Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 3
The meaning of the circumstance that it was made in the likeness of the girl—that it was her effigy—could not then come to me. I could not think of that at all. The fact that it was not the girl, but her effigy, was more than enough.
The principle of the mechanism, now that I realized it was a machine, of course was familiar to me, I, myself, had taken part in tests of contrivances aimed at the perfection of mechanical control which now I witnessed.
I had seen mechanical controls installed in the cockpit of a navy airplane; but a living pilot had sat beside the mechanism. I had seen the pilot take his hands from his levers, after the plane was in flight, and give over the controls to the mechanism; and I had watched the airplane fly and turn to right and left and climb or dive at the direction of a radio operator on the ground or in an accompanying airplane. But the movements of the plane, when piloted by the mechanism, always had been constricted; and the mechanism never had been independent. It could not fly solo; always a pilot had been beside it to lend a hand.
This mechanism, masked by the effigy of the girl, surely employed the same principle but had brought it to such perfection that only now had I realized it. Pete, I guessed, had realized it only a few moments earlier.
Now, of course, I comprehended the fate of Selby and of Kent and I knew what Pete had encountered. Each of them, flying, had come across a girl pilot—or what had appeared to be a girl in the cockpit—and she had dashed into each of them, in turn, before he could see she was a mechanism.
An automaton, controlled and commanded by whom? By the girl, whose effigy masked it? By the lovely, gentle girl herself who had talked to us on the sea?
The strange meaning of the circumstance that it was made in her likeness could not, I say, yet occur to me. I could not yet consider that this had meaning. I was applied to desperately practical things. Who manœuvered the effigy?
Not the girl herself, I realized on second thought. For this mechanical airplane must have been kept in the air, above the clouds, while she was speaking with us on the sea. However perfect the mechanism under the dummy, it could have sustained the plane in the air only under the constant direction of the operator of the radio control. The girl could not have been the operator. She could not have manipulated radio controls while she was talking to us. There must have been another person operating the radio controls; and those controls and this other person must be in a third airplane.
He must have been hiding above the clouds with his mechanical slave circling him like a satellite until he sent the effigy down to attack us after I had followed the girl into the sky. So her rôle, then, was that of a decoy? Had she decoyed first, in her own person, Selby and Kent and drawn them into a situation to be destroyed, in one sudden dash, by her effigy?
The idea did not satisfy me. Vaguely I was feeling, with nothing yet approaching mental realization, that there was something far more strange than that.
The effigy flew on lines parallel to my course, offering no attack and coming no closer. Again it ignored me. Now, of course, I comprehended this phenomenon. The effigy could not see me; the eyes, which piloted it, peered from the cockpit of a control airplane.
At the origin of the attack upon me, the control airplane must have circled above the ceiling with its slave; after the control had dispatched the slave and after it had engaged me, the control must have descended below the clouds to have both me and its slave in view. When I had climbed through the ceiling, the control airplane had sent the effigy up after me but the operating pilot was behind and below. He lost sight of me and of his automaton. Therefore, the effigy had flown beside me and past me, paying no attention to me until the control machine cut through the clouds and caught sight of us again.
Evidently, at the present moment, I was screened by some scraps of clouds so that the pilot of the control plane could not keep me in sight. I did not immediately discover him; I saw nothing but clouds, chasms through them here and there, and the blind, deaf, insensate, utterly merciless mechanism.
When it jerked toward me, in one of its stabbing spurts, I understood that the control pilot must have caught sight of me; and sweeping the floor of clouds I sighted him far off to the left and on the opposite side of me from the effigy.
His craft was a monoplane with blue wings like the wings of the effigy and of the girl who had stopped on the sea.
I dipped into a valley of mist; and the effigy charged through the cloud, failing by a hundred yards to find me.
I knew I had dropped from view of the control pilot who had pulled the effigy toward me almost at random. Little or no danger to Pete and me from that manner of manœuvering.
The clouds blew their billows above and below me, offering endless chasms of concealment. Occasionally, for a few seconds at a time, the control pilot might have me in sight; but he seemed to require a clear view for several seconds before he could effectively direct the mechanism at me.
He, I was saying in my mind when reckoning with that pilot. I did not pass close enough to see him; but it was a man, I felt certain—a man who had sent down Selby and Kent and Pete.
A man piloted that control plane and aimed the mechanism; a man had made and to his purposes employed the effigy of that girl.
Why?
The idea of mere escape no longer appealed tome. I looked over the edge at Pete's legs and knew that he expected of me more than escape.