This Island Earth by Ramond F Jones

Author:Ramond F Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Published: 2010-10-16T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

It was somewhere between Amarillo and Oklahoma City that he first saw the shadow. He was flying almost directly into the moon when the great, semi-transparent silhouette showed up against the silver disc.

His taut nerves forced an involuntary scream from his throat. He knew that shape – that vast, ellipsoid that he had once seen shooting into space faster than the eye could follow.

He leaned the stick and jammed his foot against the pedal. The ship heeled over in a tight turn at right angles to his former course. There was a long low cloudbank a few miles away in the otherwise clear sky. If he could get into that –

He couldn’t know whether they had seen him or not, but fear of pursuit and failure swelled within him again.

If they captured him before he revealed his knowledge of the Peace Engineers there would be no one who could warn of the menace their ambitions and blunders had created.

It was foolish, he thought, to suppose that he could get away. If they were really searching for him he could not hide from so simple a thing as a radar beam. And he knew their technology had given them means far more effective than radar.

But the cloud was less than two miles away, and he fled blindly towards it.

Halfway there, the shadow fell over him. It blotted out the moon and the sky of stars, and he screamed again in terror. The great hull was poised almost above, moving silently with his plane. In panic, he jerked on the stick and jabbed the foot pedal.

But the plane did not swerve. And then the motor coughed and died. He gripped the useless controls while the ship continued in the grip of an invisible force from above.

Slowly the distance between the two ships narrowed. And now Cal saw that a wide hatch had opened in the base of the spaceship, a hatch wide enough to swallow his entire plane.

It drew closer. The border of the opening in the spaceship was dropping past him. He shoved back the canopy for a final glimpse of the silvery earth below. Then the hatch, closed and he felt the plane drop upon it, resting on its, landing gear.

He sat there for a long moment in utter darkness. There was no sound nor sense of motion. It was a void in which all perception had vanished.

It seemed like the suddenness and finality of death. He had blundered, he thought, from first to last. He had been confused by his wanting to believe in the Peace Engineers at their face value. It had taken him too long to believe that they were anything but what they professed to be.

He tried to think of what his failure might mean – to Ruth and Ole and to the whole human race – but he was too tired to put one thought after another in consecutive order. His failure was too great for comprehension.

Abruptly lights came on. Except for his plane, the chamber was completely bare.

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