crimson, high in air above the city-mass. Swiftly Nissr drew over the building. Far, very far down in the chasm of emptiness, tiny strings of light—infinitesimal luminous beads on invisible threads— marked Broadway, Fifth Avenue, countless other streets. The two red winks drew almost underneath.
Down plunged the searchlight, picking Niss’rosh out of the gloom. Through the floor-glass, the Master could descry it clearly. He slowed, circled, playing with vacuum-lift, helicopters, engines, as if they had been keys of a familiar instrument. Presently the liner hovered, poised, sank, remained a little over 750 feet above the observatory on the roof-top.
“Cracowicz!” ejaculated the Master, into the phone again, as his deft fingers made another connection. A foreign voice answered: “Yes, sir!” alertly.
“Ready in the lower gallery now, with the winch and tackles!” bade the Master.
Again came: “Yes, sir!” from the man in charge of the three who already knew perfectly well what was expected of them. As Nissr slowly turned, a trap opened in the bottom of her lower gallery, almost directly between the two forward vacuum-floats, and down sped a little landing nacelle or basket at the end of a fine steel cable.
Swiftly the electric winch dropped the nacelle, containing three men. It slowed, at their command, through the phone that led up the wire. With hardly a jar, the basket landed on the roof.
The men jumped out, made fast their tackles to Captain Alden’s plane there, leaped in again and signaled: “Hoist away!”
With noiseless speed the winch gathered in the cable. Up swooped the nacelle. As it cleared the roof, Nissr purred forward, slid away, gathered speed over the city where already the alarm had been given.
In four minutes the men had safely landed in the lower gallery once more, and the plane was being hoisted by davits and made fast on the upper platform, known as the take-off, which served as a runway for planes leaving the ship or alighting thereon.
Over the light-spangled city the giant air-liner gathered way. Three or four searchlights had already begun trying to pick her up. Quiverings of radiance reached out for her, felt into the void, whirled like cosmic spokes. The Brooklyn Navy Yard whipped the upper air for her. Down on Sandy Hook, a slim spear of light stabbed questingly through the night. Then all at once the monster light on Governor’s Island caught her, dazzling into the Master’s eyes.
He only smiled, as he sheered eastward, dropped East River behind and unloosed the Sky-eagle’s course above Brooklyn.
“Just a little fireworks, as a send-off, Major,” said he, notching the speed ahead, ever ahead, till a whipping gale began to beat in at the broken pane. “They got word of it pretty quick, eh? I suppose they’ll send up a few planes after us.”
“After us, yes!” exulted the major. “Faith, they’ll be after us, all right—a devil of a long way after!”
To this the Master gave no answer, but signaled Auchincloss in the engine-room for full speed. Now a subtle tremor possessed the vast fabric, mistress of the upper spaces and the night. The close-compacted lights beneath commenced to sprinkle out into tenuous dots. The tiny blazing fringe of Coney burned a moment very far below, then slid away, under the glass flooring. Still heading sharply upward, with altimeter needle steadily mounting, with the cold becoming ever greater, the liner flung herself out boldly over the jet plain of ocean.
Right into the eye of heaven she seemed to point, into a vast and profound blackness, that, as the Master snicked off the no-longer needed searchlight, unleashed myriad stars—stars which leaped out of the velvet night. Already man and the works of man lay far behind. If there had been any tentative pursuit, the Legionaries knew nothing of it. Outdistancing pursuit as an eagle distances sparrows, the liner gloried in her swift trajectory.
The Master nodded, well pleased. Bohannan laughed like a boy, and holstered his gun. He moved over to the starboard window, out of the gale. With mocking eyes he watched the futile searchlight at the Hook.
“They’ve got as much chance of overhauling us as the proverbial celluloid cat has of catching the asbestos rat,” said he. “A clean getaway, barring the little damage we’ve taken—this window, and Alden, and—”
“Better unpack your kit, and settle down,” the Master dryly interrupted him. “Take a look around and see that everything’s shipshape. Be sure the port and starboard watches are chosen. Everything’s been arranged, already, but in dealing with human beings there’s bound to be a little confusion. They aren’t automata— unfortunately. And, Major!”
“Yes, sir?” answered Bohannan, who despite his familiarity with the Master was now constrained to formality. Resentment sounded in his voice.
“Send Brodeur to relieve me, in about ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” repeated the Celt. For a moment, standing there in the gloom of the pilot-house, he eyed the dim, watchful figure at the wheel. Then he turned, slid the door, and disappeared.
As he walked aft, past the aluminum ladder that led to the upper galleries, he muttered with dudgeon: “He rates us two for a nickel, that’s plain enough—plain as paint! Well, all right. I’ll stand for it; but there may be others that—”
He left the words unfinished, and went to do the Master’s bidding.
Alone, the Master smiled. Wine of victory pulsed in his blood and brain. Power lay under his hand, that closed with joy upon it. Power not only over this hardy Legion, but power in perspective over—
“God, if I can do it!” he whispered, and fell silent. His eyes rested on the instruments before him, their white dials glowing under the little penthouses of their metal shields. Altitude now showed 2,437 feet, and still rising. Tachometers gave from 2,750 to 2,875 r.p.m. for the various propellers. Speed had gone above 190 miles per hour. No sign of man remained, save, very far below through a rift in the pale, moonlit waft of cloud, a tiny light against a coal-black plain of sea—the light of a slow, crawling steamer—a light which almost at once dropped far behind.
Vast empty spaces on all hands, above, below, engulfed Nissr. The Master felt himself alone with air and sky, with power, with throbbing dreams and visions.
“If it can be done!” he repeated. “But—there’s no ‘if’ to it, at all. It can be! It shall! The biggest thing ever attempted in this world! A dream that’s never been dreamed, before! And if it can’t, well, a dream like that is far more than worth dying for. A dream that can come true— by God, that shall come true!”
His hands tightened on the wheel. You would have said he was trying to infuse some of his own overflowing strength into the mechanism that, whirling, zooning with power, needed no more. The gleam in his eyes, there in the dark pilot-house, seemed almost that of a fanatic. His jaw hardened, his nostrils expanded.
This strange man’s face was now wholly other than it had been only a week before, drawn and lined by ennui. Now vast ambitions dominated and infused it with virile force.
As he held the speeding air-liner to her predetermined course through voids of night and mystery, he peered with burning eagerness at the beckoning stars along the world’s far, eastern rim. “Behold now, Allah!” he cried suddenly. “Labbayk!1 I come!”