Page:Weird Tales v02n04 (1923-11).djvu/14

Rh would like to hear some of the explanations!"

"There will be some wild stories now," I said.

"But none I imagine, Rider, so wild as the truth itself."

"I don't think there will," said St. Cloud.

And now, as I look back, I don't think that there was.

Once or twice I heard Henry Quainfan singing, in a low voice. I remember the following:

"I love a maid, a mystic maid, Whose form no eyes but mine can see; She comes in light, she comes in shade, And beautiful in both is she."

Then there were those two lines which have become imbedded in my memory, though at the time I thought nothing of them. Here they are:

"When thou wert given we were as one, Who now are two and widely sundered."

At last night came down on the world, black and threatening. Thus the weather favored us, for with a clear sky, some body might see the Hornet go heavenward; and that was just what Henry Quainfan did not want anybody to do.

On the whole world not a single soul knew that three men were going to launch out into the ether deeps this night.

About an hour after the coming of darkness, a strong wind came up, and a little later a heavy rain began to descend, bolting out, over there in the west, the city's light-spangled hills.

Well, we three took our last look at the world and entered the Hornet.

The little chamber was lighted by an electric bulb. Blinds were drawn over the windows, My heart was going Thumpety-thump, my face I knew was pale, and there was a sickening sensation in, to use a phrase of Henry's, my "scrobiculus cordis."

With a face upon which there was not the slightest tinge of pallor and with hands that were perfectly steady, Henry closed the door and made it fast.

For a time he moved about-busy and yet in reality doing nothing.

"All ready now!" he said.

There succeeded a short silence. St. Cloud and I stood expectant, moveless.

Henry, however, seemed to have plunged into thought.

I breathed a silent prayer to the dread Being who created the innumerable hosts of stars and the awful wastes of space, and notes when sparrows fall.

Of a sudden Henry Quainfan roused himself.

"Now we go!" he said.

The next moment there was a slight jerk. We were off. Our little world was rushing away from the earth with the speed of a bullet. And down below people would pass the night as was their wont, would get up in the morning and proceed with their little earthly affairs as usual, would see, day after day, the sun rise, pursue his way through the heavens and sink, as they always had while we three should never see the great luminary in the terrestrial heavens again, had left the earth forever and were rushing up and out into the icy and bottomless deeps of space.





It would be difficult to say why, but in my mind this has always seemed the point where the astounding, and in some ways awful, drama of really began.

And this is perhaps remarkable in that what was to follow-I mean that drop sunward for the matter of some thing like thirty millions of miles-had (and has) the seeming of some wondrous and terrible dream.

Of a sudden my mind became a panic- a mad riot. What an utter fool, what a colossal ass I had been to come on this mad journey! If I could only get out! But it was too late; I couldn't do that now. The earth must already, I knew, be at a terrific distance below us, and the Hornet-this tiny thing that was now our world-was rushing up and out with appalling speed. Get out, indeed! We were committed, and committed with a vengeance.

St. Cloud was, I believe, as scared as myself; but Henry Quainfan appeared to be utterly unaffected. Those nerves of his were nerves of steel.

At length he smiled at us and said:

"Well, we're on our way!"

A remark that struck me as positively idiotic.

St. Cloud made an exclamation.

I said:

"How far are we up?"

Henry Quainfan turned his eyes to a thing that looked something like an auto speedometer.

"Just about ten miles now," he said airily.

"I didn't think it was more than half that," I told him. "We are certainly going some."

"Not yet, Rider," he smiled. "It's the atmosphere, you know. As soon as we get out of it, we'll pick up speed."

"If it wasn't for that hissing or whistling sound," said Morgan St. Cloud, "I could swear that the Hornet was at rest. There is no swaying, nothing to show that we are moving."

"That's so," I said. "Why, Henry, these darkened windows?"

Henry Quainfan nodded.

"And it will take but one look to destroy that illusion of rest.

"You see," he added, his finger poised over a button, "I didn't want any of those gullologists to see us go up. Also, it probably was good for our nerves. And in all likelihood, we'll need all the nerves we've got before very long. This thing is going to be-well, decidedly unearthly."

"It's our minds we've got to watch," put in Morgan.

"Precisely."

Henry's finger pressed down, and the blind shot away from the window (ingeniously protected) in the floor of the Hornet. Then he rapidly released all the other blinds and turned off the light.

The sky was of the intensest black, and the stars shone as they never do in the depths of that aerial ocean in which men have their being.

I dropped on my knees and peered earthward. The sight was stupendous, but a vast expanse of world involved in appalling even, and yet after all I beheld the uncertainty and mystery of night.

"It's still hollow," I said.

"Of course," returned Henry. after a time it will be a sphere."

I referred, of course, to the seeming concavity of the earth that most strange phenomenon, and well known to aeronauts.

It was some minutes afterwards-how many I don't know-that it came. I had just straightened up and was looking out one of the windows. St. Cloud was beside me looking too. He gave a sharp exclamation. At that instant across that star-powdered blackness shot a sword of fire, and as the eye leaped to follow, that plunging point of it was shattered into a thousand incandescent fragments.

"What now?" came Henry's voice.

"A meteor," returned St. Cloud. "And it was infernally close. If that thing had hit the Hornet! Bullets are snails compared with those boys."

"Yes," said Henry Quainfan; "it was probably going something like twenty or thirty miles a second-that is, when it came plunging into the atmosphere. Those waifs of space do constitute a danger, a danger by no means insignificant [sic]