Far, far out he swam on the new wings he had built for himself—and for Naia. Naia? He smiled. In Himyra she was perhaps flying by day even as he was flying now—flying as he had taught her to fly in body and soul; teaching others to fly for the strength of her nation, as he was flying for her nation and his, to make it strong and secure. For a moment the thought gripped him, and he flew on in a sort of waking dream, until the flare of a hundred leaping fires directly beneath him brought him back to the matter in hand. He passed the first line of the Mazzerian bivouac and darted above a wood and came above a great savanna—a tree-dotted plain, where the camp-fires were flashing again.
Then, and then only, for the first time he reached down and took up a bomb, and sailing high above that plain where the camp-fires looked like a myriad of fireflies far beneath him, he let it fall.
A flash, a ruddy, great mushroom of golden, raying light—a splash of rending destruction in the night. The explosion came up to him long after he saw it, on the lagging vibrations of sound. Again and again he hurled a second and third as he swam from left to right.
Faint, far away, oddly detached, he thought he heard a distant shouting, though it was hard to be sure above the motor's roar. But the light of other fires showed him the silhouette of many figures running, of arms uplifted, as though those who swarmed like a hill of angry ants driven into panic were pointing into the air. Where that cluster of pointing forms seemed thickest he soared on swift, sure wings and let go another bomb. It fell beyond his vision. It burst. The blur of bodies into which it descended was no more.
And now a strange mood seized Croft in its grip. It was unlike anything he had ever known. It was in reality a sort of air intoxication one may suppose. But suddenly it was as though he were a superman indeed, above all things mundane, so far above the puny mortals who crawled on the ground beneath him, who writhed under the force of his bombs, that he moved in a world detached from them, or any one, or anything save himself.
It was as though he rode on destiny's wings rather than upborne by those of the roaring airplane. He tilted his vanes from no sane purpose, with nothing to gain. Up, up he shot; up, up, until he could see the whole night-wrapped region about him, the forest, the fire-studded camp of Mazzer's army—Atla, a ruddy glow behind her walls, where shortly he must return.
But not yet—not yet. For a time it was enough to chase this new found exultation, to swim here in the void between earth and heaven, alone with the thing he had made, on which he rode; alone with it, with his spirit, and his thoughts of Naia of Aphur, of the time when these blue spawn, driven back to their lairs in the hinterland of Palos, he should return to claim her. It was enough to ride thus the winds of eternity, as it were, sweeping on and on in the wheel of a mighty circle beneath the stars.
A sputter, a cough from the motor. Croft came back from his dreams to the present in a flash. The engine was missing. Apprehension touched him with a breath-arresting recognition of the fact. And hardly had he taken it into account when the motor missed again. And having coughed for the second time, it died.
He was falling—falling! The bombs! Oddly enough he thought of them rather than of being dashed to death. He reached down and found the remaining four he had brought. He hurled them over the side of the fuselage, tossing them wide. Then he began a frantic effort to once more start the engine—in vain.