"Mac—do ye break out two parachutes, me lad! Bring 'em up here, and shake a leg! No, there's nothin' to worry about—divil a thing!"
Then, into the transmitter, he shouted thickly as he switched the instrument on:
"Jimmy, me bhoy, kape away! Kape away, I'm tellin' you, or ye'll have me Irish temper disturbed, and I'm a divil whin I'm roused! What do I know about your twin ingineers? Wan of thim makes trouble enough for me! Now take yourself away, and don't step on the tail of this ship or we'll go down to glory together!—unless we go to another terminal and find oursilves in hell, and us all covered wid snow. Think how divilish conspicuous you'd be feelin'—"
A discord of voices silenced his laughing banter; on the instrument board the warning light was flashing imperatively. Above the bedlam of voices one stood out, and all other commands went silent before the voice of authority.
"Silence! This is the Commander of Air! Orders for O—sixteen—L: seize that ship! Your magnets!—disregard damage!—get your magnets on that ship and hold her. We are coming down—"
Chet reached for the transmitter switch and opened it that their voices might not go beyond the control room.
"Lots of company; they seem pretty certain that they're on the right track. And the big boss himself is coming down to call. Can't you hurry those 'chutes?"
The control room door was flung open as the figure of a young man stumbled through and dropped two bundles of cloth and webbing upon the floor. He clung to the door-frame as Chet threw the big freighter into a totally unexpected maneuver that rolled them down and away from a silver-bellied ship above. Then the levers moved again, and the ship went hard-a-port as Chet caught again one fleeting glimpse of shadow below that could only be the markings of a building he had known well.
"Hold her there, Spud!" he shouted. "He'll be back in a minute or two! He'll get us next time!"