But where, in all this dark, mountainous waste, was that valley? Sonya believed she was flying toward it. She had several times in the last hour altered the direction of the flight. Altho’s thoughts, a dim feeling of his approaching nearness, seemed to guide her.
It was very vague, an intuition more than a thought. Altho himself did not know where he was, but the bond of love between these two was very strong. Each could feel the other’s approaching presence. He had tried to warn her away, but when she persisted, he did his best to guide her.
Sonya murmured, “Now he says, Lights in the valley—you will see the lights.”
But every desolate valley sweeping beneath them was pale and wan in the starlight. Then Sonya prepared an image-finder. She connected the batteries, the projector, and the grid of glowing wires.
Alice and Dolores held the grid between them. Sonya fired the small projectile. It sailed off, a whirling pink ball. It was in reality a small, flat disk with a lenslike eye and a whirling, pink, glowing armature on top.
Over a radius of several miles Sonya’s raytron apparatus could direct its flight, and back over the invisible connecting ray came an image of all that the lens eye saw.
The pink ball of light sailed ahead and soon was lost to view. The grid of wires which Alice and Dolores held glowed pink; then suddenly glared white. A glare of white showed ahead in the sky. It was the light flare Talon had sent up to locate the fugitives.
The flare went dark. The grid was pink again. Upon it, etched in black, was a moving scene: mountains, crags, valleys, moving in slow panorama, valleys all pale and empty in the starlight. Then one showed dim, moving lights!
Alice cried, “Sonya . . . lights! We see them now!”
Sonya’s apparatus marked the position of the pink ball. She turned the birds slightly, to fly after it.