STORM BIRDS
The first slow light of day, "under the opening eyelids of the morn," found the Master up in the screened observation gallery at the tip of the port aileron. Here were mounted two of the six machine-guns that comprised Nissr's heavier armament; and here, too, were hung a dozen of the wonderful life-preservers—combination anti-gravity turbines and vacuum-belt, each containing a signal-light, a water-distiller and condensed foods—that, invented by Brixton Hewes, soon after the close of the war, had done so much to make air-travel safe.
Major Bohannan was with the Master. Both men, now in uniform, showed little effect of the sleepless night they had passed. Wine of excitement and stern duties to perform, joined with powerful bodies, made sleeplessness and labor trivialities.
For an hour the two had been standing there, wrapped in their long military overcoats, while Nissr had swooped on her appointed ways, with hurtling trajectory that had cleft the dark. Somewhat warmed by piped exhaust-gases though the glass-enclosed gallery had been, still the cold had been marked; for without, in the stupendous gulf of emptiness that had been rushing away beneath and all about them, no doubt the thermometer would have sunk below zero.
Nissr's altitude was now very great, ranging between 17,500 and 21,000 feet, so as to take advantage of the steady eastward setting wind in the higher air-lanes. A hard, frozen moonlight, from the steely disk sinking down the western sky, had slashed ink-black shadows of struts and stanchions across the gallery, and had flung Nissr's larger shadow down the hungering abysses of the sky that yawned beneath.
That shadow had danced and quivered at fantastic speed across dazzling moonlit fields of cloud, ever keeping pace with the Sky Eagle, now leaping across immense and silent drifts of white, now plunging, vanishing into black abysses that showed the ocean spinning backward, ever backward toward the west.
With the coming of dawn, the shadow had faded, and the watchers' eyes had been turned ahead for some first sight of the out-riders of the attacking fleets. Bohannan, a little nervous in spite of his well-seasoned fighting-blood, had smoked a couple of cigars in the sheltered gallery, pacing up and down with coat-collar about his ears and with hands thrust deep in pockets. The Master, likewise muffled, had refused all proffers of tobacco and had contented himself with a few khat leaves.
Silence had, for the most part, reigned between them. Up here in the gallery, conversation was not easy. The hurricane of Nissr's flight shrieked at times with shrill stridor and with whistlings as of a million witches bound for some infernal Sabbath on the Matterhorn. A good deal of vibration and of shuddering whipped the wing-tip, too; all was different, here, from the calm warmth, comfort, and security of the fuselage.
The men seemed standing on the very pinion-feathers of some fabled roc, sweeping through space. Above, below, complete and overwhelming vacancy clutched for them. The human is not yet born who can stand thus upon the tip of such a plane, and feel himself wholly at ease.
As darkness faded, however, and as approaching dawn began to burn its slow way up the stupendous vaults of space above the eastern cloud-battlements—battlements flicked with dull crimson, blood-tinged blotches, golden streaks and a whole phantasmagoria of shifting hues—something of the oppression of night fell from the two men.
"Well, we're still carrying on. Things are still going pretty much O.K., sir," proffered the major, squinting into the East—the cold, red East, infinitely vast, empty, ripe with possibilities. "A good start! Close to a thousand miles we've made; engines running to a hair; men all fitting into the jobs like clockwork. Everything all right to a dot, eh?"
The Master nodded silently, keeping dark eyes fixed on the horizon of cloud-rack. Above, the last faint prickings of stars were fading. The moon had paled to a ghostly circle. Shuddering, Nissr fled, with vapory horizons seemingly on her own level so that she appeared at the bottom of an infinite bowl. Bohannan, feeling need of speech, tried to be casual as he added:
"I don't feel sleepy. Do you? Seems like I'd never want to sleep again. Faith, this is living! You've got us all enthused. And your idea of putting every man-jack in uniform was bully! Nothing like uniforms—even a jumble of different kinds, like ours—to cement men together and give them the esprit de corps. If we go through as we've begun—"
The Master interrupted him with a cold glance of annoyance. The Celt's exuberance jarred on his soul. Since the affair with "Captain Alden," the Master's nerves had gone a little raw.
Bohannan rallied bravely.
"Of course," he went on, "it was unfortunate about that New Zealand chap going West. He looked like a right good fellow. But, well—c'est la guerre! And I know he wouldn't have chosen a finer grave than the bottom of the Atlantic, where he's sleeping now.
"By the way, how did Alden come out? Much hurt, was he? I know, of course, he didn't go back to the sick-bay. So he couldn't have been badly wounded, or he would be—"
"The Arabs have a saying, my dear fellow," dryly answered the Master, "that one ear is worth ten thousand tongues. Ponder it well!"
The major's look of astonishment annoyed the Master, even while it hurt him. He took scant pleasure in rebuffing this old friend; but certainly "Captain Alden" would not bear discussing. Feeling himself in a kind of impasse regarding Alden, and fearing some telltale expression in his eyes, the Master swung up his binoculars and once more swept the cloud-horizons from northeast to southeast.
"We ought to be sighting some of the attackers, before long," judged he. "I'm rather curious to see them—to see flies attacking an eagle. I haven't had a real chance of testing out the neutralizers. Their operation, in actual practice, ought to be interesting."
He tried to speak coldly, impersonally; but he well realized a certain strained quality in his voice. Even now, in the hour of impending attack, his thoughts could not remain wholly fixed on the enemy which—so the wireless informed him—lay only a little beyond the haze-enshrouded, burning rim of cloudland.
Despite every effort of the will, he kept mentally reverting to the midships port stateroom containing the woman. He could not keep himself from wondering how she was getting on. Her wound, he hoped—he felt confident—could not be serious.
Had it been, of course, the woman would have asked some further aid.
And since the moment when he had left her, no word had come to him.
More than once, temptation had whispered: "Go to her! She has deceived
you, and you are master here. But, above all, you are a man!"
Twice he had all but yielded to this inner voice. But he had not yielded. Another and a sterner voice had said: "She is an interloper. She has no rights. Why give her another thought?"
This voice had prevailed. The Master had told himself only a few hours more remained, at all events, before the woman should be cast off and abandoned in whatever strange land might befall—probably Morocco, or it might be the Spanish colony of Rio de Oro on the western fringes of the Sahara. After that, what responsibility for her safety or her welfare would be his? Why, he had none, even now!
"But, man," the small voice insinuated, "she came to you on an errand of mercy, to nurse and care for such as might fall ill or be wounded. It was not wholly the desire for adventure that led her to deceive you. Her motive was high and fine!"
"A curse on all women!" retorted the other voice. "Away with her!" And this sterner voice again prevailed. Still, at thought that sometime during the day now close at hand he was to see the last of this woman who had stood there before him in his cabin, with dark eyes looking into his, with eager, oval face upturned to his, with all that glory of lustrous hair a flood about her shoulders, something unknown, unwonted, fingered at the latchets of his heart.
He realized that he felt strange, uneasy, uprooted from his sober aplomb. Unknown irritations possessed him. Under his breath he muttered an Arabic cynicism about woman, from the fourth chapter of the Koran: "Men shall have the preeminence above women, because Allah hath caused the one of them to excel the other!"
Then came the philosophical reflection:
"Man, you were seeking new sensations, new experiences, to stir your pulses. This woman has given you many. She has served her purpose. Now let her go!"
Thus, seeming to have reached a certain finality of decision, he dismissed her again from his mind—for perhaps the twentieth time—and with new care once more began studying the gold-edged, shining clouds where now a dull, broad arc of molten metal had burned its way out of the mists.
The Master slid colored ray-filters over his binoculars, to shield his eyes from the direct dazzle of the rising sun, and swept that incandescent arc. Suddenly he drew a sharp intake of breath.
"Sighted something, eh?" demanded the major, already recovered from the snub administered.
"See for yourself, Major, what you make of it! Right in the sun's eye, and off to southward—all along that fantastic, crimson cloud-castle."
Bohannan's gaze narrowed through his own glasses. Bracing his powerful legs against the quivering jar of the aileron, he brushed the horizon into his eager vision. The glasses steadied. There, of a truth, black midges had appeared, coming up over the world's rim like a startled covey of quail.