smashed at it again and then again, cursing it, wheezing for breath. He threw down the bar and plucked up the hammer. Indestructible, was it? He’d see about that. He grabbed an iron rung on the curved wall of the ship and edged in around a cushioned seat. He couldn’t seem to get the right angle. Glancing blows wouldn’t do. The damned seat was square in the way. He beat at the chair, the hammerhead ripping into the soft leather. He kicked at it, shrieking, whipping around as if to surprise the window and delivering against it one final blow. The handle of the hammer split as a spider web of cracks sprang into the heavy glass, breaking the reflection of his sweating face into fragments. He threw down the rest of the handle and pulled himself through the hatch, losing his hat in the process. It bounced once on the landing, rolled onto the stairs, and sailed into the diminishing light of the silo, tumbling groundward end over end.
In a rage, he threw his prybar after it, then stooped, grabbed the box, and raised it over his head as if to smash it down too, to reduce it to rubble on the cobbled floor forty feet below. He stood just so, heaving with exertion, animal noises issuing past his teeth, and then slowly lowered the box, visions of Kelso Drake winking into focus across the tangled confusion of his mind. He turned and leaped wildly down the stairs, three at a time, his breath escaping in mewling grunts with each jolt.
He jerked to a stop at the base of the stairs, crouching before a bank of levers on the smooth side of the rocket. He dropped the box and grasped first one and then another of the levers, wrenching them this way and that. One snapped off in his hand and he slammed it against the others, then cast it with such force against the clapboard wall of the silo that it impaled itself, vibrating audibly.
He reached for another lever, but stopped dead. A humming noise, growing louder by the moment, filled the silo. A low rush followed, building toward a roar. Billy Deener leaped back at a quick surge of heat from the base of the rocket. He grinned with sudden anticipation, and in a stooping run, grabbed the box from the stones with one hand, his fallen hat with the other, and was out the door, pounding across the green toward a distant copse that lay like a shadow against the evening sky.
A blast behind threw him onto his face in the grass, and the darkness suddenly evaporated. He crouched, turned his shaded eyes toward the silo, and watched in amazement the domed roof burst outward in a spray of shingles and shards of wood, the debris spinning slowly in the air roundabout the shattered roof. Through the airborne debris rose the rocket, a pinwheel of sparks showering down like bursting fireworks. It seemed hardly to make headway, but angled jerkily, its nose threatening to dip groundward.
Deener was struck with the sudden thought that the entire thing was going nowhere, that it might teeter over and plummet onto the green, onto his head, in fact. He rose slowly to all fours, ready to throw himself flat, then dashed once more for the trees, watching the struggling rocket over his shoulder.
The thing stopped abruptly and hung for a moment in the air. It shuddered, like a dog shaking water from its coat, and the dark little sphere at the top popped off in another wash of sparks, soaring like a champagne cork northward, over the tops of the willows along the River Nidd, whistling as it flew like a rubberized, inflated bat slowly losing air through a tiny hole. The whistling diminished, momentary silence fell, then the remains of the rocket smashed full length onto the meadow, flickering with sparkling little fires before snuffing out into darkness. Deener watched with evident satisfaction from the edge of the wood. He clapped his hat onto his head, tossed his box skyward, caught it, and strode away through the trees toward the village of Kirk Hammerton.
“Holy Mother of God,” whispered St. Ives, staring in horror across the tops of the willows. A nebula of sparks whirled from the burst top of the distant silo, lighting a rain of shingles. The suddenly appearing rocket edged skyward, visible above the trees, threatening to soar into the heavens, to shoot away toward the winking stars. But it didn’t. It was almost stationary, as if it hung by a sky hook, and just before its nose dipped and the thing fell lifeless to the meadow, the spacecraft, the product of years of work, jumped from the end of the rocket as if shot from a child’s pop gun, and arched through the air over their heads, its gaslamps curiously lit within, its hatch flung back on its hinges.
It sailed several hundred yards toward town, stuttering out little jets of smoke and fire through motivator tubes, and making a foolish whistling noise that died out even as the two men watched the craft disappear beyond distant trees. A short, far-off crash sounded. St. Ives lurched. A wave of fear washed through him — fear that some local manor house had been destroyed by his craft, or worse, that people had been hurt, killed perhaps. The fear turned almost at once to anger, and he shouldered his rifle and fired both rounds at the moon, imagining briefly that it was the loathsome, pocked face of Willis Pule, who had, obviously, doubled back on them and launched St. Ives’ rocket out of spite.
Well
He shouted across the river, but had hardly begun when he noticed that the rowboat was already halfway across, skimming along behind a bow lantern that illuminated the astonished face of old Binger.
“Did you see it!” he cried, slamming up against the grassy bank. St. Ives said nothing, but merely clambered aboard. Hasbro followed, respectfully silent, considering, perhaps, that there was little but cliche to offer when a man’s work had gone up, literally, in smoke.
The old man carried on wildly. He’d seen the explosion, the tired flight of the rocket. And it had burst out of a silo too, that anyone would think would be filled with corn. Bang, out the top it came like some kind of bird. It gave a man a start, with all the talk of burglars and such. Did St. Ives suppose it was his man in the river that did it, that set it off? St. Ives did. That beat all, said the old man. He’d seen the little ball pop off and sail away. It was the damnedest thing. He and Mrs. Langley went up to the attic, and there the damned thing went over the trees like a duck and smashed Lord Kelvin’s barn to splinters. Right through the roof.
The old man dropped an oar in order to illustrate his story with helpful gestures, sailing his hand in a little arch while he whistled through the gap in his front teeth, then disappearing the hand between his knees, which, St. Ives supposed darkly, represented Lord Kelvin’s barn. “Pow!” shouted old Binger, throwing his knees apart to demonstrate the barn’s going to bits. He wheezed out a sort of laugh and had another go at his knees. Meanwhile the little rowboat rocked dangerously and slipped downstream. St. Ives gritted his teeth. It
St. Ives lurched forward as the rowboat ran up onto the bank, nearly dumping his fowling piece into the river. Off to the north, coming along the highroad, was a scattering of waving lights, flickering against the dark night. They bounced and flared — torches, evidently, carried by any number of people. A murmuring reached them on the breeze. St. Ives was struck suddenly by the ominous implication of the approaching people — a mob, perhaps. What were they about? Did they carry hay forks? Guns?
He’d never seen any profit in advertising his experimentations. Rumors filtered out now and again. He’d been suspected of vivisection and of the building of infernal devices. Men from the metalworks no doubt alerted the populace to his having contracted for the shell of the craft and odd parts. But no one, certainly, besides Hasbro and certain friends — the Trismegistus Club specifically — knew that an hour earlier a launchable space vehicle had been moored in the silo.
He climbed the little rise atop which sat his house, lit, now, like Christmas, Mrs. Langley having apparently decided that an abundance of lights would frighten off villains. Perhaps she was right. The blasted silo sat dark and silent on its meadow, lit only by a little sliver of moon that slipped in a low arc above the horizon. It was impossible at the moment to see that the silo was roofless — a relief, certainly.
The torchbearers approached. St. Ives recognized an old farmer — McNally, it was, and his two pudding- faced sons. And there behind them was Stooton from the post office, and Brinsing, the Scandinavian baker. There were a dozen more, generally speaking, and the lot of them seemed to be in a collective terror; they didn’t at all bear accusatory looks. Old Binger, seeing that he had lucked upon a comparatively vast audience, started in on the subject of the sailing bat thing, using hand gestures and grimaces to good effect.
St. Ives was in a sweat to shut him up. It mustn’t be known that the imbroglio was sponsored by St. Ives. Hasbro, anticipating as much, silently and unheeded, shoved Binger’s rowboat out into the current with his foot, then stepped forward and shouted, “The boat!” in such a commanding and inflammatory tone that Binger stopped in midsentence, his hand having completed only half its customary flight, and bolted through the ferns along the riverbank, shouting at his mutinous boat.
St. Ives nodded appreciatively at Hasbro, and decided to give Binger twice what he owed him when he returned, for the old man would without a doubt be wet through before he found his way home that night to work
