'Stop!' he screamed. 'You've got to stop it!'
Pantaleon was sitting hunched forward over his controls, oblivious, like a racing cyclist in a sprint. Carriscant now felt the speed of their passage whip the ribbons of blood and snot away from his nose to sprinkle the rear section behind him, the heavy drops pattering on the stretched fabric. Then there was a sudden decrease in noise and he. realised the drumming of the wheels had ceased. Beyond his left thigh he saw the cruciform shadow of the Aero-mobile begin to shrink slowly. To his absolute horror he realised that they had taken to the air.
In front of him Pantaleon began to whoop and caw like some maddened, tormented bird. Glancing down, he saw the white discs of the lopped trees at the meadow's end flash beneath them and he realised they were considerably higher than ten feet from the ground. The engine too seemed to be straining unnaturally hard as the sensation of forward motion gave way and was replaced by a kind of dreamlike buoyancy as the Aero-mobile seemed to rise almost vertically in the air like a gull gliding in a warm thermal.
'We're too high!' Carriscant yelled.
Pantaleon turned, gaped in shock, and almost fell from his saddle at the sight of his blood-boltered passenger.
'My God! What happened?'
'We're too fucking high!' Carriscant screamed in his face.
'Take the controls!'
Panicking, suddenly obedient, Carriscant gripped the two warping levers and felt the animate vibration of the flying machine transfer itself to his body. Pantaleon reached up and took hold of the air-catcher flap handles. And pulled down.
The machine shuddered and the Aero-mobile slipped nervily sideways.
'Mother of God!' Pantaleon cried in alarm.
Carriscant felt one of the warping levers whip itself forward out of his grasp and the machine began to descend in a quickening sideways glide to the left. Carriscant reached forward and tugged on the handle. It would not move, jammed fast.
'We've passed it!' Pantaleon screeched, pointing.
Over on the right Carriscant saw the square of white canvas disappear beneath the lower wing. They were higher than the bamboo still, he saw, higher than the palm trees. Jesus. Fifty, sixty feet, he thought. Oh my God. But the left side wings were still pointing down and there was no doubt that their side-slipping descent was growing speedier by the second.
Suddenly the engine cut out. The straining roar was replaced by a pleasant whistling and creaking noise as the wind sang over the stretched wires and the wooden armature of the flying machine stretched and contracted beneath these unfamiliar stresses.
'What's happening?' he yelled in Pantaleon's ear.
'We've done it, my friend! We've done it!' Pantaleon sobbed.
Over to the right Carriscant saw the belvedere of Sam-paloc convent and suddenly thought crazily – 'low flying dove'. In front of him, over Pantaleon's heaving shoulders, he saw the thick green mass of the riverine trees that marked the course of the San Roque estero.
Lower, lower, they went and the pitch of the singing wires grew shriller and less pleasant.
To his absolute shock he saw that Pantaleon was no longer bothering to work the controls. His face was buried in his hands as he sobbed fiercely in his triumph, blubbing and laughing in his moment of ecstasy.
Carriscant tugged vainly at his jammed warping control.
They swooped over a terrified peasant in his carabao cart.
The sunlit green wall of trees whooshed up to meet them.
The last sounds he heard were Pantaleon's fervent sobs and the ethereal arctic whistle of the bracing wires.
He never felt the impact, but he could not have been unconscious for very long. He came to, winded, on his back, with a horrible silence in his ears. He became aware of a ghastly unfamiliar coolness in his legs from the waist down. His first thought was: I am paralysed and I shall never live with Delphine. After a second or two's smouldering, bitter despair he raised his head and realised his legs were submerged in water while his torso rested on a crescent of sand formed by a side eddy of the San Roque creek. Then he was jolted anew by the blood-soaked front of his suit, a coruscating red in the hazy sunshine. I must have lost pints, he thought vaguely, a good gallon. He touched his nose gently: tender but unbroken. He rolled on to his front and crawled out of the water. Then he vomited all the beer he had drunk, a lifetime ago, it seemed. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and stood up with great care.
The Aero-mobile was twenty yards away, a crumpled sad-looking mess; its wings sheered off and folded back along its body by the impact of the two trees it had plunged between. Carriscant approached unsteadily. His entire body was beginning to ache. There was no sign of Pantaleon.
He crouched by the water's edge and washed his face clean of his blood. He told himself that any second now he would hear that daft elated voice saying, 'My God, Salvador, what did I tell you! We're the most famous men of our time!' but all that came to his ears was the disturbed twittering of the river birds and the sonorous ringing of the convent bell at Sampaloc, summoning its stunned citizens to come to the aid of the men in the machine that fell from the sky.
He raised his eyes and saw Pantaleon's face through the grasses on the other side of the stream. His eyes were wide, astonished, and his mouth was open. Except it was all wrong: like a face in a spoon his chin was above his mouth which was above his nose. His face was upside down but worse than that, he saw, as he waded across the stream to fetch his friend's broken body, it was in the wrong place, peering out at him in surprise through the twisted crook of his right arm.
ESCAPE
The maiden flight of the Aero-movil numero uno lasted approximately seventeen seconds and observers estimated that at the apex of its climb it had reached a height of 80 feet and had travelled a distance of 2,800 feet over a pronounced leftward curving course. Unfortunately, Carriscant learned later, according to the rules of the Amberway-Richault prize, the destruction of the flying machine, or the injury or death of the flyer, rendered any attempt null and void. The senior adjudicator, Mr Gallo, thought the whole episode a great shame and hoped that Dr Carriscant would continue with his colleague's pioneering work. He invited him to form the first committee of the Aero-Club of Manila. Carriscant agreed at once, nodding dully. Pantaleon's death and his extraordinary achievement left him feeling both hugely upset and humbled, visited at the same time by an acute sense of loss and awestruck admiration.
After giving his statement to the Sampaloc constabulary, and seeing Pantaleon's blanket-shrouded body being carried into the police station, he returned to the nip a barn where he found the place deserted, the crowd quite dispersed. He wondered how many of them were aware that the Aero-mobilist himself had perished in his attempt to win the Amberway-Richault prize. Carriscant walked morosely up and down the wooden roadway trying to come to terms with what happened, trying to sort and understand those endless seconds of terror and alarm. At least Panta had felt that exhilaration he so craved surge through his body. Carriscant remembered his manic shrieks and yelps of triumph as they really flew for the first time, recalled his sobs of helpless gratitude as they hurtled towards the trees on the San Roque estero. At least Pantaleon had died happy, full of the knowledge that he had achieved something monumental and triumphant. There were worse ends than that, he reflected, worse ways to die, and he sensed some of his sadness wane, and grew aware that, simultaneously, there was a new emotion blooming inside him, a feeling building of an irrepressible and transforming jubilation. That his own life had been spared now appeared to him the most astonishing miracle and, while he knew that he would still shed a few tears for his lost friend, a voice inside him was whispering delightedly, 'You're alive, alive, ALIVE!' Whether it was blind chance or divine intervention he was taking it as a clear sign. Carriscant's luck… Carriscant's luck was holding. Salvador Carriscant and Delphine Blythe Sieverance were destined to be together. Everything that was due to happen in the next few days was going to go according to plan. He knew, with a fierce, passionate certainty, that now all was going to be well.
