The Dark Design (67 page)

“Very well, Richard,” Cyrano said. He pointed at the walkie-talkie fastened to Sturtevant’s belt.

“My dear fellow, why don’t you summon Boynton to this side? Then we can board in comparative safety.”

“Yeah. I should have thought of that.”

Cabell bound a cloth ripped from a corpse around the wound in the Frenchman’s arm. The dark man’s skin was grayish, and his eyes had lost their fire. As the helicopter settled down near them, Cyrano stepped forward and, using his épée, knocked the other’s from his grasp. He said nothing; he did not resist as Cyrano tied a cloth around the wound in his thigh.

“Your comrades can give you more than first aid when they arrive,” Cyrano said.

He ran to the machine and climbed in. Boynton took it up before the door was closed, sending it at an angle upRiver. John, still completely naked, was slumped in a seat in the second row. Cyrano, looking at him, said, “Get some cloths on him. Then tie his hands and his feet.”

He looked down. There were about twenty men on the flight deck. Where had the others come from? They were shooting away, their guns flashing like sex-crazed fireflies. But they had no chance of hitting their target. Did they not know that their captain was aboard, that they might hit him? Apparently not.

Something hit him in the back of his head. He was floating somewhere in a dark grayness while faraway voices said peculiar things. The ugly face of his childhood schoolteacher, the village curé, loomed before him. The brutal fellow had often beaten his student, rapping him savagely with a stick on the body and on the head. At the age of twelve, Cyrano, desperate, mad with rage, had attacked the parish priest, knocked him down, kicked him, and beaten him with his own stick.

Now the apish features, growing ever larger, swept through him. And he began to regain his senses.

Boynton was yelling, “I can’t believe it! He got away!”

Cabell was saying, “He rammed his elbow into my ribs, and he kicked Cyrano in the head!”

The chopper was tilted so that he could look down through the still unclosed door. A searchlight from the boat briefly caught the king’s naked body. His arms were flailing in an effort to keep himself upright. Then John had disappeared into the darkness.

“He couldn’t survive!” Boynton said. “It’s at least a thirty-meter fall!”

They would not be able to go back down and make sure. Not only were some shooting at the chopper, others were running now to a rocket battery. Though there was no chance the pistol shots could hit the chopper, the heat-seeking rockets would be unavoidable unless Boynton got the machine to a safe distance.

However, Boynton was not the man to be so easily frightened. And he was undoubtedly infuriated that their prisoner had escaped.

Now he was flying the copter, not away, but toward the boat. He was bringing it to a point about 90 meters opposite the rockets. There went the four rockets the machine carried, flames spurting from their tails.

And there went the battery in a huge ball of flame and a cloud of smoke, bodies and pieces of deck and metal flying on all sides.

“That’ll stop them!” Boynton said.

Sturtevant said, “How about strafing them?”

Cyrano was startled. “What? Oh, use the machine gun? No, let us depart with speed. If there’s one survivor, he could get to another rocket battery, and we’d be done for. We have failed our mission and lost too many brave fellows to risk more casualties.”

“I don’t see how we’ve failed,” Boynton said. “Sure, we didn’t bring John back, but he
is
dead. And it’ll be a long, long time before the boat is ready to operate.”

“You think John is dead, eh?” Cyrano said. “I would like to believe that. But I will not say for certain that he is dead until I see his corpse.”

Groaning with pain, the crew of the
Jules Verne
quickly checked themselves for injuries. Three had ribs that hurt so badly they were not sure they were not cracked or broken. Frigate thought that his neck muscles were either torn or severely strained. Tex and Frisco had bloody noses, and the latter’s knee was paining him. Pogaas’ forehead was skinned and bleeding. Only Nur was unhurt.

There was little time to worry about themselves. The balloon was now rising but was drifting away from the mountain. The storm clouds were disappearing as swiftly as burglars who hear a police siren. Fortunately, the light system was still working. Frisco could see the flight instruments. Nur got a flashlight, and he and Frisco applied a thin liquid to the pipe connections. Nur, examining these through a magnifying glass, reported that he could see no bubbles. Apparently, no hydrogen was escaping.

Nur opened the top hatch, and he and Pogaas climbed out onto the load ring. While the Swazi directed the beam of the flashlight, Nur went up the ropes like a monkey. He could not get close enough to the neck of the bag to apply a paste. But he did report that the envelope seemed to be tight around the entrance of the pipes.

Frisco heard this with skepticism. “Yeah, they seem to be okay. But we can’t really tell unless we land and deflate the bag.”

Frigate said, “As long as we have positive buoyancy, we’ll stay aloft. I don’t think we should land until we come up against the polar winds. That ought to be tomorrow if we’ve estimated our travel distance correctly. If we touch down, we might lose the balloon. For one thing, we don’t know how the locals will react to it. In the early days of Terrestrial ballooning, a number were destroyed by ignorant and superstitious peasants when the aeronauts landed in rural areas. The peasants believed the balloon to be the devil’s work or the vehicle of evil magicians. We might run into such people.”

Frigate admitted that it made him very uneasy to be without ballast. However, if they must, they could always unbolt the chemical toilet and throw it out. Of course, the situation might be such that there wouldn’t be time to do this.

The
Jules Verne
lifted above the Valley, and the wind sent it spanking along northeasterly. After an hour it lost much of its strength, but the craft was still moving in the right direction. It was also steadily ascending. Frigate took over the pilot’s post at 4877 meters or a little over 16,000 feet of altitude. To stop further ascension, he valved off hydrogen in driblets. When it began to sink, he turned the burner on. From then on, the pilot would be busy trying to maintain the vessel within a 2000-meter zone while losing as little gas as possible and running the burner at a minimum.

Frigate’s neck and shoulder pained him very much. He would be glad when he was relieved and could get under the cloths and stretch out. One drink of booze wouldn’t hurt him and it might ease the agony.

So far the voyage had been mostly hard and fast work, some stomach-squeezing danger, and much boredom. He’d be happy when the final landing was made. Then the events of the trip would start to take on the patina of amusing adventure. As time passed, it would gain a golden glow, and it would all seem wonderful. The crew would tell exaggerated stories, making their perils seem even more hairbreadth than they had actually been.

Imagination was the great cozener of the past.

Standing by the vernian, the only illumination the cold starlight and the instrument bulbs, all but himself asleep, Frigate felt lonely. Tempering the loneliness, however, was pride. The
Jules Verne
had broken the record for nonstop balloon flights. From liftoff to this point, it had floated approximately 4824 kilometers or 3000 miles. And it would cover much more distance—if all went well—before it was forced to land.

And it had been done by five amateurs. Except for himself, none had ever been in a balloon on Earth. His forty hours in hot-air balloons and thirty in gas balloons did not make him a veteran aeronaut. He’d logged more time on this flight than all his hours on Earth.

The crew had gone on a voyage which would have made history if it had been on the native planet. Their faces would have been on TV screens worldwide, they’d have been feted and banqueted, they could have written books which would become movies, the royalties would have rolled in.

Here, only a few would ever know what they had done. Even a smaller number would refuse to believe them. Not even a few would know if the voyage ended in the deaths of the crew.

He looked out a port. The world was bright starlight and dark shadows, the valleys like snakes crawling, serpents in march order. The stars were silent, the valleys were silent. As quiet as the mouths of the dead.

That was a gloomy simile.

As silent as the wings of a butterfly. It recalled the summers of Earth in his childhood and youth, the many-colored flowers of the backyard garden, especially the sunflowers, ah, the tall yellow sunflowers, the songs of birds, the savory odors of his mother’s cooking drifting to his nose, roast beef, cherry pies, his father playing the piano…

He remembered one of his father’s favorite songs, one of his own favorites. He’d often sung it softly while on night watch on the schooner. When he did so, he saw in his mind a small glow far ahead of him, a glow like a star, a light that seemed to travel before him, guiding him toward some unnamed but nevertheless desirable goal.

Suddenly, he was weeping. The tears were for the good things that had been or might have been, for the bad things that had been but should not have been.

Drying his tears, he made a final check and roused the little Moor for his watch. He crawled under the cloths, but his neck and shoulders drove sleep away. After trying vainly to sink into blessed oblivion, he got out to talk to Nur. They continued a conversation that had gone on, day and night, for many years.

In several respects,” Nur said, “the Church of the Second Chance and the Sufis agree. The Chancers, however, have somewhat different technical terms which might lead you to think that each refers to different things.

“The final goal of the Chancers and the Sufis is the same. Ignoring the difference in terms, both claim that the individual self must be absorbed by the universal self. That is, by Allah, God, the Creator, the Rel, call Him what you will.”

“And this means that the individual being is annihilated?”

“No. Absorbed. Annihilation is destruction. In absorption the individual soul,
ka
, or Brahman, becomes part of the universal self.”

“And that means that the individual loses his self-consciousness, his individuality? He is no longer aware of himself?”

“Yes, but he is part of the Great Self. What is the loss of self-consciousness as an individual compared to the gain of self-consciousness as God?”

“That strikes me with horror. You might as well be dead. Once you’re no longer self-conscious, you
are
dead. No, I can’t understand why the Chancers or Buddhists or Hindus or Sufis think this state desirable.

“Without self-consciousness, the individual is indeed dead.”

“If you’d experienced that ecstasy which Sufis experience in one stage of development, the
passing-away,
you’d understand. Can a person blind from birth be filled with ecstasy while those with sight are looking at a glorious sunset?”

“That’s just it,” Frigate said. “I have had mystical experiences. Three.

“One was when I was twenty-six years old. I was working in a steel mill. In the soaking pits. There cranes strip large ingots from the molds into which molten steel was poured in the open hearths. After the stripping, the cooling ingots are lowered into gas-burning pits which reheat them. From there they’re taken to the rolling mill.

“When I worked in the pits, I fancied that the ingots were souls. Lost souls in the flames of purgatory. They’d be soaked in the flames for a while, then carried off to the place where they’d be pressed down into shape for heaven. Just as the big rolls in the mill squeezed down on ingots, shaping them, pressing the impurities to the ends of the ingots, which were then chopped off, so the souls would be shaped and purified.