second. But it clipped him; his brain whirleddizzily. The next moment he slithered off the plane and fell to theground, dragging the unseen Kashtanov with him. And as he pitched intothe damp grass, the shock dislodged his grip.
He was up in a flash, but the damage was done. The monkey-wrenchcurved through the darkness in a vicious swipe that landed it flushagainst his jaw; swung back, pounded again like a trip-hammer--againand again and again....
Chris reeled back, teetered on the edge of nothingness, then wenttumbling crazily down into the sand-trap behind. One leg was doubledunderneath him as he crashed.
A voice floated down out of the darkness. "That is the end of you!" itsaid. But Chris Travers did not hear it....
* * * * *
Pain. Agonizing pain. The whole lower side of his face was a burning,throbbing, aching lump of flesh, and his left leg seemed on fire. Whathad happened? Where was he?
Then came remembrance, and it was far worse than the fangs of painthat were gnawing him. Chris cried out--a cracked, twisted cry.Kashtanov, the dam--the box of the ray! How much time had passed?
He hunched his body over and stared up. Limned against the starlightwere the wings of a plane, still standing where it had landed besidethe sand-trap. He clutched his thoughts. The plane meant--it meantKashtanov had gone on his errand, had not yet returned? Only minuteshad gone by since the blows from the monkey-wrench. But was the boxplaced yet? Was Kashtanov already hurrying back?
He listened. From far away came a drone that was separate from thethrobbing of his head. The drone of waters, controlled waters. Thenormal sound of the spillway of Gatun Dam. The box had not yetunleashed its disintegrating bolt of blue.
"I've got to stop it!" he whispered.
He tried to rise. Only one leg held. The other twisted awrily with arasp of broken bones. A spearing pain tore through him. Useless! Hisfall had broken it. He could not rise, could not walk, much less run.He was no more than a cripple.
"Oh, God!" he groaned, "How can I, how can I?"
Then his eyes fell on the plane resting above him.
"I've got one leg," he muttered, "and two hands and two eyes....They're left me. Yes!"
He rolled over. He shoved with his right leg and clawed at the bank ofthe sand-trap. Inch by inch he wormed up, slipping, scraping. The sandgrated into his battered face and seeped through onto his tongue; hecoughed and spluttered, groaning from the effort and his feebleness.Spots of blood showed black against the crazy course he left behindhim; ages seemed to pass before he thrust his head over the top of thebank, dug his chin into it and pulled onto level ground. Ages, but inreality only seconds, and the whole Canal--America--lying at the mercyof what each one of those seconds might unloose!
* * * * *
But the plane was near now, and it almost seemed that some unseenforce mightier than the strength of men hauled Chris's broken body toit and up the stretch of its fuselage-side into the cockpit.
Ordinarily, he should have been delirious from the pain of jaw andleg, but the controls of the plane were before him and he saw nothingelse. Wings and propeller were better than legs! He was in hiselement: by the sixth sense of born airmen, he knew and could handleany flying machine, no matter how foreign.
In a second, his fingers had fumbled onto the starting button. Thechoke of the motor and then its full-throated roar were sweet to hisears.
The lonely golf course and the night re-echoed with the bellow oftwelve pistons thrusting in line; watching, one would not have dreamedthat a cripple was at the controls of the plane that now swung aroundwith a blast of power, leveled its nose down the course and racedsmoothly over close-clipped grass. Its wheels bumped, spun on theground and lifted into air.
A mile to the dam! Istafiev's words came back to him. It would takeKashtanov twenty minutes at least, for he would go cautiously. But howlong had passed--how long? That was the agonizing question.
Staring forward through the hurtling prop, the night rushed at him;the dark hills melted away to either side; clear ground swept intoview and then a long black thread that was the spillway channel.Behind was the bubbling, leaping flow of the spillway itself, andGatun Dam. The smooth cement sides were as yet unharmed.
"Thank God!" Chris muttered. "Now, where--where?"
A stream of light flowed out from the hydro-electric station on theleft side of the spillway channel. The opposite bank was bare, runningright up to the face of the dam beneath the spillway's seven gates.There the box was to be placed. But from the air, the light wasuncertain, deceptive--and a little two-foot-square box was all he hadto go by!
"I can't see!" Chris said hoarsely. "I can't see!"
* * * * *
Like a roaring black meteor the plane hurtled over the banks of thespillway, the eyes of its pilot scouring the ground. It zoomed just intime to miss the wall of the dam, banked, doubled like a scaredjack-rabbit, dove down again, coming within feet of the spillwaychannel. Mad, inspired flying! But what good could it do?
Then from its cockpit came a yell.
"There! There! By heaven, I can make it!"
Two or three hundred feet--it was not clear just how far--from theface of the dam, on the bare right bank of the channel, a tinypin-prick of black was moving slowly along. It seemed to move byitself through the air. And now, as the screaming plane banked againand came rushing closer, the pin-prick grew into a black box thatsuddenly stopped its advance, held motionless some four feet off theground. Though the man who held it was not visible, Chris could fancyhim staring up at the plane, could fancy the look of consternation onhis unseen face.
Two hundred feet was the range of the rays! Was Kashtanov that close?Obviously the controls had not yet been set, for he still held thebox. But he could switch them on in a second and fling the deadlymachine up toward the dam, if he were at present just out of range. Asecond--a second!
"Damn you, here goes!" roared Chris.
He wrenched the stick way over. The plane appeared to hang crazily onone wing. Then it leveled off and stuck its nose down, flipping itstail up, and down--down--down it bellowed; with no hope in the worldof ever coming out of its insane plunge.
What he saw in that last momentary glimpse was burned forever intoChris Travers' memory. There was the black box, hanging in the airstraight before the plane's thundering nose; there, behind it, theblack tide of the spillway waters; and, still further behind, he couldsee the other bank and the hydro-electric station, and a few tinyfigures that rushed out from it just then to see what some fool flyerwas doing.
All this flashed into his sight, etched against the sable night as ifin flame. Then the plane's snout smashed into the black box hangingbefore it, and the propeller crunched through a naked, invisible body.A ragged scream that marked the passing of Kashtanov split through theair for a flash of time, and the dark, blurred mass that was anairplane teetered clean over and flopped into the rushing spillwaychannel.
* * * * *
The men who had scrambled out from the hydro-electric station staredat each other blankly. One of them stuttered:
"But--he did that deliberately! Nothing went wrong with his ship! Isaw him! He seemed to be diving at something!"
"Come on!" snapped another. "We might be able to get him out. A madfool like that's just the kind who'll live through it."
* * * * *
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