His face was seared, but the pain of it was forgotten in the knowledge that their drunken, twisting flight had whipped out the fire licking back from the forward cockpit. He saw Culver's head, fallen awkwardly to one side. The helmet in one part was charred to a crisp.
He leveled off. He was thinking: "Another man gone! Can't I ever fight back? If I only had a gun!" Then he knew he was looking at the pistol grip, where Colonel Culver's brown hand had brought an awkward weapon to life. His lips twisted to a whimsical smile, though his eyes still held the same cold fury, as he whispered: "And I don't even know that the damn thing's loaded—but I'm going to find out!"
hey were clustered on the sands below him as he roared overhead. He was flying at two thousand, the throttle open full. Beside the ship a gun swung its long barrel downward. It sputtered almost soundlessly—but where it passed, the sand rose up in spouting fountains.
But his wild speed made the gunfire almost useless. The shell-bursts were spaced too far apart; they straddled the blot of figures.
He came back at five thousand feet, slowly—until the ship lurched, and he saw the right wing tip vanish in a shower of molten metal. He threw the ship over and away from the invisible beam; the plane writhed and twisted across the last half mile of sky. He was over them when he pulled into a tight spiral, then he swung the pistol grip that controlled the gun until the dot in the crystal was merged with the target of clustering red forms. The gun sputtered.
Below the plane, the quiet desert heaved its smooth surface convulsively into the air. Even above the roar of the motor Smithy heard the terrific thunder of that one long explosion.
Above the rim of the forward cockpit Culver's head rolled uneasily; his voice, thick and uncertain, came back through the phone; and later—only a matter of minutes later, though fifty miles away—Smithy set the plane down on a level expanse of sand and tore frantically at his belt. Colonel Culver was weakly raising his head.