Drunken in his new found strength, he pulled ahead closer to the roaring jets.
t the peak of the arc of climb of the New York-Istanbul stratoliner, high in the ionosphere where the Earth was merely a giant globe far below, the pilot of the stratoliner boredly cut the jets for the fuel-saving glide that turned their nose toward Earth again.
The radar was clanging its usual senseless warning of imminent collision with some solid objects, which had approached closer than the automatic relays considered safe. It had been clanging for several minutes. The pilot glanced in annoyance at the radar screen, where several hundred globes—from two to seven feet in diameter—showed vividly, trailing the ship in a fan-shaped cluster. "Some day I'm going to take a hammer to that thing."
The co-pilot, looking back from the control blister's rear window, saw nothing, as usual, except a few of the shining globes, which showed themselves transiently in a brief flash of blue light as they carelessly overloaded and discharged—and one, smaller than the rest, who blinked on and off rapidly in brilliant flashes of blue. As he watched, it ran suddenly down the color-scale to red and began to lag behind, a glowing red globe, sinking.
"I wonder what the hell they think they're doing?" he grumbled.