Standing with the colonel on the field, Billy Cobb had seen the wheel drop. He had ordered the recall lights. But he foresaw that they would do no good. Norris would not be looking back. And as for circling the field, that was out of all expectation. It would have been suicide to turn the XT-6 with the load she bore under five hundred feet altitude. She would have laid twenty miles behind her ere that.
And so it turned out. Without a deviation to right or left she bore due south, floundering through the heat waves, and in five minutes had passed from view in the thick haze that hung on the burning air.
A picture flashed through Billy’s brain; a picture of a great gray ship that floated down to Cristobal, circled the sun-bleached hangars, settled groundward, touched, dropped a wing, somersaulted mightily, crashed with a roar of rending steel, and lay still, a hideous mass of riven junk. He saw the broken bodies of two men pinned beneath that mass.
Norris must be warned. He must. If he knew, he could pancake in, stall, and save young Crawley and himself, though not the ship, perhaps. A dropped wheel was deadly if you didn’t know. But if you knew, it could be dealt with.
He was trying to think. How could Norris be reached? Radio? The XT-6 had no radio. Cable Cristobal? Obviously. But something might happen to the message. It might be delayed, or garbled in transmission. Not likely. Still, there was that chance and this was a matter of life and death. And again, if Cristobal got the message, what then? They would send men out on the field to wave wheels at Norris. That was the classic signal. Norris would understand, if he saw. But would he see? He might not circle the field. His gas might be out and he might drive straight in the moment he picked up the T. Cristobal would be notified by cable, of course. But that wouldn’t be enough. It wasn’t sure.
Norris must be reached before he lifted Panama. And he could be reached. Billy knew how. Then, with stunning impact, the conviction struck him. There was only one way to save Norris, and only one man to do it. He, Billy Cobb, was the man.
He tried to suppress the thought. Jennie! It would be the final blow to her. But she might not know. He would warn the colonel. And if all went well⸺ It wouldn’t, though. He had the washed-out pilot’s certainty of that. No flyer in Billy’s condition of air nerves ever believes he can fly without crashing. That is one of the unchanging symptoms that make the disease. And Billy’s plan to warn Norris involved flying. It involved not only flying. It involved landing—landing perhaps hundreds of miles from an airdrome, perhaps in swamps, perhaps in mountains, perhaps in the ocean, and almost certainly in the obscurity of night!
He racked his brain desperately for excuses. He found none excepting Jennie. Could he do it? Could he leave her? Could he so much as straddle a fuselage without swooning of dread?
Then the questions reversed themselves. Could he possibly escape it? What would she say if he did—when she found out, when she learned of John Norris’ death, and young Crawley’s, by the hangar lines of Cristobal—when she knew who had let them go to that inevitable ending? Was it possible that he could refuse this summons, that he could even consider refusal?
Yet consider he did for a split second longer. There were other pilots, good pilots, pilots without nerves, above all, pilots without the slender thread of a sweetheart’s tenuous life tangled round their hearts and bound up in their actions. Why not let them⸺ But it was begging the question. Norris was Billy’s friend a hundred times more than theirs. This was his own show. He could not put it off. And he knew what Jennie would say if he tried.