He steadied the small mitrailleuse on the edge of the cockpit, holding the craft's stick between his knees, and squeezed off a burst which rattled through the other's fuselage without apparent damage. The foe glider slid away quickly, losing precious altitude in the maneuver.
"Ah, ha," Joe said wolfishly. "So now they know we've got a stinger too."
"I got that," Freddy crowed. "I got it perfectly. Listen, we're too high for the boys down below. Get lower so they can get you on lens, Joe. The other Telly teams. Every fracas buff in North America is watching this."
Joe snorted his disgust. "I hope every fracas buff in North America chokes on his trank pills," he snarled. "We're in the dill, Freddy. Understand? We're too heavy, and there's two of them and one of us. On top of that, those are Maxim guns they've got mounted, not peashooters like this Chaut-Chaut."
"That's your side of it," Freddy said, not unhappily. "I take care of the photography. Get closer, Joe. Get closer."
Joe had found another light updraft and gained a few hundred feet, but so had the others. They circled, circled. His experience balanced their advantage of the lesser weight. Happily, their glide ratios didn't seem to be any better than his own. Had they high performance gliders of forty, or even thirty-five, gliding angle ratios, he would have been lost.
"Nothing else you can toss out?" he growled at Freddy.
"What the Zen!" Freddy muttered nastily. "You want me to jump?"
"That's an idea," Joe growled wolfishly, even as he circled, circled. "I should have realized when you were giving me your fling about reintroducing aerial warfare, that it wasn't an idea that others couldn't have. It was just as easy for Bob to mount a gun as it was for us. Now we're both being kept from doing reconnaissance by the other and—"
Joe Mauser broke it off in mid-sentence and his face blanched. He shot a quick look downward. All three gliders had climbed considerably, and the terrain below was indistinct.