Apparently its pilot had not noticed the battleship until the barrage of anti-aircraft fire had destroyed the first plane. Not until then did he even know the Idaho existed. Like a bird that had been suddenly startled by the appearance of a hawk, the plane leaped into the air. Shells were still bursting around it. It went up so fast it left the barrage completely behind. Its climb was almost vertical. It rose to about twenty thousand feet, leveled off. Twice it circled the battleship, ignoring the shell bursts, that tried to keep up with it.
Then it turned in the direction from which it had come. It was out of sight in seconds.
There was silence on the bridge of the Idaho.
"Holy cats!" Craig heard an officer mutter. "Somebody is crazy as hell. We don't have planes that will fly like that and I know damned good and well they didn't have them a hundred thousand years ago!"
Was Michaelson wrong? Was he talking through his hat when he said the Idaho had been precipitated through a time fault into the remote past? He had said they might be a hundred thousand years in the past, or a million years—he didn't know which. The appearance of the lizard-birds, the great winged dragons of mythology, had seemed to prove that the scientist was correct.
Did these two mysterious planes, of strange shape and design and with the ability to fly at such blinding speed, prove that he was wrong?
Was it possible—the thought stunned Craig—that they had been precipitated into the future?
The winged dragons belonged to the past. The planes, theoretically at least, belonged to the future.
"Something is crazy!" Captain Higgins said. "Go get that scientist," he spoke to one of his aides. "I want to talk to him."