He smiled seraphically at the bewildered pilot as he added: "That's all, Danny, for the present. Fly your little tin ship. I've got some heavy thinking to do."
Danny heard him ask one cryptic question, but he asked it as one who knows that only from his own brain can come the answer.
"How do they get rid of it?" the Infant was demanding. "If they stay in the air, how do they get rid of the load?"
And Pilot O'Rourke was glad enough to leave the answer to that one to the Infant. For had not the Infant alone seen the only reasonable answer to the puzzle of the mysterious man? And Danny had learned that it takes a real man and a real mind to track truth to her hiding place and accept the absurd improbabilities on which truth rests.
They were approaching their destination when the Infant opened his Cupid's-bow mouth to pronounce one additional question. "How high," he asked, "will your little tin ship fly? I know they've reached just under a hundred thousand experimentally, but how high will this one go?"
"And that's a question neither you nor I can answer, Infant." Danny was working with careful fingers at tiny levers; their control room was filled with whining whispers and thin shrieks. "We're goin' down now," he continued, and again flipped over the switch that would put him in communication with the Washington office of the A. F. F.
"O'Rourke—Mountain Division—Unit Five," he said quietly. "Approaching Washington at altitude sixty-five thousand. Descending. Orders, please!"
Within the control room, where the voice of a Washington operator should have answered on the instant, there was silence. The rocket motor had been stilled. The two men were suddenly breathless with listening—listening!—where was heard only the whispering shrillness from without. The whispering grew as the red ship slanted down into denser air; it built up in volume; it varied its pitch and timber till it sounded like echoing voices ... ghostly voices and phantom words ... like orders from the dead....
And Danny O'Rourke found his eyes staring into those of the Infant, where he read only the confirmation of his own fears.