It was holding my rifle, turning it and feeling it with its slender finger-like tentacles. When the gun went off, it took a grotesquely half-human attitude of surprise.
Battle In the Air
I returned to my experiments with the lever. The control was relatively simple. The vessel was propelled forward when the lever was pushed forward, and reversed when the lever was pulled back. Slipping the little disc up or down raised or lowered the prow, and twisting the thing accomplished the steering in the horizontal plane.
By the time my cautious experiments had revealed all of that, Melvar had pointed out three slender crimson craft, wheeling low about us, and evidently preparing to land. I pulled the knob up, and pushed it forward all the way. A pale red beam shot ahead. The black landscape dropped away from us, and we hurtled through the air of the night. I was amazed at the lack of any great sensation of motion, and that the jets of gas, for all their appalling roar without, were barely audible within the cylinder. Still the fore part of the ship was transparent from within, so that we had the oddest sensation of floating free in space.
I saw that the three ships had fallen in a line behind us, and were following at the same terrific pace. When we had reached an altitude of perhaps a mile, I twisted the knob to bring the helm about, and we shot over the Silver Lake, which lay like a white desert of moonlit sand beneath us, standing out sharply against the dark plain around it. In a moment we had gone over it, and over the low hills beyond, and into the bank of purple mist. I had hoped to have time to land and have the vessel on the ground below, but I looked back and saw that our pursuers were gaining swiftly, and that slender twisting rays of bright orange and green were darting toward us from the hurtling arrow-like ships of red.
In the darkness and the mist we could see nothing of the ground below. The only visible things were a few mist-veiled stars above, and the bright scarlet torpedoes that shot after us. Quickly I circled and raised the helm. I was almost intoxicated with excitement, and the indescribable sensations of our swift and lofty flight. I felt released from all the weaknesses of the body; I felt as if I had conquered the force that holds all men to earth. I felt a new and wonderful sensation of freedom and power. I had but to move the little piece of metal in my hand to go where I pleased with the speed, almost, of light. But still came the line of ships behind us, at an incredible pace, stabbing at us with the green and orange rays.
Then, high above the others, I brought the ship around in a hair-pin turn, and plunged directly at them. They tried to turn aside, while their rays shot thickly toward us, but our speed was too great. The foremost suddenly turned broadside toward us, attempting to get out of our path. I held our bow directly at it; raised it a trifle at the last instant. The keel of our vessel struck the other amidships. The terrific crash of the collision hurled us to the floor.
When I regained my feet we were falling in a crazy twisting path, our ship altogether out of control. No sooner was I on my feet than the floor tilted up again and I fell back to my hands and knees. I saw that the one we had struck was broken in two and plunging toward the earth far behind us, while the other two were circling about, far overhead. The mist about us grew thicker until the other ships, and the fragments of the wrecked one, were strangely colored purple; thicker still, until they vanished. We floated in a world of purple fog.
I seized the control lever as soon as our wild gyrations enabled me to reach it, but my unskilled efforts only resulted in making us roll and twist more wildly. So long as we had been on an even keel the piloting had been easy enough, although I imagine my success in ramming the other ship had been largely due to luck; but the blow against us had been sidewise, setting the ship to spinning like a top. It seemed that we fell an interminable time. Whenever the stern pointed downward for a moment, I pushed the lever forward, to check our fall as much as possible.