“He looked olderr and his big mouth was shut tight as if he was mad, but I could see how his two hands that held the controls were steady, just like that (he gripped one of the bars of the bed to show me), and I could even see the ring on his fingerr just as plain as day.”
A shot rang out and the plane shook “just like a dog shakes himself.” He saw Slade yank back the larger lever and reach below him for another. For a few seconds he was pushing and pulling—the terrible shaking ceased—darkness.
Archer was trembling like a leaf.
“A miss is as good as a mile,” he heard Slade say. “Don’t get rattled, she’s stable, drop your note, quick! I’m going to get out of this!”
It seemed to Archer but half a second and then the four lights were far away, so quickly is distance multiplied by the slightest movement in the air. It seemed now that the square was all askew and the odd fancy occurred to him that the shock of that gun away down there had knocked it out of shape.
“See it?” he heard Slade say without any trace of excitement.
Archer looked and saw far below them and some distance to the west the little flickering light of the descending torch, growing smaller— smaller—until it disappeared. He tried to determine whether it was within the radius of the square but that was quite impossible, for the square kept changing, and as a sort of vent to his suspense he watched it, expecting every second to find himself in another glare of light, and then to go tumbling down through space. Now those far-off lights formed a diamond, now they seemed to form almost a straight line, then opened into a crazy sort of square and again looked like a part of the Big Dipper; and the whimsical thought came to Archer that they were above the stars and looking down on them.
He knew, of course, that these odd effects were caused by Slade’s manouvering, but he had never seen such effects produced while riding on an express train or any other sort of conveyance, and the experience fascinated him much more than did the very simple and obvious devices for controlling their craft. “I felt as if I didn’t belong to the worrld at all,” he said.
He does not know how long they manouvered, nor how much area they covered in doing so, because there is hardly such a thing as distance in an airplane. An aviator may go five miles to turn around. “All I know is,” he said, “that pretty soon I saw something down therre, but not just below me, just like a picture comes on the movie screen when the audience is all in the darrk. I saw the buildings and everything and long lines, white kind of, like a baseball field, only the buildings were all built slanting-ways, like, as if the wind that was blowin’ a little while before had kind of pushed them over one way. Believe me, I’ve sat up in the top galleries at a good many movie shows, but I neverr, neverr, neverr saw such a big, clearr screen.... ‘Slady,’ I shouted, ‘look at those buildings, will you, how they’rre all fallen overr sideways—’ ‘I don’t know which one of us is a bigger fool,’ Slady answered, pulling on the stick that moves the sideways thing in back and grabbin’ the otherr one that he called the broomstick. ‘Look at ’em, will you!’ I shouted. ‘They’rre built crazy, or something!’ ‘You’re built crazy or something,’ Slady said, ‘look at ’em now.’ And just then they straightened all up like regular buildings, long barrns, sorrt of, and the white lines made a big square, all nice and even like. ‘I swept ’em straight with the broomstick,’ Slady says, in that soberr way of his, and just then the whole place tipped up like as if it was going to spill all the buildings off it and everything was all crooked again. ‘Have a hearrt, Slady!’ I shouted. ‘You’ll spill the whole concarrned village if you pull that thing again!’”
“Did Slade laugh?” I asked.