“Perfectly. Good night.”
For many hours the Earth had been obscured by clouds, so that the pilot had only a general idea of what part of the world was beneath them, but as they dropped rapidly downward into the twilight zone, the clouds parted and they saw that they were directly over the Panama Canal. Seaton allowed the Skylark to fall to within ten miles of the ground, when he stopped so that Martin could get his bearings and calculate the course to Washington, which would be in total darkness before their arrival.
DuQuesne had retired, cold and reticent as usual. Glancing quickly about his cabin to make sure that he had overlooked nothing he could take with him, he opened a locker, exposing to view four suits which he had made in his spare time, each adapted to a particular method of escape from the Skylark. The one he selected was of heavy canvas, braced with steel netting, equipped with helmet and air-tanks, and attached to a strong, heavy parachute. He put it on, tested all its parts, and made his way unobserved to one of the doors in the lower part of the vessel. Thus, when the chance for escape came, he was ready for it. As the Skylark paused over the Isthmus, his lips parted in a sardonic smile. He opened the door and stepped out into the air, closing the door behind him as he fell. The neutral color of the parachute was lost in the gathering twilight a few seconds after he left the vessel.
The course laid, Seaton turned almost due north and the Skylark tore through the air. After a short time, when half the ground had been covered, Seaton spoke suddenly.
“Forgot about DuQuesne, Mart. We’d better iron him, hadn’t we? Then we’ll decide whether we want to keep him or turn him loose.”
“I will go fetch him,” replied Crane, and turned to the stairs.
He returned shortly, with the news of the flight of the captive.
“Hmm … he must have made himself a parachute. I didn’t think even he would tackle a sixty-thousand-foot drop. I’ll tell the world that he sure has established a record. I can’t say I’m sorry that he got away, though. We can get him again any time we want him, anyway, as that little object-compass in my drawer is still looking right at him,” said Seaton.
“I think he earned his liberty,” declared Dorothy, stoutly, and Margaret added:
“He deserves to be shot, but I’m glad he’s gone. He gives me the shivers.”
At the end of the calculated time they saw the lights of a large city beneath them, and Crane’s fingers clenched upon Seaton’s arm as he pointed downward. There were the landing-lights of Crane Field, seven peculiarly-arranged searchlights throwing their mighty beams upward into the night.
“Nine weeks, Dick,” he said, unsteadily, “and Shiro would have kept them burning nine years if necessary.”
The Skylark dropped easily to the ground in front of the testing shed and the wanderers leaped out, to be greeted by the half-hysterical Jap. Shiro’s ready vocabulary of peculiar but sonorous words failed him completely, and he bent himself double in a bow, his yellow face wreathed in the widest possible smile. Crane, one arm around his wife, seized Shiro’s hand and wrung it in silence. Seaton swept Dorothy off her feet, pressing her slender form against his powerful body. Her arms tightened about his neck as they kissed each other fervently and he whispered in her ear:
“Sweetheart wife, isn’t it great to be back on our good old Earth again?”
Colophon
The Skylark of Space
was published in 1928 by
E. E. Smith.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
David Zitzelsberger,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2007 by
Greg Weeks, L. N. Yaddanapudi, David Dyer-Bennet, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive in three parts: Chapters 1–7, Chapters 8–13, and Chapters 14–19.
The cover page is adapted from
Composition,
a painting completed in 1943 by
Andrée Rexroth.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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