Thicker but brittle sections of the stems seemed rotor-blades when more seaweed-cardboard was attached. From two hundred feet, the crudities of the object would not show. It would look like a helicopter landed on the island where Jorgenson and Ganti were confined.
It would look like a rescue.
When the copter arrived, it checked in midair as if it braked. It hung in the air. Its crew stared down. They saw a strange aircraft there. The helicopter whirled and went streaking away toward the horizon.
Jorgenson and Ganti immediately attacked their own creation. The framework was brittle; barely able to sustain its own weight. They furiously demolished the whole thing. They hauled its fragments into the cave. They worked furiously to remove every trace of its former presence.
Within two hours a fleet of six steam-copters came driving across the sea. They swept over the island. They looked. They saw Jorgenson and Ganti—naked man and naked Thrid—glaring up at them. They saw nothing else. There was nothing else to see.
There was a Thrid official on one of the copters. The matter had been reported to him. A helicopter could only have landed on this island to rescue the prisoners. They were not rescued. There had been no helicopter. The crew of the craft which made the report had made a mistake!
Jorgenson and Ganti gloated together when darkness had fallen. The copter-crew had made a false report. They would face an angry official. Either they'd take back their original report, or stick to it. If they took it back, they'd tried to deceive an official, who could not be wrong. Jorgenson and Ganti gloated over what they'd done to their jailers.
IV
When a copter came again a week later, it was not the same flier or the same crew. The bag of food and water was dropped from a different height. The copter hovered until it saw both Jorgenson and Ganti. Then it went away.