“I don’t know what to make of you,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t want to trap you, but you were better off in the art factories. I don’t know what to do with you.”
I sprang to my feet, and for an instant I ceased to realize my predicament. “Will you take me to my friends in London?” I asked. In my mind was the memory of a university acquaintance who lived in St. John’s Wood. But then the swift remembrance came back to me, and I hung my head and groaned.
“Back to London!” exclaimed the airscout. “But you’ll be put to the leather vats. Doctor Sanson is furious, and the police are searching for you everywhere. You’re crazed! What’s the sense of running away from painting pictures and going back to sweat ten years over the hides?”
“Take me to London!” I implored. “I have nowhere to go. Perhaps—I don’t know—”
I was hoping wildly that somebody whom I had known might still survive. But by this time I was beginning to pull myself together. I resolved to wait for his decision.
“Now, friend,” he said, as if he had made up his mind, “your top got stuffed making those factory pictures, as was very natural. Now, I think you had better go back to London, and I’ll take you there, since your friends have shaken you. But of course it must be the police station. I can’t risk my own liberty. Once more, are you sure you want to go? If not, I haven’t seen you.”
“I’ll go,” I answered indifferently.
“Yap? Step in, then!”
I took my seat beside him. It will seem incredible, but I had never ridden in an airplane before. In my other days only a few had seen these craft. It was hardly more than six years since the Wrights had flown when my long sleep began. In spite of my oppression of mind, or perhaps because the days of horror that I had spent in the cellar produced the unavoidable reaction, I began to feel the exhilaration of the flight as we ascended to a height of perhaps a thousand feet and drove northward. The sensation was that of sitting still and seeing the trees flit by beneath me, and would have been pleasing but for the intense cold, which pierced through my rags and numbed me. I perceived that the airplane was under perfect control, and could be stayed without falling. After a while I realized that there was no motor.
My companion saw me looking at the machine. “Improved solar type,” he said, patting her caressingly. “Better than a bird, isn’t she?” He turned toward me. “You’ve been sleeping in the wood these three days?” he asked. “And find the factories best? I don’t score you for that. Where’s the rest of you? Five, weren’t there? Why didn’t you keep together? Where’s that bishop of yours?”