by Don Wilcox
“Blaw! Blaw! Blaw!” they mocked. “Wooveley-wooveley-blaw!”
One of them grabbed his clipped wing and spread it out. From our distance we could never tell that the tip feathers were missing. But obviously that was what the commotion was all about. They followed him around the rocky mountain ledge, not doing him any bodily harm, but giving him enough vocal mockery to weigh him down for days to come.
That was my first lesson in how wingmen behave, and it did me good to know that it was more important to them to chastise one of their own members who got his wingtips in trouble than it was to come back and murder us.
Lieutenant Gene Wells snapped his fingers, and I broke out of my daze and followed him. He seemed very eager to make some tracks in another direction, and this particular McCorkle at his heels was of the same opinion.
CHAPTER V
Time, Space, and a Female
You probably don’t know what heat is. I mean, you’ve never really experienced hot weather. Maybe you’ve worked on slightly warm pavement when the sun’s doing a hundred and twenty in the shade, and you’ve complained about having to pour boiling tar. Merely tepid, my friend.
Or possibly you’ve spent a winter’s evening at a railway station in a tiny two-by-four waiting room with fifty people and no ventilation, and the station agent fires the stove up to red hot, and every time he looks out at the snow he tosses in another bucket of coal. And your head grows clammy and your woolen underwear begins to itch. That was a refrigerator, my friend, compared to the heat that bore down on us in this strange land.
“Where are we going?” I asked Wells.
“To try to find the others.”
“Is it far?”
“Depends on whether they’ve kept in motion since I last saw them. They saw what happened to Private Biddle and Charrington—”
“Charrington! Did he get it too?” I groaned.
“Eight bird monsters pounced on him when we first got here.”
Gradually I pieced together Lieutenant Wells’ story. Wherever we were, we had all made our appearance on this hillside at about the same time. The fall—if you could call it a fall—had left most of the gang uninjured, but jolted.
“Like tumbling from a second story window,” Wells said. “But as we picked ourselves up, one by one, we all looked pretty silly. There was nothing overhead to drop from—not even a low cloud. Nothing but those big harmless looking birds floating high overhead on lazy wings.”
Hours had been spent looking for me, in vain. Maxie Hammerstein had kept yelping that they’d better get back to their company. But no one knew which way to go.
No one even knew which way the war was. But if this land of sand was a stretch of the Sahara desert, it seemed best to trek northward. The Mediterranean must be up there somewhere.
“It was obvious,” said Wells, as he recounted these things, “that some very unusual power from the professor’s gun had shot us through a space of dozens of miles—if not hundreds. All of our previous surroundings were simply gone. Didn’t you observe this?”
“At a glance,” I said.
“But Private Charrington couldn’t get it through his head. He was sure that our village must be right on the other side of one of these mountains.”
“It was miles from any mountain.”
“Charrington couldn’t be convinced. While some of us were searching you, he struck off down the slope and walked out on the flat. That’s when it happened.”
I studied Wells’ expression, the tight line of his mouth, his cool and courageous eyes. He and Charrington had been close friends. Young fellows in their twenties, they had been just smart enough to keep a forty-year-old like me guessing. I had been on many a late night vigil with them, scouting the enemy moves across Algiers. I had heard them argue about the paths of the stars, the geological changes of the earth, and a lot of dizzy ideas about time and space and Einstein, and whether or not there were any native earthworms under the sands of the Sahara.
“Charrington couldn’t have known that walking out on the floor of sand was an invitation to death,” Wells said. “None of us could know it until he tried it. But it’s the same lesson this desert fighting has driven home. A soldier can hide in the shadowed mountainsides, but he turns himself into a target the minute he walks out on the smooth desert floor. Eight of these winged beasts swooped down. It happened before anyone could draw a gun. Now we understand what we’re up against.”
After Gene Wells gave me the fuller story. The winged men had made a ceremonial feast of Charrington the same as the recent one around Biddle. Two thousand of them, Wells estimated, flew the circles and spirals and cloverleaf formations, while the four big shots took over the body and had their bestial orgy of feasting.
After that the rest of the men slipped from one hiding place to another under Lieutenant Wells’ strict orders.
Meanwhile neither Biddle nor I had been found. Wells set the course for the party. But they hadn’t got far when he left them to go back and look for Biddle and me.
“The winged men found Biddle before I got back. He may have been dead already,” said Wells.
I reassured him on this point from my discovery of the broken vertebrae.
“Then we did fall—we must have—but from where?”
Wells’ question was not to be answered that day, nor that week or month.
But he and I made the most of the night’s darkness to put miles of space between us and the desert hexagon. We hiked as if we had a sure destination somewhere to the north. What utter innocence!
We kept our eyes on the stars, and the goal toward which we moved was something like a star. It stayed just as far away—no matter how many hours we walked.
You don’t understand how this could be? My good friend Wells and I didn’t either, on that starry night. But it was true, as we would someday learn.
Through ten hours of darkness we walked, leaving the cathedral rocks and wingmen’s playgrounds farther behind with every step—and yet, if the facts were known, we were not one foot nearer to the scenes of war that had so mysteriously vanished. Nor one foot farther away.
Curiously enough, we spent part of that long dark hike talking about such mysteries as space and time and Mr. Einstein and the stars and why the past and the future never happen to bump into each other.
That is, Wells did most of the talking, and I threw in a few uh-huhs and a goodly number of huh’s and you-don’t-say’s while I tried to straighten out all the mysterious meanings. This time and space business isn’t something to be taken in one easy dose, like your castor oil. It’s more like your vitamin pills and your setting up exercises—a little every day, and after a long time you really feel the results.
There was a female bird creature flying over our heads when the pink dawn came in over the land.
She was flying low—not more than fifty feet up. Wells drew his pistol. I believe he’d have shot her if she hadn’t been so swift. Swish—She was away like a rocket. Wells shook his head.
“We’ve got to make tracks now,” he whispered. “She must have seen us. She’ll be back with a mob of brothers and sisters, or I miss my guess.”
The nearest peak sticking up through the level floor of sand was about a mile away, and we skipped for it, keeping a sharp lookout for trouble.
Hidden again, we took turns sleeping and standing guard. Twice before noon we saw this lone flyer swing down out of the cloud level and circle the base of a neighboring mountain. Once she came close enough that we could see her dark hair fluttering over her naked brown shoulders. Her face was the face of a beautiful savage human animal. Her wings might have been made out of those ten dollar blossoms that society women wear at parties.
She didn’t see us—at least she pretended she didn’t, Apparently she was just circling the base of the butte looking for rodents.
“You’re not going to shoot her, are you, Lieutenant?”
He didn’t answer me. He had drawn his pistol, but was sort of gasping
for breath at that moment. Like a fellow might if a beautiful leopard leaped out into the sunlight unexpectedly. The sight of such a girl cutting through the air so gracefully was enough to hypnotize anyone.
Then she was winging away from us, and I could feel just the faintest stir of air against my sweaty cheeks from the slow, rhythmic flapping of her wings.
I said to Wells, “You decided not to shoot, huh?”
“Yeh.” He was still watching. “Better save the bullets, huh?”
“Yeh.” He wasn’t hearing me. But he had told me before that his orders to the other men were to save their bullets. There were too many of these creatures to start a battle. We wouldn’t last an hour. Our one bet was to keep hidden.
Wells, gazing, returned his pistol to its holster.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.
He turned on me with a show of temper that was entirely uncalled for. “Mind your manners.”
“You’re thinking,” I said, “what a swell specimen she’d be to take back to the museum.”
Wells’ eyes warmed with a restrained twinkle. “Why not the zoo?”
“After what’s happened,” I said, “I didn’t figure that you’d care to let any of these creatures live—in cages or out.”
His mouth tightened, and he gave me nothing but silence the rest of the day.
We rested, ate lightly, and sipped water from our canteens. Within another day we would have to replenish our supplies. If only a plane would have come over—but here, in my ignorance, I was hoping for the impossible.
Another night of hiking. Another dawn—this time with the hope that we had left the land of the winged humans far behind. But this was being too optimistic. The swiftness of wings gave them dominion over a wide area.
Then, too, as Wells observed, the abundance of sand squirrels and other scampering little rodents marked this stretch of desert as a sure hunting ground for larger flesh-eating animals.
We didn’t overtake the rest of our party. In fact, in these two nights we had failed to pick up their trail, and we began to wonder if we might have passed them.
But we did pick up a trail of sorts, with implications that gave us a headache. One man’s trail, with one identifying mark.
To give you a bird’s-eye of the geography, this big level area of sand might have been mapped in the shape of an oak leaf. All the little curlicues and scallops cutting in around the sides would be these tooth-shaped mountains forming the border around the desert floor.
Through the nights we had been cutting straight across the level stretches. But whenever we needed cover we had headed for the left side of the oak leaf pattern. In other words, our northbound trail had threaded in and out of the mountains along the west side of the flat desert.
This daylight found us heading for an almost bald tower of green and gray rock with a bit of scrubby woods near the base.
“Watch everything,” Wells muttered. “The way this land lies, the other men would be sure to hit this point—if they’ve come along this side of the flat.”
“If I were a winged man, and hungry,” I said, “I’d figure that here is a perfect trap for soldier steak and tenderloins.”
“Watch everything,” Wells repeated. “There could be a hundred pairs of wings in those thickets. But with daylight on us we’ve got to take our chance on finding some cover.”
We turned around, then, to catch sight of the pair of fluttering orchid wings speeding through the air within twenty yards of us. That same abbreviated human figure—the female whose savage beauty had fairly petrified us the day before.
“The museum specimen!” I exclaimed.
“Zoo!” said Wells. And this time he didn’t draw a gun. He just gazed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.
“What?”
“She needs more feathers. She’s got no modesty, flying around in public this way—”
“Shut up,” said Wells. “You’re all wet.”
He seemed a bit ruffled so I tried to smooth it over. “What I mean is, she needs some hands instead of those talons. And she needs some legs.”
“She needs nothing,” said Wells very dogmatically, as if he were an army doctor offering a diagnosis. “She’s doing all right, isn’t she? This is her land, not ours. She’s got exactly what she needs to take her up and down these mountains, hasn’t she? She’d have a devil of a time getting along with her people if she had hands and legs. Now, wouldn’t she?”
“Hell, I didn’t mean to insult her,” I said.
“All right.”
“Say, where’d you get these notions?” I said. “Next thing I know you’ll be trying to strike up a conversation—”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Well, the way you’re standing there gazing—hell, maybe she’s gone after a hungry mob. You know she saw us this time.”
Gene Wells broke out of his freeze. “We’d better streak for the tall timber.”
We streaked, and on the way we stopped like stones, to find ourselves looking down at big foot tracks in the sand.
Those tracks were going our way, so we followed them. And ten minutes later, just as we were nearing the edge of the thickets we saw something lying beside the foot tracks that was bright green.
It was a fountain pen. Wells picked it up and turned it over in his hand.
“The last green fountain pen I remember seeing,” he said, “was in the coat pocket of the German professor.”
CHAPTER VI
Canteens and Angels
“Great-great-granddaddy McCorkle,” I said. “What’s a fountain pen doing here in the middle of the desert?”
Wells pointed to the tracks. “Whoever came this way was staggering, from exhaustion or thirst or both. He may have been near the end of his rope. What do you see here, McCorkle?”
“Looks like he fell,” I said.
Wells nodded. “That’s when the pen dropped. But he got to his feet again. If he found any water around here he may have pushed on. But on the other hand—”
“He may be sitting up there in the bushes watching us,” I said.
It gave me a creepy feeling. We seemed to be coasting into an invisible traffic jam. But Wells was ready to take his chances that any man in this parched land would be a friend. Even if it were the German professor.
“The last I saw of the professor,” I said, “he was being led away by four men with bayonets.”
“That was just before the gun exploded,” said Wells. “But he broke free just as that puff of red smoke popped out. He was running back to us when the damned thing caught us.”
I gazed at the tracks again, and in spite of myself I felt a certain respect and awe toward the big, blustering, bespectacled professor. Whether his intentions had been evil or good, it was evident that he had applied his ingenious brain to an amazing line of secret knowledge.
I said to Wells, “That guy knew we were going places.”
“Sure he did,” said Wells.
“And he wanted to go along.”
“Wanted to—and did. But after he got here he didn’t show his face to us. He must have made his exit from the winged creatures in a hurry.”
“And left us to their mercy,” I said. “What’s his big idea?”
“I don’t think he cared about us,” said Wells. “We were just so much surplus baggage. He meant to shoot that gun before anybody came. He was probably in the last five minutes of a long experiment when we found him—maybe the culmination of a lifetime of study. If so, no wonder he carried on like a madman when we came along and started razzing him.” We followed the faltering steps for another thirty feet.
They swung in a dizzy zig-zag path, first away from, and then toward the nearest patch of bushes.
I stopped and blinked my eyes and snapped my fingers. A true McCorkle inspiration had hit me.
“If he knew how to get us here, Wells,” I said, “praise be to Saint Patrick, he’ll know how to get us back.”
Lieutenant Wells nodded with a slight smile at the corners of his eyes and I saw that he was way ahead of me. “That’s the point exactly, McCorkle. We’ve got to find him. We’re going to find him.”
“We’re going to—” I started to repeat. “Oh-oh. There’s a part of him.” I bent down and picked up his tortoise shell spectacles. That was all—just his specs at the end of his trail. For at this point his foot tracks ran out. What went on here?
We stood there for about five minutes, looking and wondering. The early forenoon sun was already growing uncomfortably hot. Our twelve-foot shadows pointed toward the base of this tall towering spike of gray and green rock toward which we and the mysterious tracks had advanced. Its sides stood up from the desert floor like the walls of an iceberg out of a level sea. The scrubby bushes and brambles were fairly thick upon the first hundred feet of its elevation. Farther up they were thinly sprinkled, so that the upper two hundred feet appeared as a bald rocky dome.
“Don’t sunburn your tonsils,” I said to Wells. “Do you think he jumped up there?”
“He went somewhere,” Wells muttered.
But it was obvious he couldn’t have jumped anywhere. When a man, tramping the desert, falls for a second time, and there his trail ends completely, with no tracks of any other men or animals for yards around, there’s only one way he could have gone.
Up.
Something with wings had come down and taken him up.
“This spells another feast over at the hexagon,” I said. “Tough chewing, I’ll bet. Plenty salty, too.”
Wells took the spectacles, tapped them with his finger. The sand that the perspiration-coated frames had gathered fell away. This, like the condition of the foot tracks, argued that a few hours had passed since the German brought these tracks to a dead end.
We backtracked for a hundred yards or more along this mysterious track, thinking that we might find an answer. Maybe this track-maker had thought we were on his trail and had contrived to give us this dead end to throw us off the scent.