The Dark Design (69 page)

There was no answer.

Jill pressed the general-alarm button. Sirens began whooping throughout the ship.

“This is the captain! This is the captain! Central crew’s quarters! Central crew’s quarters!”

The voice of Katamura, an electronics officer, said, “Yes, Captain! I read you!”

“Get men down to the hangar bay fast. I think Officer Thorn has escaped!”

Cyrano said, “Do you really think it’s he?”

“I don’t know, but it seems likely. Unless… someone else…”

She called sick bay. No answer.

“It’s Thorn! Damn! Why didn’t I install a belly-hatch override switch?”

In rapid sequence, she ordered two groups to run to the hangar bay and one to the ship’s hospital.

“But, Jill,” Cyrano said, “how could he escape? He has not recovered from his wounds, he is guarded by four men, he is shackled to the bed, the door is locked, and the two men inside don’t have the key!”

“He’s no ordinary man! I should have chained his hands, too! But it seemed unnecessarily cruel!”

“Perhaps the helicopter was not refueled?”

“If it wasn’t, Szentes was neglecting his duty. No chance of that!”

“The hatch is full-open now,” Nikitin said.

Graves’ voice came over the intercom. “Jill! Thorn…”

“How’d he get out?” Jill snapped.

“I’m not sure of the details. I was sitting in my office, sampling some of the medical alcohol. All of a sudden I heard a hell of a brouhaha. Shouts, somebody crashing into something. I got up, but there was Thorn at the door. A length of broken chain was trailing from his ankle shackle. He must have broken the links with his bare hands!

“He charged on in, shoving me to one side so hard I was knocked against the wall. For a minute I was stunned, I couldn’t even stand up. He ripped the intercom off the bulkhead with his hands! His bare hands! I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. He tied my hands behind me and my ankles together with belts he’d taken from the two guards. He could have killed me easily enough, snapped my neck. Man, I still hurt where he grabbed me. But he left me alive, I’ll say that for him.

“I finally got loose and staggered out to the ward. All four guards were on the floor. Two are still alive but badly hurt. The intercoms were all wrecked. The door was locked, and the pistols and knives of the outside guards were gone. I’d still be there if I wasn’t so handy at picking locks and the lock wasn’t pickable. Then I ran to the nearest bulkhead phone…”

“How long ago was it that he broke loose?”

“Twenty-five minutes ago.”

“Twenty-five?”

She was dismayed. What had Thorn been doing in all that time?

“Take care of those men,” she said and switched him off.

“He must have had a transmitter hidden somehow, somewhere,” she said to Cyrano.

“But how do you know that?”

“I can’t be sure. What else would take so much of his time? Nikitin, take her down to ground level! As fast as possible!”

Katamura’s voice came over the intercom.

“Captain, the chopper’s gone.”

Cyrano swore in French.

Nikitin flipped on the general address and informed the crew that the ship would be going into dangerous maneuver. All personnel should make themselves secure.

“Forty-five degrees, Nikitin,” Jill said. “Full speed.”

The radar operator reported that the helicopter was on his scope. It was going south and downward at a maximum velocity at a forty-five degree angle to the horizontal.

By then, the deck of the control room was tilted downward. The others hastened to strap themselves into chairs bolted to the deck. Jill took a seat by Nikitin. She would like to have taken over the pilot’s chair, but even now protocol forbade that. However, it did not matter that she was not at the controls. The wild Russian would get the dirigible down as swiftly as she could. Her job would be to make sure that he did not overdo it.

“If Thorn has a transmitter,” Cyrano said, “he can use it now. We’ll never make it.”

Though he was pale and wide-eyed, he smiled at her.

Jill looked from Cyrano to the control panel indicators. The ship was parallel to the Valley, so there was no problem about clearing the mountaintops. The Valley looked narrow, but it was rapidly broadening. There were some lights down there, bonfires around which would be sentinels or late-night revellers. The rain clouds had dissipated swiftly, as they almost always did. The star-packed skies cast a pale light into the space between the two mountains. Was anybody down there looking up at them? If so, they must wonder what this huge object was and why it was coming down so swiftly.

Not that it was going fast enough to suit her.

Cyrano was right. If Thorn did intend to set off a bomb, he would be doing it now. Unless… unless he would be willing to wait until the ship had landed. After all, he had spared Graves, and he could have killed the other two guards.

Keeping an eye on the panel radar-scopes, she called the hangar bay.

Szentes answered.

“We were all in our quarters,” he said. “There’s no guard posted in the bay.”

“I know,” she said. “Just tell me… quickly… what happened?”

“Thorn stuck his head in the door. He pointed a pistol at us. Then he ripped off the intercom, and he told us that he was going to close the door. He said he had a bomb rigged to explode if the door was opened. Then he shut it. We didn’t know if we should believe him, but no one was willing to find out if he was lying or not. Then Officer Katamura opened the door. There wasn’t any bomb; Thorn had lied. I’m sorry, Captain.”

“You did what you should have done.”

She told the radio operator to transmit their situation to the
Mark Twain.

At 915 meters, a little over 3000 feet, she ordered Nikitin to tilt the propellers to give the ship an upward thrust. Also, to raise the nose by three degrees. The inertia would keep them diving despite the braking effect of the propellers. In a minute she would order the nose raised by ten degrees. This would flatten out the dive even more.

What to do when the ship straightened out at 915 meters or somewhat over 3000 feet?
If
it leveled at that altitude. She was really cutting it close, though she knew the capabilities of the
Parseval
almost as well as she knew hers.

Should she land the ship? There was no way to moor it, and the hydrogen would have to be valved off so that it would not rise as the crew abandoned it. Otherwise, some of the men would not get off in time, and they would be carried away.

But what if Thorn had no transmitter, what if there was no bomb? The airship would be lost for no reason.

“Too fast! Too fast!” Nikitin said.

Jill was already leaning forward to set the ballast switch for a discharge of 1000 kilograms of water. She punched the button, and a few seconds later the ship rose abruptly.

“Sorry, Nikitin,” she murmured. “There wasn’t any time to waste.”

Radar indicated that the helicopter was hovering north of them at 300 meters altitude. Was Thorn waiting to see what they would do? If so, he did not intend to set off the bomb if they crash-landed or abandoned the ship.

What was she to do? The thought of either alternative made her grind her teeth. She could not bear the idea of wrecking or losing this beauty. The last airship.

The safety of the crew, however, had to come first.

“One hundred and fifty-two meters altitude,” Nikitin said.

The propellers were turned fully upward and biting into the air at full speed. The mountains loomed on both sides; The River sparkled in starlight on the port; the plains ran smoothly beneath them.

There were dwellings below, frail bamboo structures filled with people, most of whom would be sleeping. If the dirigible landed on the plain, it would crush hundreds. If it caught fire, it would burn many more.

Jill ordered Nikitin to steer it over The River.

What to do?

O
F
the people along The River who had to stay awake or who wanted to, a few had looked into the white-and-black-spangled sky. These saw two silhouetted objects, one much larger than the other. The smaller one was composed of two spheres, one below the other, the larger of the spheres above the other. The greater object was long and shaped like a fat cigar.

They were moving toward each other, the smaller emitting a faint light from the lower sphere, the other sending out bright beams. One of these beams began to go on and off in measured lengths of time.

Suddenly, the larger object dipped its nose, and it came down swiftly. As it neared the ground, it emitted a strange noise.

Many did not recognize the shape of either object. They had never seen a balloon or a dirigible. Some had lived when balloons were not unknown, though many of these had only seen illustrations or photographs of them. But most of this group had never seen or heard of an airship except in illustrations of what might be expected in the future.

A very small minority recognized the larger, now diving, object as a dirigible.

Whatever their knowledge, many ran to wake up their mates and friends or to sound a general alarm.

By then some had seen the helicopter, and this caused even more curiosity and apprehension.

Drums began to beat; people, to shout. Everybody was awake by then, and the dwellings were emptied. All looked up and wondered.

The questions and the shouts became one great cry as one of the flying objects burst into flame. They screamed as it plunged, bright orange fire trailing like the glory of a falling angel.

Tai-Peng wore only a garment of irontree leaves and vine blossoms. A cup of wine in his left hand, he paced back and forth, extemporizing poems with the ease of water flowing down a hill. A poem would tumble out in the court speech of the T’ang dynasty, sounding to non-Chinese like dice clicking in a cup. Then he would translate it into the local Esperanto dialect.

Much of the subtlety and reference were lost in the mutation, but enough was retained to move his listeners to laughter and tears.

Tai-Peng’s woman, Wen-Chün, softly played on a bamboo flute. Though his voice was usually loud and screeching, it was subdued for the occasion. In Esperanto it was almost as melodious as the flute. He wore only a garment made for the occasion, red-green-striped leaves and red-white-blue-striped blossoms. These fluttered as he walked back and forth like a great cat in a cage.

He was tall for a man of his race and time, the eighth century
A.D.
, lithe yet broad shouldered and heavily muscled. His long hair shone in the late noon sun; it glittered like a dark jade mirror. His eyes were large and pale green, blazing, a hungry—but wounded—tiger’s.

Though he was a descendant of an emperor by a concubine, he was nine generations removed. His immediate family had been thieves and murderers. Some of his grandparents were of the hill tribes, and it was these wild people who had bequeathed him the fierce green eyes.

He and his audience were on a high hill from which the plain, The River, and the land and the mountain wall beyond could be seen. His listeners, even drunker than he, though none had drunk so much, formed a crescent. This left an opening for him to stride into and out of. Tai-Peng did not like barriers of any kind. Walls made him uneasy; prison bars, frenzied.

Though half of the audience was Chinese of the sixteenth century
A.D.
, the others were from here and there, now and then.

Now Tai-Peng stopped composing, and he recited a poem by Chen Tzu-Ang. First, he stated that Chen had died a few years before he, Tai-Peng, was born. Though Chen was wealthy, he had died in a prison at the age of forty-two. A magistrate had put him there so he could cheat him out of his father’s inheritance.

Tai-Peng paused to empty his cup and hold it out for a refill.

One of the group, a black man named Tom Turpin, said, “Ain’t no more wine. What about some alky?”

“No more drink of the gods? I don’t want your barbarians’ juice! It stupifies where wine enlivens!”

He looked around, smiled like a tiger in mating season, and he lifted Wen-Chün and strode off to his hut with her in his arms.

“When the wine stops, it’s time to begin with women!”

The brightly colored leaves and blossoms fluttered to the ground as Wen-Chün mock-struggled with him. He looked like a being from ancient myth, a plant man carrying off a human female.

The others laughed, and the group began to break up before Tai-Peng had shut the door of his hut. One of them walked around the hill to his own hut. After entering, he barred the door and drew down bamboo-and-skin blinds over the windows. In the twilight he sat down on a stool. He opened the lid of his grail and sat for a while staring at it.