Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 9 (1943-01).djvu/9



HE thing plunged downward like a dark star falling to earth. A moment before it had been Richard Trent, a Yank flying for China. Then in the space of the trembling of a leaf, machine-gun bullets had shattered the night's still blackness. His gasoline caught fire and the "Tomahawk" was enveloped in flames. In a split second, he had jumped clear of the plane, striking his head sharply as he did so. He was unconscious before he could pull the ripcord of his parachute. And so he dropped through space, unaware that his body wTas hurtling toward the dust of a parched earth. His plane had been flying at eighteen thousand feet.

The air was bitingly cold and it served as a stimulant to revive him. He opened his eyes. Down, down, down he plunged. It was difficult for him to pull his thoughts together. His brain was in chaos. Memory eluded him. His hand went mechanically to the rip-cord and the parachute opened up like a white cloud above him. Against the sky it had a luminous quality, the reflection of starlight. There was no moon.

A strong wind was blowing, stalling his descent. Often he drifted many miles though he was in no condition to calculate direction. Nevertheless he was aware that he was drifting but he was not alarmed. He had been flying at approximately three hundred miles per hour, when his plane was attacked. Before leaping into space he had cut down the speed. His head ached viciously, and blood was trickling down his face from a gash in his forehead. The wound gave him no pain. Otherwise he was uninjured. Only that sharp headache annoyed him. It nauseated him but the cold air felt good against his forehead. Occasionally, the descent of the parachute would be arrested by a sudden vicious upswing of a wind channel, as though Kuan Yu, the God of War were striking out with his fists, flaying the very air itself even as the entire earth was being churned by his huge iron heels. Once the parachute collapsed and billowed around his head, for he was falling upward, but as it enshrouded him like folds of white cloud, he abruptly plunged downward again at a terrifying speed. Once more the parachute mushroomed and his descent was gentle and reasonably calm. But now he noticed a strange phenomenon. Silently one by one, the stars were disappearing into a terrifying void of blackness. There was little dampness in the air despite its coldness so no storm was approaching. Yet the stars continued to be blotted out as though they were white flowers and the gentle, smiling God of Longevity was walking about the blue meadows of the sky and gathering them as he walked.

Soon all color and brilliance was gone from the night, and only bleak, desolate blackness remained. Man drinks light with the atmosphere, so it was that Richard Trent's mouth felt parched, dry. Fear drove the moisture from his throat, until he could not have needed drink more if he had been in a Gobi sandstorm. But one single star visible in the dark would have slaked his thirst.

Meanwhile the descent had become more rapid. The cold grew less penetrating but the peril seemed to increase. For months Richard Trent had been a Flying Tiger. His exploits were world news. He had faced death in its cruelest forms without flinching. He had laughed in face of danger, yet now he was afraid when there was nothing to fear; afraid of blackness when he had crept about Chinese villages feeling his way along, not even a candle visible, and had never given it a thought. Now, without reason, horror, biting, 7