There were more days of waiting.
We had long since heard, through Nanette's nurse, her brief account of those last moments in Turber's aero. She had been for a time alone in the control room with Bluntnose and Jonas. They were waiting for Turber. Jonas had fallen into a panic of fear; he sat huddled and chattering, dominated by the Indian who, with stolid indifference to the city tumbling around them, was waiting for the master.
Nanette had stood in the aero doorway. Her mind was groping with a plan. Bluntnose came and pulled her back. He stood in the doorway and shouted welcome to the arriving Turber and the woman Josefa.
Nanette knew that the control room was filled with a blinding glare of light reflected from our white beam so near at hand outside. She heard Jonas scream something about the glare; she could feel it—almost see it. And she could hear, outside the aero, a pandemonium of sound.
She knew every detail of the corridor and the control room. She ran past the huddled Jonas. In a moment Turber would enter, and the aero would flash away and escape. Nanette ran for the instrument table which held the controls. She knew it was close by a window; she knew that the window was open and that it was some six or eight feet above the ground.
Desperate plan! Just a chance to wreck the aero and still to save her own life. She had no knowledge of the controls' operation. She leaped for the table. Her fingers tore at the delicate wires—her clenched little fists smashed the fragile vacuum globes.
She felt the aero sway crazily; she felt it flash as she flung her body through the window. She fell into the black emptiness of insensibility—
The aero had lurched a few seconds into the future, and with every law of Nature transgressed by its derelict flight it had stopped and crashed into ruins.
Nanette's body, hurtling through the air, must have been just within the aero's influence. Inconceivable shock to her! A fall through Space of a few feet. But the impulse from the lurching Time-vehicle had thrown her—as she fell those few feet—into the third day forward.
But it was over now. She lived; these surgeons with their science were giving her back to me.