The pilot pointed.
“I saw something dark,” he said briefly, “where there was a deep dent in the cloud.”
The co-pilot threw a switch. Within seconds a new sound entered the cabin. Beep-beep-beep-beep. They were thin squeaks, spaced a full half-second apart, that rose to inaudibility in pitch in the fraction of a second they lasted. The co-pilot snatched a hand phone from the wall above his head and held it to his lips.
“Flight two-twenty calling,” he said crisply. “Something’s got a radar on us. We saw it. Get a fix on us and come a-running. We’re at eighteen thousand and”—here the floor of the cabin tilted markedly—“now we’re climbing. Get a fix on us and come a-running. Over!”
He took the phone from his lips and said conversationally: “Radar’s a giveaway. This is no fly-way. You wouldn’t think he’d take that much of a chance, would you?”
Joe clenched his hands. The pilot did things to the levers on the column between the two pilots’ seats. He said curtly: “Arm the jatos.”
The co-pilot did something mysterious and said: “Check.”
All this took place in seconds. The pilot said, “I see something!” and instantly there was swift, tense teamwork in action. A call by radio, asking for help. The plane headed up for greater clearance between it and the clouds. The jatos made ready for firing. They were the jet-assisted take-off rockets which on a short or rough field would double the motors’ thrust for a matter of seconds. In straightaway flight they should make the plane leap ahead like a scared rabbit. But they wouldn’t last long.
“I don’t like this,” said the co-pilot in a flat voice. “I don’t see what he could do——”
Then he stopped. Something zoomed out of a cloud. The action was completely improbable. The thing that appeared looked absolutely commonplace. It was a silver-winged private plane, the sort that cruises at one hundred and seventy-five knots and can hit nearly two-fifty if pushed. It was expensive, but not large. It came straight up out of the cloud layer and went lazily over on its back and dived down into the cloud layer again. It looked like somebody stunting for his own private lunatic pleasure—the kind of crazy thing some people do, and for which there is no possible explanation.