Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 Part 14

"Paula?"

"I am all right," she a.s.sured him unsteadily. "What now?"

"There's a seat pack under you," said Bell. "It's a parachute. You'd better put it on. G.o.d only knows where we'll land, but if the motor stops we'll jump together. And I think we'll have to jump before dawn.

This plane won't fly indefinitely. There's just one chance in a million that I know of. There'll be a moon before long. When it comes up, look for the glitter of moonlight on water. With the wing-tip lights we may--we may--manage to get down. But I doubt it."

He moved his hand to cut in the motor again. She stopped him.

"If we head south," she said unsteadily, "we may reach the Paraguay.

It is perhaps two hundred miles, but it is broad. We should see it.

Perhaps even the stars...."

"Good work!" said Bell approvingly. "_Nils desperandum!_ That's our motto, Paula."

He swung off his course and headed south. He was flying high, now, and an illogical and incomprehensible hope came to him. There was no hope, of course. He had had, more than once, a despairing conviction that the utmost result of all his efforts would be but the delaying of their final enslavement to The Master, whose apparent impersonality made him the more terrible as he remained mysterious. So far they seemed like struggling flies in some colossal web, freeing themselves from one snaring spot to blunder helplessly into another.

But the moon came up presently, rounded and nearly full. The sky took on a new radiance, and the jungle below them was made darker and more horrible by the contrast.

And when there were broad stretches of moonlit foliage visible on the rising slopes beneath, Bell felt the engine faltering. He switched on the instrument board light. One glance, and he was cold all over. The motor was hot. Hotter than it had ever been. The oil lines, perhaps the pump itself....

Paula's hand reached back into the glow of the instrument board. He leaned over and saw her pointing. Moonlight on rolling water, far below. He dived for it, steeply. The wing-lights went on. Faint disks of light appeared far below, sweeping to and fro with the swaying of the plane, bobbing back and forth.

It seemed to Bell that there had been nothing quite as horrible as the next minute or two. He felt the over-heated, maltreated motor laboring. It was being ruined, of course--and a ruined motor meant that they were marooned in the jungle. But if it kept going only until they landed. And if it did not....

White water showed below in the disks of the landing lights' glow. It tumbled down a swift and deadly _raudal_--a rapid. And then--black, deep water, moving swiftly between tall cliffs of trees.

Bell risked everything to bank about and land toward the white water.

The little plane seemed to be sinking into a canyon as the trees rose overhead on either side. But the moonlit rapid gave him his height, approximately, and the lights helped more than a little.

He landed with a terrific crash. The plane teetered on the very verge of a dive beneath the surface. Bell jerked back the stick and killed the engine, and it settled back.

A vast, a colossal silence succeeded the deafening noise of twelve cylinders exploding continuously. There were little hissing sounds as the motor cooled. There was the smell of burnt oil.

"All right, Paula?" asked Bell quietly.

"I--I'm all right."

The plane was drifting backward, now. It spun around in a stately fas.h.i.+on, its tail caught in underbrush, and it swung back. It drifted past cliffs of darkness for a long time, and grounded, presently, with a surprising gentleness.

"Do you know," said Bell dryly, "this sort of thing is getting monotonous. I think our motor's ruined. I never knew before that misfortunes could grow literally tedious. I've been expecting to be killed any minute since we started off, but the idea of being stuck in the jungle with a perfectly good plane and a bad motor...."

He fished inside his flying suit and extracted a cigarette. Then he lit it.

"Let's see.... We haven't a thing to eat, have we?"

There was a little slapping noise. Bell became suddenly aware of a horde of insects swarming around him. Smoke served partially to drive them off.

"Look here," he said suddenly, "we could unfold a parachute and cover the c.o.c.kpits for some protection against these infernal things that are biting me."

"We may need the parachute," said Paula unsteadily. "Does--does that smoke of yours drive them away?"

"A little." Bell hesitated. "I say, it would be crowded, but if I came up there, or you here...."

"I--I'll come back there," she said queerly. "The extra cans of gasoline here...."

She slipped over the part.i.tion, in the odd flying suit which looks so much more odd when a girl wears it. She settled down beside him, and he tried painstakingly to envelope her in a cloud of tobacco smoke.

The plague of insects lessened.

There was nothing to do but wait for dawn. She was very quiet, but as the moon rose higher he saw that her eyes were open. The night noises of the jungle all about them came to their ears. Furtive little slitherings, and the sound of things drinking greedily at the water's edge, and once or twice peculiar little despairing small animal cries off in the darkness.

The jungle was dark and sinister, and all the more so when the moon rose high and lightened its face and left them looking into weird, abysmal blackness between moonlit branches. Bell thought busily, trying not to become too conscious of the small warm body beside him.

He moved, suddenly, and found her fingers closed tightly on the sleeve of his flying suit.

"Frightened, Paula?" he asked quietly. "Don't be. We'll make out."

She shook her head and looked up at him, drawing away as if to scan his face more closely.

"I am thinking," she said almost harshly, "of biology. I wonder--"

Bell waited. He felt an intolerable strain in her tensed figure. He put his hand comfortingly over hers. And, astoundingly, he found it trembling.

"Are all women fools?" she demanded in a desperate cynicism. "Are we all imbeciles? Are--"

Bell's pulse pounded suddenly. He smiled.

"Not unless men are imbeciles too," he said dryly. "We've been through a lot in the past two days. It's natural that we should like each other. We've worked together rather well. I--well"--his smile was distinctly a wry and uncomfortable one--"I've been the more anxious to get to some civilized place where The Master hasn't a deputy because--well--it wouldn't be fair to talk about loving you while--"

he shrugged, and said curtly, "while you had no choice but to listen."

She stared at him, there in the moonlight with the jungle moving about its business of life and death about them. And very, very slowly the tenseness left her figure. And very, very slowly she smiled.

"Perhaps," she said quietly, "you are lying to me, Charles. Perhaps.

But it is a very honorable thing for you to say. I am not ashamed, now, of feeling that I wish to be always near you."

"Hus.h.!.+" said Bell. He put his arm about her shoulder and drew her closer to him. He tilted her face upward. It was oval and quite irresistibly pretty. "I love you," said Bell steadily. "I've been fighting it since G.o.d knows when, and I'm going to keep on fighting it--and it's no use. I'm going to keep on loving you until I die."

Her fingers closed tightly upon his. Bell kissed her.