He was silent, working. A long, long time later he swung on the propeller. The motor caught. He throttled it down and watched it grimly. The motor warmed up to normal, and stayed there.
“It will run,” he said coldly. “Those two plugs in the crankcase may come out at any time. I’ve tightened them a little. They’d worked loose from the vibration. But—well.… That Service man was heading for Asunción. He’d been found out. They probably shot him down in mid-air after he’d gotten away. His plane may be crashed anywhere in the jungle within a mile or so. And I’ve two bearings on the fazenda where Ribiera went, now. One from Asunción through here and one from Rio. I want to go back there tonight and dump burning gasoline on the buildings, to do enough damage to disorganize things a little. Then I’m going to try to make it to a seaport. We can stow away, perhaps.”
He shut off the motor.
“We’ll start at dusk. There’ll be lights there. This report says it’s nearly a city—of slaves. We want the darkness for our getaway.”
Paula looked at the sky.
“We have three hours,” she said quietly. “Let us cook and eat. You must keep up your strength, Charles.”
She said it in all seriousness, with the air of one who has entire confidence and is merely solicitous. And Bell, who knew of at least three excellent reasons why neither of them should survive until dawn—Bell looked at her queerly, and then grinned, and then took her in his arms and kissed her. She seemed to like it.
And they lunched quite happily on piranha and pacu—which is smaller—and drank water, and for dessert had more piranha.
* * * *
The long afternoon wore away slowly. It was hot, and grew blistering. Insects came in swarms and tormented them until Bell built a second and larger smudge fire. But they fastened upon his flesh when he went out of its smoke for more wood.
They talked, as well as they could for smoke, and looked at each other as well as they could for smarting eyes. It was not at all the conventional idea of romantic conversation, but it was probably a good deal more honest than most, because they both knew quite well that their chance of life was small. A plane whose motor was precariously patched, flying over a jungle without hope of a safe landing if that patched-up motor died, was bad enough. But with the three nearest nations subservient to The Master, whose deputy Ribiera was, and all those nations hunting them as soon as they were known to be yet alive.…
“Would it not be wise, Charles,” asked Paula wistfully, “just for us to try to escape, ourselves, and not try—”
“Wise, perhaps,” admitted Bell, “but I’ve got to strike a blow while I can.” He was staring somberly at the little plane, fast upon a mud bank, with the tall green jungle all about. “The deputies and all their slaves have their lives hanging by a thread—the thread of a constant supply of the antidote to the poison that’s administered with the antidote. The deputies—Ribiera, for instance—don’t realize that. Else they wouldn’t dare do the things they do. But let them realize that the thread can be broken, and what their slaves would do to them before they all went mad.… You see? Let them learn that a blow has been struck at the center of all the ghastly thing, and they’ll be frightened. They’ll be close to mutiny through sheer panic. And there may be slip-ups.”
It was vague, perhaps, but it was true. The subjection of the poisoned men and women was due not only to terror of what would happen if they disobeyed the deputies, but to a belief that that thing would not happen if they did obey. If Bell could do enough damage to the fazenda of The Master to shake the second belief, he would have shaken the whole conspiracy. And a conspiracy that is not a complete success is an utter failure.
It was close to sunset when they heard a droning noise in the distance. Bell went swiftly to the cockpit of the plane and searched the sky.
“Don’t see it,” he said grimly, “and it probably doesn’t see us. We’re all right, I suppose.”
But he was uneasy. The droning noise grew to a maximum and slowly died away again. It diminished to a distant muttering.
“What say,” said Bell suddenly, “we get aloft now? We’ll follow that damned thing home. It’s going from Asunción to that place we want to find. This is on that route. Whoever’s in it won’t be looking behind, and it’s close to darkness.”
Paula stood up.
“I am ready, Charles.”
Bell swung out on the floats and tugged at the prop. The motor caught and roared steadily. While it was warming up, he stripped off the rest of his shirt and tore it into wide strips, and tied the rags in the handles of the gasoline tins in the two cockpits.
“For our bombs,” he explained, smiling faintly. “You’ll want to wear your chute pack, Paula. You know how to work it? And we’ll divide the guns and what shells we have, and stick them in the flying suit pockets.”
He made her show him a dozen times that she knew how to pull out the ring that would cause the parachute to open. She climbed into the front cockpit and smiled down at him. He throttled down the motor to its lowest speed and shoved off from the mud bank. Clambering up, while the plane moved slowly over the water under the gentle pull of the slow-moving propeller, he bent over and kissed her.
“For luck,” he said in her ear.
The next instant he settled down at the controls, glanced a last time at the instruments, and gave the motor the gun.
The plane lifted soggily but steadily and swept up-stream toward the rolling water of the raudal, which tumbled furiously about an obstacle half of stones and shallows, and half of caught and rotting tree trunks. It rose steadily until the trees dropped away on either side and the jungle spread out on every hand. It rose to a thousand feet and went roaring through the air to northward, while Bell strained his eyes for the plane on ahead.
It was ten minutes or more before he sighted it, winging its way steadily into the misty distance above the jungle. Bell settled down to follow. The engine roared valorously. For half an hour Bell watched it anxiously, but it remained cool and had always ample power. Paula’s head showed above the cockpit combing. Mostly she looked confidently ahead, but once or twice she turned about to smile at him.
The sun seemed high when they rose from the water, but as it neared the horizon its rate of descent seemed to increase. They had been in the air for no more than three-quarters of an hour when it was twice its own disk above the far distant hills. Almost immediately, it seemed, it had halved that distance. And then the lower limb of the blaring circle was sharply cut off by the hill crests and the sun sank wearily to rest behind the edge of the world.
It seemed as if a swift chill breeze blew over the jungle, in warning of the night. The trees became dark. A shadowy dusk filled the air even up to where the plane flew thunderously on. And then, quite abruptly, stars were shining and it was night.
Bell remembered, suddenly, and switched on the radio as an experiment. The harsh, discordant dashes sounded in his ears through the roaring of the motor. A beam of short waves was being sent out from his destination. While he was on the direct path the monotonous signals could be heard. When they weakened or died he would have left the way.
But they continued, discordant and harsh and monotonous, while the last faint trace of the afterglow died away and night was complete, and a roof of many stars glittered overhead, and the jungle lay dark and deadly below him.
For nearly half an hour more he kept on. Twice he switched on the instrument board light to glance at the motor temperature. The first time it appeared a little high. The second time it was normal again. But there was little use in watching instruments. If the motor failed there was no landing field to make for.
A sudden faint glow sprang into being, many miles ahead. The pinkish glare of many, many lights turned on suddenly. As the plane thundered on the glow grew brighter. An illuminated field, for the convenience of messengers who carried the poison for The Master to all the nations which were to be subjected.
The glow went out as Bell was just able
to distinguish long rows of twinkling bulbs, and he saw the harsher, fiercer glow of floodlights. He reached forward and touched Paula’s shoulder. Conversation was impossible over the motor’s roar. Her hand reached up and pressed his.
Then he saw other lights. Bright lights, as from houses. Arc lights as from storage warehouses, or something of the sort. A long, long row of lighted windows, which might be dormitories or perhaps sheds in which The Master’s enslaved secretaries kept the record of his victims.
The earth flung back the roaring of the little plane’s motor. Bell had but little time to act before other planes would dart upward to seek him out. He dived, and the wing tip landing lights went on, sending fierce glares downward. Twin disks of light appeared upon the earth. Sheds, houses, a long row of shacks as if for laborers. A drying field, on which were spread out plants with their leaves turning brown. A wall about it.…
“The damned stuff,” said Bell grimly.
He swept on. Jungle, only jungle. He banked steeply as lights flicked on and off below and as—once—the wing tip lights showed men running frantically two hundred feet below.
Then a stream of fire shot earthward, and Bell held up his hand and arm into the blast of the slip stream. It blew out the blaze that had licked at his flesh. He stared down. The gas can had left a trailing stream of fluid behind it as it went spinning down to earth. All that stream of inflammable stuff was aflame. The can itself struck earth and seemed to explode, and the trailing mass of fire was borne onward by the wind and lay across a row of thatch-roofed buildings. An incredible sheet of fire spread out. The stuff in the drying yard was burning.
Bell laughed shortly, and flung over another of his flaming bombs, and another, and the fourth.…
* * * *
He climbed for the skies, then, as rectangles of light showed below and planes were thrust out of their lighted hangars. Four huge conflagrations were begun. One was close by a monster rounded tank, and Bell watched with glistening eyes as it crept closer. Suddenly—it seemed suddenly, but it must have been minutes later—flame rushed up the sides of that tank, there was a sudden hollow booming, and fire was flung broadcast in a blazing, pouring flood.
“Their fuel tank!” said Bell, his eyes gleaming in the ruddy light from below. He shut off his landing lights and went upward, steeply. “I’ve played hell with them now!”
A thousand feet up. Two thousand. Two thousand five hundred.… And suddenly Bell felt cold all over. The instrument board! The motor was hot. Hot! Burning!
He shut it off before it could burst into flames, but he heard the squealing of tortured, unlubricated metal grinding to a stop. He leveled out. It was strangely, terribly silent in the high darkness, despite the roaring of wind about the gliding plane. The absence of the motor roar was the thing that made it horrible.
“Paula,” said Bell harshly, “one of those plugs came out, I guess. The motor’s ruined. Dead. The ship’s going to crash. Ready with your parachute?”
It was dark, up there, save for the glare of fires upon the under surface of the wings. But he saw her hand, encarmined by that glare, upon the combing of the cockpit. A moment later her face. She turned, light-dazzled, to smile back at him.
“All right, Charles.” Her voice quavered a little, but it was very brave. “I’m ready. You’re coming, too?”
“I’m coming,” said Bell grimly. Below them was the city of The Master, set blazing by their doing. If their chutes were seen descending.… And if they were not.… “Count ten,” said Bell hoarsely, “and pull out the ring. I’ll be right after you.”
He saw the slim little black-clad figure drop, plummetlike, and prayed in an agony of fear. Then a sudden blooming thing hid it from sight. Thick clouds of smoke lay over the lights and fires below.
Bell stepped over the side and went hurtling down toward the earth in his turn.
CHAPTER XI
Bell was falling head-first when the ’chute opened, and the jerk was terrific, the more so as he had counted not the customary ten, but fifteen before pulling out the ring. But very suddenly he seemed to be floating down with an amazing gentleness, with the ruddy blossom of a parachute swaying against a background of lustrous stars very far indeed over his head. Below him were masses of smoke and at least one huge dancing mass of flame, where the storage tank for airplane gas had exploded. It was unlikely in the extreme, he saw now, that anyone under that canopy of smoke could look up to see plane or parachute against the sky.
Clumsily enough, dangling as he was, Bell twisted about to look for Paula. Sheer panic came to him before he saw her a little above him but a long distance off. She looked horribly alone with the glare of the fires upon her parachute, and smoke that trailed away into darkness below her. She was farther from the flames than Bell, too. The light upon her was dimmer. And Bell cursed that he had stayed in the plane to make sure it would dive clear of her before he stepped off himself.
The glow on the blossom of silk above her faded out. The sky still glared behind, but a thick and acrid fog enveloped Bell as he descended. Still straining his eyes hopelessly, he crossed his feet and waited.
Branches reached up and lashed at him. Vines scraped against his sides. He was hurled against a tree trunk with stunning force, and rebounded, and swung clear, and then dangled halfway between earth and the jungle roof. It was minutes before his head cleared, and then he felt at once despairing and a fool. Dangling in his parachute harness when Paula needed him.
The light in the sky behind him penetrated even the jungle growth as a faint luminosity. Presently he writhed to a position in which he could strike a match. A thick, matted mass of climbing vines swung from the upper branches not a yard from his fingertips. Bell cursed again, frantically, and clutched at it wildly. Presently his absurd kickings set him to swaying. He redoubled his efforts and increased the arc in which he swung. But it was a long time before his fingers closed upon leaves which came away in his grasp, and longer still before he caught hold of a wrist-thick liana which oozed sticky sap upon his hands.
But he clung desperately, and presently got his whole weight on it. He unsnapped the parachute and partly let himself down, partly slid, and partly tumbled to the solid earth below.
He had barely reached it when, muffled and many times reechoed among the tree trunks, he heard two shots. He cursed, and sprang toward the sound, plunging headlong into underbrush that strove to tear the flesh from his bones. He fought madly, savagely, fiercely.
He heard two more shots. He fought the jungle in the darkness like a madman, ploughing insanely through masses of creepers that should have been parted by a machete, and which would have been much more easily slipped through by separating them, but which he strove to penetrate by sheer strength.
And then he heard two shots again.
Bell stopped short and swore disgustedly.
“What a fool I am!” he growled. “She’s telling me where she is, and I—”
He drew one of the weapons that seemed to bulge in every pocket of his flying suit and fired two shots in the air in reply. A single one answered him.
From that time Bell moved more sanely. The jungle is not designed, apparently, for men to travel in. It is assuredly not intended for them to travel in by night, and especially it is not planned, by whoever planned it, for a man to penetrate without either machete or lights.
As nearly as he could estimate it afterward, it took Bell over an hour to cover one mile in the blackness under the jungle roof. Once he blundered into fire-ants. They were somnolent in the darkness, but one hand stung as if in white-hot metal as he went on. And thorns tore at him. The heavy flying suit protected him somewhat, but after the first hundred yards he blundered on almost blindly, with his arms across his face, stopping now and then to try to orient himself. Three times he fired in the air, and three times an answering shot came instantly, to guide him.
And then a voice called in the blackness, and he ploughed toward it, and it called again, and again, and at last he s
truck a match with trembling fingers and saw her, dangling as he had dangled, some fifteen feet from the ground. She smiled waveringly, with a little gasp of relief, and he heard something go slithering away, very furtively.
She clung to him desperately when he had gotten her down to solid earth. But he was savage.
“Those shots—though I’m glad you fired them—may have been a tip-off to the town. We’ve got to keep moving, Paula.”
Her breath was coming quickly.
“They could trail us, Charles. By daylight we might not leave signs, but forcing our way through the night.…”
“Right, as usual,” admitted Bell. “How about shells? Did you use all you had?”
“Nearly. But I was afraid, Charles.”
Bell felt in his pockets. Half a box. Perhaps twenty-five shells. With the town nearby and almost certainly having heard their signals to each other. Black rage invaded Bell. They would be hunted for, of course. Dogs, perhaps, would trail them. And the thing would end when they were at bay, ringed about by The Master’s slaves, with twenty-five shells only to expend.
The dim little glow in the sky between the jungle leaves kept up. It was bright, and slowly growing brighter. There was a sudden flickering and even the jungle grew light for an instant. A few seconds later there was a heavy concussion.
“Something else went up then,” growled Bell. “It’s some satisfaction, anyway, to know I did a lot of damage.”
And then, quite abruptly, there was an obscure murmuring sound. It grew stronger, and stronger still. If Bell had been aloft, he would have seen the planes from The Master’s hangars being rushed out of their shelters. One of the long row of buildings had caught. And the plateau of Cuyaba is very, very far from civilization. Tools, and even dynamos and engines, could be brought toilsomely to it, but the task would be terrific. Buildings would be made from materials on the spot, even the shelters for the planes. It would be much more practical to carry the parts for a saw mill and saw out the lumber on the spot than to attempt to freight roofing materials and the like to Cuyaba. So that the structures Bell had seen in the wing lights’ glow were of wood, and inflammable. The powerhouse that lighted the landing field was already ablaze. The smaller shacks of the laborers perhaps would not be burnt down, but the elaborate depot for communication by plane and wireless was rapidly being destroyed. The reserve of gasoline had gone up in smoke almost at the beginning, and in spreading out had extended the disaster to nearly all the compact nerve-center of the whole conspiracy.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 12