Page:Amazing Stories Volume 02 Number 06.pdf/27

546 "Faster than ever I've seen," Max assured his chief. "I hope the pilot isn't asleep," he continued, "for there was to be five pounds of radium aboard, going east, and there'll be a fuss if it goes astray."

"Just call headquarters, will you please?" exclaimed Fowler, "and find out who is piloting Number Two."

The junior engineer took from his pocket a little, square case about the size of a match box. He turned a small dial and pressed several buttons before making the inquiry in an ordinary tone of voice. Out of the instrument came the reply at once.

"So it’s the lady pilot," mused the chief. "We are up against the human element again. I've had the thought-recording machine on her twice now, and each time I got a negative graph. It just means that she thought resistant to these old type recorders. Several times I've asked the directors for one of the newest machines. But you know how hard it is to persuade the heads of these big companies to keep abreast of the times. In fact they said that any one who had sufficient intelligence to resist the old machine, either didn’t need watching, or was too good for the job, and should be promoted. They forget that it was a thought-resister who put Number Three in the bog, out of which it took us seven days to get it. It was a partial thought resister who lost Number Four six years ago."

"Funny it has never been found."

"Well, I was only a student at the time, but I always had the idea that they should have looked further afield, You see, they just assumed that it fell somewhere between here and New York, within fifty miles or so on either side of the direct course."

"It couldn’t very well happen again," exclaimed Max Norman. "With the new recorders, we know to half a mile where they are at any time."

"Yes, but it's a nuisance digging them out of holes, and fishing them out of the sea, and there's always a chance that some one may get hurt, and then of course there's an inquiry and a lot of fool questions and still more foolish suggestions for the future by old fogies who have never in their lives travelled faster than five hundred miles an hour.

"I feel sorry for this girl pilot, because she is of abnormal intelligence. She ranks in the eighty-seven zone, and when you remember that there are only seven hundred people on the earth who have reached the ninetieth, you see how she is wasting her talents piloting for us."

"Well, why is she doing it, when she might be doing much better work?”

"That’s just the trouble. Unfortunately for her, she is of the matrimonial type, and wants to have children. A century ago when eugenics were first brought into use, we tried to breed infant prodigies and mathematical marvels, but through our mitakesmistakes [sic], we got instead a crop of lunatics; now we limit the combined intelligence to one hundred and ten, and get splendid results. Therefore the poor girl must choose a man of the twenty-third degree of intelligence or less—corresponding to the clever men of nineteen-ten to nineteen-twenty. Can you blame her for not wanting to tie up with such a man? He would be "too slow to catch cold" an expression used in those far-off days.

"It seems a pity that our brainiest people should be denied a family if they desire one, but people of such intelligence should be far too busy to even think of such things."

"Did you hear the whistle announcing the safe landing of Number Two? That whistle is only a survival of the times when projectile travelling was considered an extra risk, and we had actually to insure the passengers specially."

"No, I didn’t hear it. Just call the head office again, please, and ask if they arrived safely."

Again Max Norman took out the little instrument, and called the office. Both men stiffened up, and looked serious as the spoken words came rather haltingly from the tiny loud speaker."“No, Number Two has not landed in New York."

"What does the recording chart say?" shouted Fowler impatiently.

"Well, Sir, the chart—the chart ran out of ink as the projectile passed Chicago."

HE movements of the chief were incredibly swift. His first outburst of language was also incredible. The people in that office responsible for the instrument's running out of ink got the same old blowing-up, only a hundred times more cutting, more sarcastic, as the people who made stupid mistakes two centuries before. From his pocket, Fowler took a larger, more complicated instrument and called every large city over which the projectile had travelled and many of the air liners under its high path through the rarefied air, where the meteor dust whirls endlessly around the earth.

There was just a slight clue, and it carried an ominous message. When approaching New York, the projectile pilot had asked for position, stating their finder had been jarred out of order. Here was the wretched, double contingency that was always upsetting things. Two minutes and forty seconds later, the projectile had sent an S. O. S. call that was never finished. Now where was the projectile? When they were given position they were at a very great height, and they still had velocity to carry them a thousand miles. The pilot had the means of steering anywhere—even doubling back on her course, if need be. They also had the means to communicate from the air, from under water, from two hundred feet deep in the earth. There was a dead silence from the projectile. The reserve spring, kept compressed for emergencies, hurled the two engineers to New York in a shade over seventeen minutes. Even during the trip, they had engaged the very best brains of the world to help in the search.

When Miss Henrietta Morgan—to give her her simple name devoid of letters and numbers denoting her qualifications—entered the pilot house of Number Two projectile, she was not thinking of high tides, or gauges, or meters, or complicated direction finders, or the dozens of other intricate instruments that lined the little steel compartment. She was thinking how