Page:Wonder Stories Quarterly Volume 2 Number 2 (Winter 1931).djvu/9

 known planets, and its value increasing proportionately. A few ounces of it would make a man financially independent for a decade, and being in but modest pecuniary circumstances, the little corporal was not adverse to any adventure, with honor, which might offer to increase his income.

"Very well," consented Davidson. "Three hours land leave, but a day in the dikes of New Asia for every minute you overstay leave." From an observatory window in the super-planet-plane he saw his companions leap upon the scarlet grass with two radiocycles and make away on their wheels like schoolboys released from school. He envied them their youth, their exuberance of spirit, their very limit of intelligence, though they were not fools by any means.

In mentality they ranked only 12bx and 12cx respectively, Hal-Al shading just above his friend Bailee by reason of his slightly superior concentration. Davidson ranked 37hx, which was greatly superior to that of the younger men, but when he considered such minds as Chang O'Riley and Coli Toro who ranked 107x he felt that he had no sufficient grounds for any self flattery.

HREE hours passed—four—five—but the absent men did not return, nor send a radio message. There seemed nothing for Davidson to do about the situation but wait, and waiting under tension is a hard game to play, particularly when one waits alone. The little corporal found it so, but it was not his fault he was alone.

All the planet-plane's crew, except himself, Hal-Al, Bailee, and one Jaquet, had been taken in a trap set by the inhabitants of the planet Kopex, and had perished. These four had fled back to the plane and proceeded towards Xea for reinforcements. On the way the man Jaquet had choose to release himself of material existence. He had got up from dinner one day and hurried into the t-h-tube, the other men thinking that he wished merely to satisfy himself about some machinery there which he had shortly before brought under discussion.

 

But quickly attaching himself by a chain to a torpedo-harpoon he had shot himself into celestial space. They took a thirty second tele-cinema of his flight on the harpoon as evidence of the fact, to turn in with the planet-plane log, and closed the incident of his suicide in their minds.

This man Jaquet had not been accepted for the expeditionary-party to Kopex, but had stowed himself away in a thermo-jacket in an evaporated-food refrigerator, and had not been discovered till the plane was an x-ometer distant from the earth. He had then succeeded in entertaining the crew with a magnificent word-panorama of a seven years journey across the Milky Sahara, that was believed to divide the material world from the semi-material or quasi-spiritual. Possibly the man was only circumnavigating his own hat, but then a first-rate liar is ever more entertaining company than a prosy truth teller.

The greatest book in the world is Thousand and Two American Nights by Sing Hop Smith which is true only to the universal truth of pure entertainment.

Suddenly Davidson gave a shout, at sight of a little distress-parachute from his absent friends floating towards the planet-plane. He raced up to the foredeck and springing into the small but powerful Veda hydro-terra scout plane, rose like a hawk after a bird. He seized the parachute and returned to the foredeck of the planet-plane. Here he hastily examined the white silk message tag sewed into the parachute. In Hal-Al's hurried but legible handwriting was the startling communication, Save yourself, we are lost.