CHAPTER II

_Into Space_

A pulsing pain that stabbed through his head was Chet’s first
conscious impression. Then, as objects came slowly into focus before
his eyes, he knew that above him a ray of light was striking
slantingly through the thick glass of a control-room lookout.

Other lookouts were black, the dead black of empty space. Through
them, sparkling points of fire showed here and there–suns, sending
their light across millions of years to strike at last on a speeding
ship. But, from the one port that caught the brighter light, came that
straight ray to illumine the room.

“Space,” thought Chet vaguely. “That is the sunlight of space!”

He was trying to arrange his thoughts in some sensible sequence. His
head!–what had happened to his head?… And then he remembered. Again
he saw a clubbed weapon descending, while the face of Schwartzmann
stared at him through bulbous eyes….

And this control-room where he lay–he knew in an instant where he
was. It was his own ship that was roaring and trembling beneath
him–his and Walt Harkness’–it was flying through space! And, with
the sudden realization of what this meant, he struggled to arise. Only
then did he see the figure at the controls.

The man was leaning above an instrument board; he straightened to
stare from a rear port while he spoke to someone Chet could not see.

“There’s more of ’em coming!” he said in a choked voice. “_Mein Gott!_
Neffer can we get away!”

* * * * *

He fumbled with shaking hands at instruments and controls; and now
Chet saw his chalk-white face and read plainly the terror that was
written there. But the cords that cut into his own wrists and ankles
reminded him that he was bound; he settled back upon the floor. Why
struggle? If this other pilot was having trouble let him get out of it
by himself–let him kill his own snakes!

That the man was having trouble there was no doubt. He looked once
more behind him as if at something that pursued; then swung the
ball-control to throw the ship off her course.

The craft answered sluggishly, and Chet Bullard grinned where he lay
helpless upon the floor; for he knew that his ship should have been
thrown crashingly aside with such a motion as that. The answer was
plain: the flask of super-detonite was exhausted; here was the last
feeble explosion of the final atoms of the terrible explosive that was
being admitted to the generator. And to cut in another flask meant the
opening of a hidden valve.

Chet forgot the pain of his swelling hands to shake with suppressed
mirth. This was going to be good! He forgot it until, through a
lookout, he saw a writhing, circling fire that wrapped itself about
the ship and jarred them to a halt.

The serpents!–those horrors from space that had come with the coming
of the Dark Moon! They had disrupted the high-level traffic of the
world; had seized great liners; torn their way in; stripped these of
every living thing, and let the empty shells crash back to earth. Chet
had forgotten or he had failed to realize the height at which this new
pilot was flying. Only speed could save them; the monsters, with their
snouts that were great suction-cups, could wrench off a metal
door–tear out the glass from a port!

* * * * *

He saw the luminous mass crush itself against a forward lookout and
felt the jar of its body against their ship. Soft and vaporous, these
cloud-like serpents seemed as they drifted through space; yet the
impact, when they struck, proved that this new matter had mass.

Chet saw the figure at the controls stagger back and cower in fear;
the man’s bullet-shaped head was covered by his upraised arms: there
was some horror outside those windows that his eyes had no wish to
see. Beside him the towering figure of Schwartzmann appeared; he had
sprung into Chet’s view, and he screamed orders at the fear-stricken
pilot.

“Fool! Swine!” Schwartzmann was shouting. “Do something! You said you
could fly this ship!” In desperation he leaped forward and reached for
the controls himself.

Chet’s blurred faculties snapped sharply to attention. That yellow
glow against the port–the jarring of their ship–it meant instant
destruction once that searching snout found some place where it could
secure a hold. If the air-pressure within the ship were released; if
even a crack were opened!–

“Here, you!” he shouted to the frantic Schwartzmann who was jerking
frenziedly at the controls that no longer gave response. “Cut these
ropes!–leave those instruments alone, you fool!” He was suddenly
vibrant with hate as he realized what this man had done: he had struck
him, Chet, down as he would have felled an animal for butchery; he had
stolen their ship; and now he was losing it. Chet hardly thought of
his own desperate plight in his rage at this threat to their ship, and
at Schwartzmann’s inability to help himself.

“Cut these ropes!” he repeated. “Damn it all, turn me loose; I can fly
us out!” He added his frank opinion of Schwartzmann and all his men.
And Schwartzmann, though his dark face flushed angrily red for one
instant, leaped to Chet’s side and slashed at the cords with a knife.

The room swam before Chet’s dizzy eyes as he came to his feet. He half
fell, half drew himself full length toward the valve that he alone
knew. Then again he was on his feet and he gripped at the ball-control
with one hand while he opened a master throttle that cut in this new
supply of explosive.

* * * * *

The room had been silent with the silence of empty space, save only
for the scraping of a horrid body across the ship’s outer shell. The
silence was shattered now as if by the thunder of many guns. There
was no time for easing themselves into gradual flight. Chet thrust
forward on the ball-control, and the blast from their stern threw the
ship as if it had been fired from a giant cannon.

The self-compensating floor swung back and up; Chet’s weight was
almost unbearable as the ship beneath him leaped out and on, and the
terrific blast that screamed and thundered urged this speeding shell
to greater and still greater speed. And then, with the facility that
that speed gave, Chet’s careful hands moved a tiny metal ball within
its magnetic cage, and the great ship bellowed from many ports as it
followed the motion of that ball.

Could an eye have seen the wild, twisting flight, it must have seemed
as if pilot and ship had gone suddenly mad. The craft corkscrewed and
whirled; it leaped upward and aside; and, as the glowing mass was
thrown clear of the lookout, Chet’s hand moved again to that maximum
forward position, and again the titanic blast from astern drove them
on and out.

There were other shapes ahead, glowing lines of fire, luminous masses
like streamers of cloud that looped themselves into contorted forms
and writhed vividly until they straightened into sharp lines of speed
that bore down upon the fleeing craft and the human food that was
escaping these hungry snouts.

Chet saw them dead ahead; he saw the out-thrust heads, each ending in
a great suction-cup, the row of disks that were eyes blazing above,
and the gaping maw below. He altered their course not a hair’s breadth
as he bore down upon them, while the monsters swelled prodigiously
before his eyes. And the thunderous roar from astern came with never a
break, while the ship itself ceased its trembling protest against the
sudden blast and drove smoothly on and into the waiting beasts.

There was a hardly perceptible thudding jar. They were free! And the
forward lookouts showed only the brilliant fires of distant suns and
one more glorious than the rest that meant a planet.

* * * * *

Chet turned at last to face Schwartzmann and his pilot where they had
clung helplessly to a metal stanchion. Four or five others crept in
from the cabin aft; their blanched faces told of the fear that bad
gripped them–fear of the serpents; fear, too, of the terrific plunges
into which the ship had been thrown. Chet Bullard drew the metal
control-ball back into neutral and permitted himself the luxury of a
laugh.

“You’re a fine bunch of highway-men,” he told Schwartzmann; “you’ll
steal a ship you can’t fly; then come up here above the R. A. level
and get mixed up with those brutes. What’s the idea? Did you think you
would just hop over to the Dark Moon? Some little plan like that in
your mind?”

Again the dark, heavy face of Schwartzmann flushed deeply; but it was
his own men upon whom he turned.

“You,” he told the pilot–“you were so clever; you would knock this
man senseless! You would insist that you could fly the ship!”

The pilot’s eyes still bulged with the fear he had just experienced.
“But, Herr Schwartzmann, it was you who told me–“

A barrage of unintelligible words cut his protest short. Schwartzmann
poured forth imprecations in an unknown tongue, then turned to the
others.

“Back!” he ordered. “Bah!–such men! The danger it iss over–yess!
This pilot, he will take us back safely.”

He turned his attention now to the waiting Chet. “Herr Bullard, iss it
not–yess?”

He launched into extended apologies–he had wanted a look at this so
marvelous ship–he had spied upon it; he admitted it. But this
murderous attack was none of his doing; his men had got out of hand;
and then he had thought it best to take Chet, unconscious as he was,
and return with him where he could have care.

* * * * *

And Chet Bullard kept his eyes steadily upon the protesting man and
said nothing, but he was thinking of a number of things. There was
Walt’s warning, “this Schwartzmann means mischief,” and the faked
message that had brought him from the hospital to get the ship from
its hiding place; no, it was too much to believe. But Chet’s eyes were
unchanging, and he nodded shortly in agreement as the other concluded.

“You will take us back?” Schwartzmann was asking. “I will repay you
well for what inconvenience we have caused. The ship, you will return
it safely to the place where it was?”

And Chet, after making and discarding a score of plans, knew there was
nothing else he could do. He swung the little metal ball into a
sharply-banked turn. The straight ray of light from an impossibly
brilliant sun struck now on a forward lookout; it shone across the
shoulder of a great globe to make a white, shining crescent as of a
giant moon. It was Earth; and Chet brought the bow-sights to bear on
that far-off target, while again the thunderous blast was built up to
drive them back along the trackless path on which they had come. But
he wondered, as he pressed forward on the control, what the real plan
of this man, Schwartzmann, might be….

* * * * *

Less than half an hour brought them to the Repelling Area, and Chet
felt the upward surge as he approached it. Here, above this magnetic
field where gravitation’s pull was nullified, had been the air-lanes
for fast liners. Empty lanes they were now; for the R. A., as the
flying fraternity knew it–the Heaviside Layer of an earlier
day–marked the danger line above which the mysterious serpents lay in
wait. Only the speed of Chet’s ship saved them; more than one of the
luminous monsters was in sight as he plunged through the invisible R.
A. and threw on their bow-blast strongly to check their fall.

Then, as he set a course that would take them to that section of the
Arctic waste where the ship had been, he pondered once more upon the
subject of this Schwartzmann of the shifty eyes and the glib tongue
and of his men who had “got out of hand” and had captured this ship.

“Why in thunder are we back here?” Chet asked himself in perplexity.
“This big boy means to keep the ship; and, whatever his plans may have
been before, he will never stop short of the Dark Moon now that he has
seen the old boat perform. Then why didn’t he keep on when he was
started? Had the serpents frightened him back?”

He was still mentally proposing questions to which there seemed no
answer when he felt the pressure of a metal tube against his back. The
voice of Schwartzmann was in his ears.

“This is a detonite pistol”–that voice was no longer unctuous and
self-deprecating–“one move and I’ll plant a charge inside you that
will smash you to a jelly!”

* * * * *

There were hands that gripped Chet before he could turn; his arms were
wrenched backward; he was helpless in the grip of Schwartzmann’s men.
The former pilot sprang forward.

“Take control, Max!” Schwartzmann snapped; but he followed it with a
question while the pilot was reaching for the ball. “You can fly it
for sure, Max?”

The man called Max answered confidently.

“_Ja wohl!_” he said with eager assurance. “Up top there would have
been no trouble yet for that _verdammt, verloren_ valve. That one
experimental trip is enough–I fly it!”

Those who held Chet were binding his wrists. He was thrown to the
floor while his feet were tied, and, as a last precaution, a gag was
forced into his mouth. Schwartzmann left this work to his men. He paid
no attention to Chet; he was busy at the radio.

He placed the sending-levers in strange positions that would effect a
blending of wave lengths which only one receiving instrument could
pick up. He spoke cryptic words into the microphone, then dropped into
a language that was unfamiliar to Chet. Yet, even then, it was plain
that he was giving instructions, and he repeated familiar words.

“Harkness,” Chet heard him say, and, “–Delacouer–_ja!_–Mam’selle
Delacouer!”

Then, leaving the radio, he said, “Put my ship inside the hangar;” and
the pilot, Max, grounded their own ship to allow the men to leap out
and float into the big building the big aircraft in which Schwartzmann
had come.

“Now close the doors!” their leader ordered. “Leave everything as it
was!” And to the pilot he gave added instructions: “There iss no air
traffic here. You will to forty thousand ascend, und you will wait
over this spot.” Contemptuously he kicked aside the legs of the bound
man that he might walk back into the cabin.

* * * * *

The take-off was not as smooth as it would have been had Chet’s slim
hands been on the controls; this burly one who handled them now was
not accustomed to such sensitivity. But Chet felt the ship lift and
lurch, then settle down to a swift, spiralling ascent. Now he lay
still as he tried to ponder the situation.

“Now what dirty work are they up to?” he asked himself. He had seen a
sullen fury on the dark face of Herr Schwartzmann as he spoke the
names of Walt and Diane into the radio. Chet remembered the look now,
and he struggled vainly with the cords about his wrists. Even a
detonite pistol with its tiny grain of explosive in the end of each
bullet would not check him–not when Walt and Diane were endangered.
And the expression on that heavy, scowling face had told him all too
clearly that some real danger threatened.

But the cords held fast on his swollen wrists. His head was still
throbbing; and even his side, not entirely healed, was adding to the
torment that beat upon him–beat and beat with his pulsing
blood–until the beating faded out into unconsciousness….

Dimly he knew they were soaring still higher as their radio picked up
the warning of an approaching patrol ship; vaguely he realized that
they descended again to a level of observation. Chet knew in some
corner of his brain that Schwartzmann was watching from an under
lookout with a powerful glass, and he heard his excited command:

“Down–go slowly, down!… They are landing…. They have entered the
hangar. Now, down with it, Max! Down! down!”

* * * * *

The plunging fall of the ship roused Chet from his stupor. He felt the
jolt of the clumsy landing despite the snow-cushioned ground; he
heard plainly the exclamations from beyond an open port–the startled
oath in Walter Harkness’ voice, and the stinging scorn in the words of
Diane Delacouer.

Herr Schwartzmann had been in the employ of Mademoiselle Delacouer,
but he was taking orders no longer. There was a sound of scuffling
feet, and once the thud of a blow…. Then Chet watched with heavy,
hopeless eyes as the familiar faces of Diane and Walt appeared in the
doorway. Their hands were bound; they, too, were threatened with a
slim-barreled pistol in the hands of the smirking, exultant
Schwartzmann.

A tall, thin-faced man whom Chet had not seen before followed them
into the room. The newcomer was motioned forward now, as Schwartzmann
called an order to the pilot:

“All right; now we go, Max! Herr Doktor Kreiss will give you the
bearings; he knows his way among the stars.”

Herr Schwartzmann doubled over in laughing appreciation of his own
success before he straightened up and regarded his captives with cold
eyes.

“Such a pleasure!” he mocked: “such charming passengers to take with
me on my first trip into space; this ship, it iss not so goot. I will
build better ships later on; I will let you see them when I shall come
to visit you.”

He laughed again at sight of the wondering looks in the eyes of the
three; stooping, he jerked the gag from Chet’s mouth.

“You do not understand,” he exclaimed. “I should haff explained. You
see, _meine guten Freunde_, we go–ach!–you have guessed it already!
We go to the Dark Moon. I am pleased to take you with me on the trip
out; but coming back, I will have so much to bring–there will be no
room for passengers.

“I could have killed you here,” he said; and his mockery gave place
for a moment to a savage tone, “but the patrol ships, they are
everywhere. But I have influence here und there–I arranged that your
flask of gas should be charged with explosive, I discredited you, and
yet I could not so great a risk take as to kill you all.”

“So came inspiration! I called your foolish young friend here from the
hospital. I ordered him to go at once to the ship hidden where I could
not find, and I signed the name of Herr Harkness.”

* * * * *

Chet caught the silent glances of his friends who could yet smile
hopefully through the other emotions that possessed them. He ground
his teeth as the smooth voice of Herr Schwartzmann went on:

“He led me here; the young fool! Then I sent for you–and this time I
signed his name–und you came. So simple!”

“Und now we go in my ship to my new world. And,” he added savagely,
“if one of you makes the least trouble, he will land on the Dark
Moon-yess!-but he will land hard, from ten thousand feet up!”

The great generator was roaring. To Chet came the familiar lift of the
R. A. effect. They were beyond the R. A.; they were heading out and
away from Earth; and his friends were captives through his own
unconscious treachery, carried out into space in their own ship, with
the hands of an enemy gripping the controls….

Chet’s groan, as he turned his face away from the others who had tried
to smile cheerfully, had nothing to do with the pain of his body. It
was his mind that was torturing him.

But he muttered broken words as he lay there, words that had reference
to one Schwartzmann. “I’ll get him, damn him! I’ll get him!” he was
promising himself.

And Herr Schwartzmann who was clever, would have proved his cleverness
still more by listening. For a Master Pilot of the World does not get
his rating on vain boasts. He must know first his flying, his ships
and his air–but he is apt to make good in other ways as well.