by Talbot Mundy
It was not improved by the sight of an airplane — a mere speck in the south-western sky — that appeared to be trying to negotiate a different pass from the one we had used, or perhaps to be looking for the route we had taken. Even if it had been several thousand feet lower our smashed ‘plane must have been invisible among the trees. It was possibly making for Katmandu, to land there and ask questions. It presently vanished behind the tops of tumbled mountains, and its only effect was to deepen our gloom. Even Baltis was gloomy.
We were shepherded into the entrance of the central building. There was a kind of hallway, about twelve feet long with a door at either end. It was bare of furniture. All except two of our custodians disappeared through the inner door without giving us a chance to see what was on the far side. The other two appeared to have no fear of our escaping; they leaned with their backs to the doors, with the hilts of long knives thrust forward. They chewed something that stank, and spat unskillfully. If they had any other weapons than their knives they did not show them. We might have rushed them successfully, but I don’t know what good that would have done.
Henri de la Fontaine Coq was the first to make any remark:
“Kill Dorje — yes? Then seize everything?”
“Get this,” said Grim. “If you try it, I’ll kill you! All of you — I want this understood: if Dorje dies too soon, that will leave what he calls his babus in control of things. They’re infinitely worse than he is, because there are more of them. We’ve got to wreck them first — Dorje last. We need him in order to reach them.”
“All right. What’s your plan?” the Frenchman asked.
“I haven’t one.”
“Alors — then you all obey me.”
Jeff took him by the left arm and the back of the neck. The Frenchman struggled for a moment, but he was as helpless as a fly on a sticky paper, and he had sense enough to try to be funny about it:
“Peste! I was not built to come to pieces that way!” Jeff threatened to crack his head against the wall.
“We obey Grim!”
“Oh yes, why not? It makes no difference. A leader without a plan is more exciting than a ‘plane without a rudder.”
The two guards grinned but made no move to interfere and Jeff made the most of the moment. He let go, but he crowded Coq into the corner, smiling at him — always genial when he is least gentle.
“I’m merely calling your attention to a flat fact. Grim is head man. Shall I say that in French?”
“You say it very well in English.”
Baltis drew near. “You big oaf, you have only muscles!”
Henri de la Fontaine Coq smiled:
“But they are muscles. One admits that!”
The door opened. A man beckoned us, and we were given not much time to observe our surroundings. Other men came. We were crowded — hustled forward into a great shed built of undressed stone and mortar. There were tanks, and gauges on the tanks. In the midst was Dorje’s airship — pearl-grey — almost opal — and it was longer than it looked when we saw it rise out of Vasantasena’s garden. From below it looked cylindrical, with fluted ends that suggested something new in streamline. Owing to the color of the metal of which the thing was made it seemed likely that the shape wouldn’t be very confusing if seen from below from a distance; in certain lights it might be half-invisible — perhaps not visible at all. It was made of metal plates joined edgewise, not overlapping. Some sort of welding process. The seams had been rubbed smooth, but half-round ridges had been left that gave it a peculiarly neat appearance; but those ridges, too, seemed likely to catch sunlight and produce camouflage, whether or not that was intended.
There were rough steps. We were shepherded up those and through an opening in the airship’s side into a chamber about fifteen feet long. The bulkheads at either end appeared to be made of glass; at any rate, it was something perfectly transparent, except for narrow doors in either bulkhead that were made of wood, not metal. There were several more transparent bulkheads and we could see through those about two-thirds of the interior; but the bow and the stern were invisible, apparently the bulkheads there were made of metal without openings of any sort, but those sealed ends were much too short to possess any lifting capacity in the event that they were filled with gas.
There were mattresses strewn on the floor and on what appeared to be tanks along the sides of our compartment. Those tanks, too, were much too small to possess lifting power, and as a matter of fact they contained liquid ballast which we could hear splashing against swash-plates soon after we started. We could see out; there were four small windows set in the metal sides above the tanks and below the widest diameter of the hull, so that the easiest view was downward. An enormous flask of water hung from the roof in slings, but there was no food in sight and we were all of us ravenously hungry as well as sore- eyed from lack of sleep.
There was no machinery that looked capable of producing power; but a tube, apparently of some metal alloy, about two feet in diameter, extended the entire length of the airship immediately under the roof but not quite touching it. It appeared to be carefully insulated where it passed through the bulkheads, and it was held rigidly in place by a perfect spider-web of metal struts. There were similar, vertical tubes, in pairs, against the fore and aft metal bulkheads; and there was another tube, of the same diameter secured in the form of a circle to a circular plane-table marked with degrees in the roof of a compartment twenty feet astern of ours. Beneath that circular tube were what appeared to be the controls, in the form of three long levers; one of them rose through a slot in a metal housing on the floor; the others were on either side of the housing. Above those levers was a wheel connected to the circular tube overhead, and that appeared to be the steering apparatus.
There was no sound of moving machinery, no smell of heat or lubricating oil, no indication that I could detect of any motive power whatever. A crew of eight men — not the same who had herded us — lounged in the forward compartment, and there was one man seated in what appeared to be a conning-tower in the roof; we could only see his legs, which rested on a metal platform that could be reached by an iron ladder from the compartment immediately astern of that one containing the controls. Through a door in the side of that compartment a heavy, iron-bound, padlocked wooden box, about as big as a coffin-container and about the same shape, was hoisted and shoved in by four of the men who had shepherded us. Then Dorje’s thought-detecting instrument was carried in and set exactly in the middle of the floor. The same four men then fastened up the door of our compartment from the outside, using screw-bolts, after which they entered through the other door and passed through to a compartment at the stern. Then Dorje came, still looking full of vitality but once more awkward on his feet; he had a hard time getting through the opening, but once in there he sat on some blankets on a tank like those in our compartment and tucked his legs under him as if that was their normal position. A man followed him lugging a heavy box like a sea-captain’s medicine chest, which he set on the tank beside Dorje. Then the same man closed the door of that compartment from the inside, after which he joined the others in the stern.
One man, who looked like a mongrel Chinese-Tibetan came aft now, passing through our compartment to the control room, where he took hold of one of the levers. Dorje watched him, and presently spoke to him through a tube; there was another tube from close by Dorje’s seat that evidently reached up to the conning tower. The silence was death-like. No sound whatever reached us from the outside, not even when they rolled back the huge shed-door, as they must have done — until someone struck the hull with a hammer. That appeared to be the all clear signal. Dorje sat back, pressing himself against the bulkhead. Then he laughed. He enjoyed our discomfort immensely.
The man at the controls jerked his lever forward and we started so suddenly, and so swiftly, that it threw us all in a heap on the floor. There appeared to be two simultaneous motions — a foot or two upward, and forward with the speed of an arrow. The sensation was o
f being caught in a tremendous stream that was already in motion — almost of being caught by a conveyor belt, so that we started at top speed without any interval of gaining headway. It was not in the least like the motion of flying, and there was neither sound nor vibration. Chullunder Ghose was instantly and noisily sick; he abandoned optimism.
“I — whoop — sahibs, life is like that. Every — whoop — everything ends in — whoop — vomit, and the worms win! Whoop — I hope they vomit also!”
There was room for one of us at each small window, but the speed was so great that by the time we looked out there were no recognizable landmarks, and since we could not see astern there was no means of knowing how far we had come from the place we had left. The ship was rising rapidly, but on a perfectly even keel, although there was a perceptible roll and a slight pitching that were probably due to the resistance of the wind. The only sound came from the swishing of liquid ballast, and that was rather a relief from the weird lack of any mechanical sounds. Civilization has so accustomed us to the din of friction that its absence, when anything happens, is almost terrifying — and a silent terror is enormously worse than one that thunders, since we discount thunder from experience.
I am unable to describe the sensations set up by that airship, partly, I suppose, because I lacked at that time any technical knowledge that would have helped me to make mental comparisons; and in such circumstances memory is extremely tricky, however well trained it may be in some other respects. There was nothing about it that inspired confidence. It seemed amateurish. One expected it to fall at any moment and be smashed on the windswept mountain-tops beneath us. It was so cold in there that our teeth chattered, although a certain amount of heat came from the tube overhead and, I suppose, from the other tubes also. By my thermometer the temperature was 42 Fahrenheit, but that reading is not reliable.
A man brought us food — cold, half-cooked meat and parched barley. We devoured it ravenously, beastly though the meat was; in fact, ravenously was the only way to eat it — one had to get it down and get it over with. It was tossed to us as if we were animals cooped in a cage. Dorje, leaning back against a bulkhead, chewed parched barley as if his teeth were none too comfortable, and at intervals he sipped something from a bottle out of the box that resembled a medicine chest. It was noticeable that he allowed no one to wait on him; he produced his barley from an inside pocket of his leather coat.
Except for those outstanding memories the whole experience was like a dream — exactly like a dream, and just as difficult to recall in sequence and detail. That is possibly due to the fact that we needed sleep so badly. Henri de la Fontaine Coq curled himself up on a mattress on the floor, with three times his share of the blankets, and began to snore before we were in the ship ten minutes. Grim was wide-eyed. Baltis yawned and struggled to keep her faculties alert. Chullunder Ghose moaned on the floor until I took a couple of blankets off the aviator and covered him up, after which he slept and snored too. Jeff and I watched each other to see which would yield first.
Then a man came in and spoke gruffly to Grim in Tibetan. He made peremptory gestures, holding the door in the bulk-head open to keep it from slamming when the ship pitched in the wind. There was much more wind by that time; we could indistinctly hear it shrieking against the conning tower and along the flutings of the hull. Grim explained:
“I’m to go to Dorje. I wish the rest of you would sleep, if you can. I’m good for another hour or two, but after that I’ll have to turn in and it won’t do for all of us to be asleep at the same time.”
Grim went aft. I saw him sit down on the opposite tank, facing Dorje. Jeff and I removed another blanket from the aviator, gave two to Baltis, and then turned in together, on one mattress, for the sake of each other’s warmth.
CHAPTER 39. “There’s nothing you would ask me, that I wouldn’t do.”
When I awoke I had undoubtedly been dreaming. In a sense I was still in a dream. That and reality were so mixed up that I could not separate them. Grim had touched me on the shoulder, and as Jeff and I sat up and stared at him I could feel the ship pitching far more violently than it had done. There was a horrible corkscrew motion.
“We’re descending,” said Grim. “Present elevation about eleven thousand. We’re dropping into the wind that sweeps Tibet from the north.”
Henri de la Fontaine Coq sat up. “Who took my blankets? No wonder I freeze! You should have demanded others.” He stared around him. “We are all crazy, I tell you.”
“Give me something,” said Grim, “that will keep me awake. Dope. Lots of it. I mustn’t quit. Shoot me full of the stuff.”
I objected vigorously. So did Jeff. Grim put it bluntly:
“Don’t be idiots. One death’s as good as another. I must see this job through.”
I felt for my pocket case. Jeff snatched it from me.
“Very well,” said Grim, “I’ll have to use Dorje’s stuff. But it relaxes before it gets its work in.”
He was gone before we could prevent him. Through the transparent bulkhead we could see him talking to Dorje, who gave him a big bottle from the brass- bound box. Jeff hurried after him, but before he could find out how to open the door Grim had swallowed about a tumblerful of milky-looking liquid that he poured into a glass bowl. Judging by the expression on his face the stuff was bitter. He returned. He sat down on our mattress.
“God-damned idiot!” said Jeff affectionately.
Grim smiled. I felt his pulse. It was about sixty already. His eyes had lost their steel, if that describes it, but they looked amused.
“I’ll feel vigorous,” he said, “in twenty minutes. Just at present I’m incapable of lucid speech.”
Chullunder Ghose sat up and belched like a gun going off. He stared at Grim.
“What is it?” he demanded. And when I told him:
“Oh, my God! Our Jimmy Jimgrim drunk on soma!”
Jeff growled at him. “Shut up!”
“I tell you, I know all about it,” said the babu. “No, sahib! Give him no antidote — there is none — you will kill him! Let him keep still. If you increase his heart-beats he will fall dead!”
I laid Grim on his back. He took no notice, although he was perfectly conscious; he seemed able to control his arms and legs but too indifferent to do it. I took his temperature. Ninety.
“He is done for!” Chullunder Ghose forgot his own physical distress. He was afraid of something that he understood, and which Jeff knew about, but which I neither understood nor knew. “From now on he must either have that stuff or die in torture!”
“He is drunk, that’s all,” said Henri de la Fontaine Coq. “It does a man good to get drunk now and then — now and then. I also wish to drink myself into a mood. What has he? Give me some of it.”
“He is not drunk at all,” said Baltis. “If he has drunk soma, you will shortly see him ten times abler than he evaire was. But afterwards—”
“Am nihilist negationist from now on,” said Chullunder Ghose. “There will be no afterwards. We have lost our Jimmy—”
“Shut up!” Jeff commanded.
“Smash me! What do I care! Worst has happened! Let me tell you! Jimmy Jimgrim presently will blaze up and be brilliant. But after a certain length of time he will have to have more soma. Perhaps he will take it once more, or even twice more — because he is absolutist — he will absolutely do his job. But then he will still need soma. And he will not take it, even if he could get it. So he will die — in great agony. Worse agony, I tell you, than a death from any other cause. Worse than death by Chinese tortures. Jimmy Jimgrim goes over the top, I assure you. Oh, how sweet it would be to believe that this life is the last one! Then one could make an end of it and cease forevermore to suffer!”
“Let us steal some soma. Let us all take some of it,” Baltis suggested. “Wait — I will go and ask Dorje. Perhaps he will give it to us. Why not? Life is nothing but experience. Let us have that experience!”
“Yes. We might as well die with our
fuselage on fire,” said Henri de la Fontaine Coq.
“Sit down!” Jeff commanded. “And shut up!”
He was so worried about Grim that he almost forced me to forget where we were. His whole frame seemed overcharged with an emotion that he suppressed with a will that was as dynamic as his muscles. But he could not suppress Chullunder Ghose.
“Am busted flush. Am no good any more. I, who have tasted all adversity, and all contempt, and every species of disillusion, I am in profundis. Come to hell, all of you! Come, I say, come! There is no other place! That man is the only friend I ever had. He trusted me. He even made me trust myself. He treated me exactly as his equal. I am a scoundrel, and he knew it, but he trusted me, absolutely. I became a needle with a pole to point to. And now Jimmy — oh, Jimmy Jimgrim—”
He collapsed in tears, and there is almost nothing less exhilarating than a fat man crying. However, Grim stirred and that stirred us, so that even Jeff’s strain eased a little. Grim’s pulse improved. I could feel his temperature rise without the aid of the thermometer. His eyes changed; they resumed the steely blue-grey hue. He sat up — yawned — smiled — braced himself — nodded at Jeff, then at me — but he spoke first to the babu:
“Yes, it’s over the top. You’re right, I’ve trusted you. I do now. You will carry on until you haven’t a resource left. Then you’ll take yours standing up, like any other man whose friendship is worth having.”
“All right, Jimmy.”
“Listen, please. I want you men to understand me, before this soma makes me too keen-cut to talk. I’m in a middle mood at present. You, too, Baltis: listen, it won’t hurt you. Five or ten minutes from now I’ll be at white heat and unable to discuss anything. Aim — aim — aim and nothing else! I only hope my aim in accurate. I took the stuff because one of us must go the limit. That is my job. I don’t believe in leading from the rear. I’m good now for about thirty-six hours of all I’ve got in me. Then I’m burned out. You men carry on.”