Everyone was flying alone, except me, for two reasons. One was to leave more room for supplies to drop; the other was to conserve manpower as much as possible. I had George along to work the radio. We’d reconnoitered some outlying towns on the trip.
It seemed a year before the ship hit, and I was thinking at top speed, searching for some possible method of saving Kennedy. He could float for two hours; then he’d be sunk—
Just before the ship hit the water I let out a wild yell, which I myself couldn’t hear. Right ahead of Kennedy was a huge, partially submerged thing floating. It looked like a bunch of logs tied together. I guess he never saw it.
The ship crashed into it with its undercarriage. Just what happened I don’t know, because the water rose in a geyser, and I couldn’t see for a moment. But what I saw, when the water subsided, was plenty.
It seemed that the ship had been crumpled completely. It had turned on its back. Kennedy was invisible. The fuselage had broken in half, the wings crumpled back, and the motor, of course, was under water. That little heap of wreckage would become water-soaked in a few minutes. It would sink in a quarter of an hour, instead of in two hours.
I guess I was shaking a little. I remember Penoch, circling and circling. Kennedy had not come to the surface.
“Knocked out and drowning—maybe a mercy,” I was thinking, and four fins, circling, sent cold chills up and down my back.
Then he came to the surface. He struggled weakly to climb up out of the water, but it took him a full two minutes. Even then he was partly submerged. Suddenly the sight of those fins set me crazy, I guess.
“I’ll give him a chance to drown, at least!” I fairly shouted at them; and the next second I was pouring machine-gun bullets into the shadowy green monsters, and they were floating, dead, on the surface of the water.
There was not one single, solitary thing that could be done to save him. Two minutes more, and his frail life-raft would be sunk. There was no time to fly back and get something to which he could cling and drop it to him. He couldn’t swim.