Kern felt a hand on his arm and roused himself out of a half-stupor.
He thought, I must be on the ground again, and made an instinctive effort to sit up. The motion threw him into a ludicrous spin and he opened his eyes wide to see the earth whirling far below him.
He was coasting at terrific speed through the upper air upon a cold, screaming highway of wind, and moving easily beside him, riding on broad pinions like his own, a girl paralleled his flight.
Long pale hair streamed behind her away from her blue-eyed face, whipped to pinkness by the blast. She was calling something to him, but the words were snatched from her lips by the wind and he heard nothing except that shrill, continuous howling all around them. He could see that she held him by one arm, and with her free hand was pointing downward vehemently. He could not hear her words, and knew he probably could not understand them if he did, but the gesture’s meaning he could not mistake.
Nodding, he shrugged his left wing high and arched his body for a long downward spiral toward the ground. The girl turned with him, and together they glided sidewise across the rushing air-currents, delicately tacking against the wind, picking their way by instinctive muscular reactions of the spread pinions, while below them the ground swayed and turned like a fluid sea.
Kern glided downward on a wave of exultation like nothing he had ever experienced before in his life. He knew little about this world or about the girl beside him, but one thing stood out clearly—he was no longer alone. No longer the only winged being on an alien planet. And this long downward glide, like the motion of perfect dancers responding each to the other’s most delicate motion, was the most satisfying thing he had ever known.
For the first time he realized one of the great secrets of a flying race—to fly alone is to know only half the joy of flying. When another winged being moves beside you on the airways, speed matching speed, wings beating as one, then at last you taste the full ecstasy of flight.
Kern was breathless with joy and excitement when the ground swooped up at them and he banked against the rush of his glide. With suddenly fluttering wings, he reversed his position in the air and felt with both feet for the solid earth. He had to run a little to cut down his speed, and the girl ran beside him, breathless and laughing a bit as she ran.
When they came to a halt and swung to face one another the long ashen hair blew forward in a cloud that had caught up with her at last, and she fought it, laughing, and brushed back the tangled mass with both hands, the pale wings the exact color of her hair folding back from her shoulders.
He saw now that she wore a tight tunic of some very fine, supple leather, and long tight boots of the same material. The hilt of a jeweled knife stood up against her ribs from a jeweled belt.
Around them the wind still blew cold and shrill, but the blast of it was slackening noticeably and warmth was creeping back little by little into the air. They stood on a wooded hill, under trees whose whipping branches added to the tumult of noise, and Kern could see a broad vista of the land before him, with no more of the vast bending giants of the hurricane moving across it. The storm must be over, he thought.
The girl spoke. She had a pleasant contralto voice, and the language she spoke was slightly guttural and of course entirely strange. Kern saw the surprise and doubt on her face when she saw that he did not understand her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a pretty thing. I wish we could talk to each other.”
She matched his smile, but the bewilderment deepened on her face.
Kern thought, She can’t believe I don’t know her language. Could that mean there’s only one tongue spoken in this world? It’s wishful thinking—I want so much to believe it! Because that might mean the people here are all winged, and move around so easily that separate languages haven’t had a chance to evolve.
His heart was beating faster, with an eagerness that he found a little ludicrous. He had never suspected even in his own dreams how much it would mean to him to belong at last to a race that could accept him as one of its own. Bruce Hallam had set his machine in the aggregate pattern of the whole mutant group, knowing as he did so how unlikely it was that more than one of them could hope for an equivalent world on a single planet. But Bruce’s skill being what it was, Kern told himself there was no reason to be surprised that the expected had happened.
This world was his own. A winged world. He was luckiest and first of the group to find a place where he belonged. Exultation closed up his throat with the joy of being no longer alien.
“Or maybe I’m building too much on one example,” he warned himself aloud. “Are we all winged in this world, girl? Say something, quick. I want to learn your language! Answer me, girl—are you an alien too, or is this the world where I belong?”
She laughed at him, recognizing the half-serious tone of his voice though the words meant nothing. And then her glance went across his shoulder, and a look of subtle withdrawal crossed her face. She said something in her guttural tongue and nodded toward the trees behind Kern.
He turned. A third winged figure was walking toward them under the still-roaring trees, wings whipped by the wind until the newcomer staggered now and then when the full blast caught him.
Kern was aware at
