He crumpled, suddenly, dropping to the metals. The Master saw through the clinging smoke, by the dimmed light of the frosted disks, that the skin of the engineer's face and hands was cooked to a char.
"If he's breathed flame—" began the major. Alden knelt beside him, peered closely, made a significant, eloquent gesture.
"Volunteers!" shouted the Master, plunging forward.
Into the fumes and smother, half a dozen men fought their way. From the bulkheads they snatched down the little fire-grenades. The Master went first. Bohannan was second, with Rrisa a close third. Leclair in his forward rush almost stumbled over Alden. The "Captain," masked and still unrecognized as a woman by any save the Master, was thrust back from the door by the Celt, as she too tried to enter.
"No, not you!" he shouted. "You, with only one arm—faith, it's worse than useless! Back, you!" Then he and many plunged into the blazing engine-room.
Thus they closed with the fire-devil now licking ravenous tongues about the vitals of Nissr.
CHAPTER XIX
HOSTILE COASTS
An hour from that time, the air-liner was drifting sideways at low altitudes, hardly five hundred feet above the waves. A sad spectacle she made, her wreckage gilded by the infinite splendors of the sun now lowering toward the horizon. Her helicopters were droning with all the force that could be flung into them from the crippled power-plant. Her propellers—some charred to mere stumps on their shafts—stood starkly motionless.
Oddly awry she hung, driven slowly eastward by the wind. Her rudder was burned clean off; her stern, warped, reeking with white fumes that drifted on the late afternoon air told of the fury that had blazed about her. Flames no longer roared away; but the teeth of their consuming rage had bitten deep. Where the aft observation pit had been, now only a twisted net of metal-work remained, with all the plate-glass melted and cracked away. The body of Gorlitz, trapped there, had mercifully fallen into the sea. That ghastly thing, at any rate, no longer remained.