Ten paces, twelve paces! Would he ever make it?
He sagged against the cockpit, slid the woman in; with another motion he swept the child in beside her.
Like mad, he spun the motor and leaped for the fuselage as the great horizontal wings began their first slow whirl.
Before him a whole end of the narrow island broke off and the flood foamed and roared across the place where land had been a moment ago.
Behind, there was a crash and sound of the torrent pouring over. Hal could not turn to look, but he knew what was happening. Earth toppling into the flood!
Would those four rotor blades above him ever stiffen with enough lifting power for flight?
Within ten feet of the gyroscope’s nose water poured over the crumbled land edge. No room for even the slightest run now. Those rotors must lift straight up with their extra burden—or it would mean the end.
Centrifugal force was whirling the limp flimsiness of the rotors into an engine of mighty lifting power. Flexible steel stiffened as it spun a thousand, two thousand whirls to the minute.
The gyroscope was rising, slowly, not straightly as it should. Wrong balance of its burden shifted the take-off climb from perpendicular to an angle.
But at that, it cleared land and rose up and up into the sky.