The air around them grew more thickly dark as they descended. Jerry felt like a man gone blind, groping his way with arms outstretched. Only dimly could he make out the loom of Beak’s head and shoulders just behind him. They corkscrewed on, but the spiral, Jerry sensed, grew less and less tight.
The feeling of something just ahead—something they were about to smash into—grew. Jerry gripped the cowling with rigid fingers. He had never been so cold before. He was cold to the heart.
Beak straightened out the ship.
There was no altimeter in Jerry's cockpit; he could not tell how high they were. He remembered, too, that the altimeter had been set for that flat meadow in Jersey—almost at sea level. There was no telling how much these blasted hills encroached on what the altimeter indicated was free air.
The motor roared into action again. Jerry’s body swayed toward the back of the seat. Beak was climbing again. He was climbing steeply, climbing as if some devil was pursuing him out of the black pit below. Jerry felt the terror, too.
The fate that Beak Becket had flirted with so casually that afternoon, merely to startle his partner, now appalled him. Death bulks larger in the dark.
Not until the luminous hand on Jerry’s watch had marked off eight minutes did Beak cease to climb and throttle down. For another interval, in comparative silence, the ship rode on the air.
They were in clean atmosphere; there were stars above them. Only the earth had vanished out of the universe. The interwing wires that Jerry had worked on that afternoon hummed a low threnody. The prop cut the air with a whistling, uneven flutter. They were cut off from the world—refugees in cold space.
“You better jump,” said Beak hoarsely. “The gas is going.”
Somehow the words revived Jerry’s courage. He did not answer, but he felt relief.