Title: The Flight of the Eagle
Author: Galaxan, Sol
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Flight of the Eagle" ***


                        The Flight of the Eagle

                            By SOL GALAXAN

                _It was a new and mysterious plant. It
                  could make its own weather; it was
               sentient, and it prospered on Venus. But
              Earth needed it desperately. And Bat Kendo,
              the radar-mutant, was told to bring it in._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                    Planet Stories September 1953.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Humans are a strange breed. Forgetful. They grow accustomed to the
wonders they live among so easily that they never really figure up the
cost. A little time passes and the bright memories tarnish and are
covered over with newer ones. And the men who picked up the check and
maybe paid with their lives? Forgotten.

For example, when you're sitting comfortably in the New York to San
Francisco stratojet, and you take the trouble to look down at the
lush verdure of the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, do you ever
remember that a few short years back that lovely fertile parkland was
a rocky, barren waste? Or when you taste the delicious tropical fruits
that are brought to your table from the Mojave Basin, do you think of
Bat Kendo, the man who made all that possible? Like fun you do! I'll
give you ten to one you never heard of Bat Kendo. Maybe you don't even
know that the reason those once sterile wastelands are now the larders
of the North American continent is ... weather-plant. And I'll give
eight to five you don't even know where that weather-plant came from,
or how it got here, or what it cost. Not in money ... in lives.

Well, I know, and for once I'd like to have someone stand still long
enough so I could tell the story. The minute anyone sees an old
spaceman like me coming, they jet the hell out of there fast. "Old
Captain Morley's got another shaggy dog to comb out!" they say, and
beat it. My stories, it seems, are too old fashioned for this modern
age. Just because I, and a lot of others like me--only maybe not so
lucky--spent our lives opening up the spaceways instead of sitting home
on our venturiis, we're "odd characters" and "old space-hacks," and our
stories are tall tales--yarns to be avoided, or laughed at if it's not
possible to avoid them.

Okay, I expect that. But I still want to tell how that weather-plant
came to be where it is now, and what Bat Kendo had to do with it. He
was my shipmate on the R. S. _Eagle_, and I think he's got a little
credit coming to him.

The history books will tell you that during the last few years of the
20th Century the population of North America increased by something
like 600 per cent. They might even tell you that this put such a load
on the continental resources--food, mainly--that famine became a
possibility for the first time in the history of the continent. Things
were pretty tight. People were actually starving amid the technological
wonders of the time. Hydroponics were tried, but they fizzled badly.

The only answer seemed to be complete utilization of all available
land area for food production. And that meant that a lot of land that
couldn't grow weeds had to produce edible crops. That's the way things
stood back in '02, just after the William Robert Holcomb Foundation's
R. S. _Explorer_ returned from Venus with what the botanists thought
might be an answer.

Of course, the Earth-Luna System was well traveled even then, but it
took the big money of the Holcomb Foundation plus a whopping World
Federal Government grant to make a deep space mission feasible.

It was a Holcomb Foundation metallurgist's synthesis of impervium
that made deep space navigable. Before this time all ships were
chemical-fuelled because the weight of lead needed to shield atomics
would nail any spacer built to terra firma ... but good. Chemical ships
could make Luna, but no farther. Lucky to get that far with the pumps
feeding the jets a stream of monoatomic hydrogen as thick as your
arm. A ship could carry about enough juice to get up the necessary
seven-a-second with maybe enough for landing ... maybe. Even then
plenty of ships that carried a pound or two of mass too much arced
back to Earth and splashed themselves all over the ground. Others got
up escape-velocity only to run dry trying to land on Luna. Their metal
bones are still up there; if you care to look for them.

Impervium changed all that. Here was a metal that was easily worked, as
light as a good quality aluminum-magnesium alloy, and strong as steel.
And it was impervious to everything except neutrino bombardment. That
was the ticket to deep space. Atomics were in and chemicals out. I
might add that none of us were sorry to see them go, either.

Luna remained the jumping-off place. And Foy City was the staging area
for trips to ... UP. Before the successful flight of the _Explorer_,
Foy had been just a combination mining and scientific camp. After the
_Explorer_ returned from Venus, spacemen began to pour up from Earth,
and Foy City became one of the rowdiest places under Sol. Jetmen and
pilots, tubemen and ABs, all the restless flotsam of humanity flowed up
to Luna in a steady stream to mingle with the miners from the Diggings
and the longhairs from the Cosmiray Labs and the big dome of Starview.

Mars was reached and colonization began. And men set up a settlement on
Venus. The Holcomb Foundation was convinced that they had the answer
to the critical food shortage on Earth. Weather-plant. The one useful
thing that stinking Venus produces.

Weather-plant is a moss-like plant that will grow almost anywhere.
The Foundation botanists found that it gathered nitrogen and
water in some inexplicable way, and they became interested in its
possibilities. Something had to be done about soil reclamation back
on Earth, or starvation would strangle the race. Weather-plant looked
like the answer. What the smart boys couldn't have guessed was that
in addition to its other strange properties, weather-plant was
intelligent--sentient, at least. And they didn't know that it liked its
wet, foggy environment very, very much.

       *       *       *       *       *

I hit Foy City with a mammoth thirst and very little spending money.
A bad combination. I had a Pilot's rating and a brand-new Second
Officer's ticket, and I needed a job.

I'd been handling a regular chemical flight out of Foy to Montevideo
for a one horse concern that was still trying to make the low grade
uranium ore found on the Moon pay off. When I came down onto the great
pumice plain of Mare Imbrium that served Foy as a spaceport, the
patched-up blow-torch I was jockeying blew a venturi and buried herself
under twenty feet of pumice. If it had happened on Earth, we'd have
been cooked, but Luna's one-sixth gravity saved our hides. Those were
the days before tractor-pressor beam landings, you see. Back then you
landed a can by balancing her on her tail-flare like a ball on a water
spout. And that was a rough go anyway you want to look at it.

Anyway, after the pileup I quit. There was some difference of opinion
on that particular point between the company and me. They claimed I was
fired.

Quit or fired, however, I didn't get paid, and that led me to seek
solace in the local pubs. That, in turn, led me to the city drunk-tank
for the night, and that's where I ran into Bat Kendo....

Bat was Chief Tubeman on the R. S. _Eagle_. He was also a mutation.
Not that he wasn't human or anything like that. And he certainly
wasn't the much kicked around "homo superior." He merely had an extra
sense. We all have it dormant. Bat had it well developed. That's why
he was called Bat. People thought he could see in the dark. It wasn't
that. Try closing your eyes and moving your head slowly toward an
obstruction. If you are very careful and very alert, you'll be able to
sense the obstruction before you touch it. Well, Bat could "see" things
that way ... perfectly. He even used to pick up beer money by getting
into the ring blindfolded and letting pugs throw punches at him. They
hit him, but not often. And when they did connect it wasn't because he
didn't sense the blows coming; it was because he was slow on his feet
and generally three quarters drunk.

Bat's father, Nakano Kendo, had grown up in Nagasaki. He'd been exposed
to radiation by the second atom blast there. Bat had befuddled the
geneticists by showing up a mutation one generation before he was
supposed to. He used to laugh about that.

His mother had been Russian. Certainly you couldn't tell his
nationality by looking at him. His face held a suggestion of the
Asiatic, but trying to place him anthropologically would have been as
difficult as finding a pure Anglo-Saxon, whatever that is.

Bat was just the product of an insane age. A child of a man whose germ
plasm had been dosed with radiation. But for all of that Bat Kendo was
normal. Two arms, two legs, two eyes. Only his built-in radar marked
him as different. That, and his terrific taste for booze. I never
saw him sober. Yet to see him, you'd never guess he was perpetually
saturated. There may have been bigger drunks in space, but I never knew
one.

As a tubeman, he never had an equal. As an all around right guy, he
never will have.

It was Bat that talked me into signing on the _Eagle_. They needed a
Pilot, and where a better place to find one than in the Foy City drunk
tank? I knew the _Eagle_, of course. Everyone in the Luna-Earth System
did. She was a five hundred tonner, newly converted to atomics and
fitting in the Foundation yards for a flight to Venusberg.

She was going to pick up a full cargo of weather-plant from the
settlement. A hundred tons of it. And brother, that's a lot of
weather-plant.

This was to be the first quantity shipment of the stuff. The
"pilot-shipment." The botanists suspected a lot and had great hopes.
But it was up to the _Eagle_ to get the stuff to Earth. She was the
only ship available for the trip with enough storage space for the
plant, and when I listened to Bat talk about it, the flight began to
take on the aspect of a mercy mission.

I knew people were going hungry back Earthside, and old Bat was really
steamed up about it. I dare say if it hadn't been for his pep talk I'd
never have signed on. Deep space was still new, and I liked living.
But Bat talked me into it, and as soon as the turnkey shook us out of
the sack and shooed us out, Bat and I headed for the Foundation yards
and the _Eagle_.

My first view of the ship didn't do much to make me happy about the
trip. She looked old and scabrous standing tall on her tail fins out on
the flat, glaring plain of Mare Imbrium. Her hull was meteor-scarred
and eroded by atmospheric friction, and there seemed to be an abundance
of patch-welds on her.

Her tubes, however, were spanking brand new, and after I had inspected
her control-tube-pile system--as all prospective pilots have a right to
do--in company with Bat and Captain Reynard, I signed.

Reynard was a decent enough skipper. He wasn't much of a
disciplinarian, but the boat only carried a crew of twenty, so that was
no problem. As an astrogator, he had quite a reputation, and he'd been
out to Venus before on one of the ships that lugged the settlers and
scientific personnel out there.

There wasn't much fanfare when the time came for our departure. Ships
were lifting every day for Mars just then, and the departure of one
for Venus didn't seem important. Before we left though, a Holcomb
Foundation man came aboard and spoke to us about the importance of
our trip. He said that if we didn't bring back the weather-plant in
good shape, things might turn nasty on Earth. It would be another year
and a half before Venus and Earth came into conjunction again, and by
that time it might be too late for the thousands who were going hungry
back home. It gave us a sense of responsibility, all right. And it
particularly had an effect on Bat.

       *       *       *       *       *

We lifted from Mare Imbrium on 11/9/02 Earth Date. I recall that I
gave her 2G, easing her up to 6G and holding that acceleration for
sixty hours. By that time our speed in MPH wouldn't have made sense.
I revelled in the power under my hands, and the feeling that I could
actually waste an erg or two without having to worry myself bald about
landing. The _Eagle_ carried fifty pounds of ingot thorium as fuel,
and with our new atomics, that would have taken us to Centaurus, if
we'd had the time. It was wonderful to be able to keep the boat under
a steady 1G all the way to turn-over instead of having to endure the
endless nausea of free-fall. Even seasoned spacemen never got used to
free-fall, and atomics eliminated it, thank God!

The sunward flight was something to remember for sheer beauty. Earth
and Luna faded astern until they were just a bright point of light.
The sun blazed like a ball of white fire ahead of us, and Venus grew
brighter and brighter against the breath-taking backdrop of the Milky
Way. It was a gorgeous sight--but frightening, too. I had the feeling
that I was terribly exposed, as though I were standing balanced atop
the spire of the Holcomb Tower, five hundred stories above the teeming
streets of New York. Agoraphobia, I think the psychs call it. The
others felt it too. In fact one of the jetmen went slightly off his
rocker and had to be jugged. But most of the men came through the first
fear of deep space well enough, and as an astrogator Captain Reynard
was strictly one hundred per cent.

I didn't see much of Bat on the trip, since he was down in the heavily
sheathed tuberoom with his "black-gang." But I could tell whenever he
was on watch, because if I turned the interphone on without warning, I
could almost invariably hear his beery baritone singing the praises of:

    "That Lulu! Belle of ol' Foy City
    Who wears two hammocks...."

Bat was something of a poet, in his lighter moments--though most of his
stuff was lamentably unprintable.

I did get in on one little session with him and about a dozen of the
crew. That was down in the forecastle where he was entertaining the
off-watches by letting them blindfold him and then try to hide a bottle
of the tetrant alky we called our "rations." Naturally, he always
found it, and naturally he always drank it. It took them most of the
sunward trip to wise up to the fact that he was a mutation with his own
detecting system already built-in--courtesy of the Manhattan Project
and Nakano Kendo's irradiated gametes. The crew lost most of its alky
rations that way, and old Bat soaked the stuff up like a sponge.

We passed turn-over point and then the long fall down to Venus
began--three weeks of it.

Contact was established with the settlement while we were still
above the stratosphere, and our Ultra-wave-radar went into action,
the endless scanning that is absolutely essential to the landing of
spacecraft through cloud layers.

I don't mind admitting that there was a cold sweat on my brow when I
started down through the soup. The reports from UVR indicated plenty
of clearance from the mountains, but I was still leery. Some of those
peaks are reported to be as high as 200,000 feet. The _Eagle's_ gyros
were screaming and the muffled thunder of the jets filtered through
every plate of her. I'd let her slide a bit and then snatch her up
with a blast of the jets. Each time I touched the firing consoles, I
could hear the moan of the blasted atomic particles rushing through
the venturiis, and I could see the glitter of the cloud moisture that
hugged the ports as it absorbed lethal radiations from the tail-flare.

Then the clouds began to thin and I could make out the pattern of the
spaceport beneath us through the billowing formaldehyde mists that
serve Venus for an atmosphere.

I was a wreck by the time the _Eagle's_ fins touched the ground and the
dancing fire of the tubes flickered and died. I felt her sag as she
sank slightly into the mushy soil, and then I was cutting the power
switches and listening to the slowly descending whine of the gyros as
they coasted silkily to a halt.

I looked out of the ports at the miasmic swamp that surrounded us, at
the fifty foot ferns in ghastly colors, at the alien, repellent trees
that grew pulpy and squat all around the settlement. This was Venus....

       *       *       *       *       *

Venusberg wasn't the great domed city then that it is now. Back in
'02 it was just a group of pressurized Quonset huts. There were about
sixty men there, mostly maintenance workers and horticulturalists, and
five women. Four women were scientists, the fifth Bat Kendo spent his
planet-leave with.

The settlers were very cordial with us. I guess we must have been like
a breath of the home world to these poor characters who lived there.

I accompanied Captain Reynard on a tour of the cultivated areas and the
settlement itself. We were shown how the weather-plant was cultivated
and how it gathered nitrogen and water out of the fetid air to deposit
it in the soil. We saw how there were always banks of mist over the
rows of plants. It gave me quite a shock when I reached down to touch
some and the stuff actually shied away from my pressure-suit glove.

"We suspect that the stuff might actually be sentient," the settlement
botanist told us.

"You mean the stuff _thinks_?" Captain Reynard demanded.

The botanist laughed. "Oh, no. It's just that when there is a
considerable amount of the stuff about it reacts peculiarly. As soon as
this ship load of yours gets to Earth, the Foundation staff can really
get to work with it and see just what all it can do. We've great hopes
for it. It may be the answer to starvation back home."

I looked out over the neat rows of tiny plants that vanished in the
misty distance, and I looked too, at the pressing jungle. I began to
get a queasy feeling in my stomach. This was alien life. Life that had
never been meant for Earth's clean soil. There was no telling what the
stuff might do away from here.

"We suspect," the botanist was saying, "that the high formaldehyde
content of Venus' atmosphere has an inhibiting effect on the action of
the plant. We have isolated small amounts in formaldehyde-free air,
and gotten some interesting results. Freed of its native ecology, we
believe the stuff can actually create its own weather."

His voice faded away as far as I was concerned. Somewhere in my head
a bell was trying to ring. There was something here that was escaping
this botanist and Captain Reynard. I couldn't put my finger on it. I
had the crazy feeling that something, like the Purloined Letter, was
hidden here. Something obvious, something that could be, under the
proper circumstances, dangerous.

But I didn't figure it out. Not just then. Not until it was too late.
All the clues were there; the plant and the way it could gather
water vapor and nitrogen, the threat of taking it from its native
ecology. Everything. But I didn't tumble. Not until it was too late and
the obvious had taken a toll. In lives....

On 23/35/02 Venus Date the _Eagle_ was fully loaded and ready for the
long haul back up to Earth. The colonists gathered to bid us farewell,
and the party was a corker. Bat did his human radar act somewhere
along about the time the fifteenth libation was poured. He was at his
extra-normal best, telling astounded colonists just what they were
doing with their pinkies at ranges up to three hundred yards in pitch
darkness. I could have told them that he was almost as good as UVR, but
that might have spoiled the effect.

Three hours later we had bid an enthusiastic good-bye to that mushy
ball of swamp and stench those poor colonials called home, and the
valves sighed shut in the _Eagle's_ flanks. The loading cranes pulled
away and our own were retracted. The ramp was cleared and the lift-ship
alarm blared through the _Eagle_.

The gyros reached operating RPM and I let my hands play over the
consoles. The boat shuddered and lifted slowly on a tail of fire. I fed
her more power and the accelerometer moved up to 2G. I held her there
until we broke out of the clouds and into the crystalline cobalt of the
ionosphere. I swung the power lever over and the _Eagle_ leaped upward,
her needle-nose pointed for home.

We were well past turn-over, in fact just about nineteen hours from
Earth when things began happening.

Bat called Control, his voice tense with excitement. "Morley! There's
something coming ... fast! I can feel it!"

I started to ask him what was coming in fast, and whether or not he
could "see" it clearly through the metal of the ship, but I never
finished. UVR flashed a red alert warning on my control panel ... and
it was the last warning it ever gave.

The panel screeched: "METEOR SWARM!" and went dead. The lights
flickered and went out as the _Eagle_ bucked and roared in protest. The
sound of tearing metal knifed through the hull, and then the whooshing
sound of escaping air. Alarm bells clattered futilely--bulkheads
slammed. The ship's self-sealing mesoderm saved most of the air, but
not before the pressure in the boat dropped from 14.7 down to 6 lbs.
per square inch in about two seconds and doubled me up in an agony of
aero-embolism. For a long while there was silence, and I fought the
glittering knives of pain that seemed to be cutting me into hamburger.
Then the lights came back on, dimly. There was still life in the old
_Eagle_.

I staggered to my feet and rang the tuberoom. A pilot's first instinct
is to check the power. No matter what has happened to his ship, if
there's power there's hope.

"Morley...!" It was Bat calling back through the interphone. "We've had
it down here! The sheathing is gone and I've got three men killed!" I
could hear the sound of metal sizzling in the background as Bat looked
about for more dope to pass on. As it was it looked bad enough. If
the sheathing was shot, that meant that he was taking lethal doses of
radiation even as he spoke to me.

"Bat!" I shouted, "Bat, you crazy fool! If that place is hot, get out
of there!"

I got no reply.

"Bat! That's an order! Put the pile on automatic and get the hell out!"

"No soap, Morley...." Bat's voice seemed edged with pain. "You know the
autos won't last for more than thirty minutes. Strictly ... emergency
stuff...." And then his voice grew even tighter. "The storage, Morley!
Those stinking ... rocks ... took ... out ... the storage! All the
thorium went out ... the side ... they hit ... the storage bunker!"

That tore it. Without thorium ... without even an extra gram ... the
best we could hope for was making it to Earth. Luna and its lovely
one-sixth gravity for a crash landing was out.

I tried to get Captain Reynard on the phone, but there was no answer
from his quarters. I didn't need a diagram to figure out that he was
either dead or so tied up with bends that he couldn't reach the phone.

I started the compressors and the pressure began to build up, but the
mesoderm patches wouldn't stand more than 9 lbs. Well, it had to do.

The griping pains eased a bit inside me and I tried to take stock of
the situation. Station by station, I called the crew and assessed the
damage. It was plenty.

The whole communications deck was gone and the only radio on board that
worked was the tiny panel set in control. The UVR was mangled and so
was its crew of four men. Three tubemen had died in the tuberoom and I
didn't know how badly Bat might be hurt. No one could enter because the
place was hot. The thorium was gone and the sheathing on the pile too.
I looked in on the Captain and scratched him off the list. Death from
bends is not a pleasant thing to see. The _Eagle_ was my command now.
As pilot and Second Officer, I took over, for better or worse.

I returned to Control and gave the crew a quick rundown on the
situation. Work parties were made up and the wreckage cleared away. The
dead--the ones we could find--were wrapped in celoflex and consigned
to space. I mumbled a prayer over them as they slipped out into the
void. They weren't all Christians, but somehow I had a feeling that
they wouldn't mind too much. There's something about the immensity of
the cosmos that makes men relinquish their petty prejudices. And when I
got back into Control and watched the tell-tales on the Geiger-Muller
Counters down in the tuberoom, I said another prayer--for Bat Kendo.

I kept wondering why we had hit that meteor swarm. The normal chances
of such an encounter are in the vicinity of a thousand to one. Bits of
memory kept tugging at me, but I couldn't get things properly trimmed
up until a call from Bat in the tuberoom furnished the key.

"Morley, there's a piece of those damned rocks down here ... and it's
melting!"

Ice! Water! Weather-plant! The pieces of the puzzle began to fit now.
The swarm was ice ... superhard ice ... tempered by the awful cold
of the void. And the weather-plant in the hold--one hundred tons
of it--had attracted it hungrily! The plant had more than just an
affinity for water! It acted like a magnet! There had probably been
nitrogen dissolved in the water, too, and that had added to the plant's
attraction!

A sick feeling moved into the pit of my stomach and stayed right there.
There was no way of jettisoning the cargo, and there wasn't enough
fuel for a try at airless Luna! That meant....

I could hear the Venusian botanist's words echo mockingly in my ears.
"... we suspect it can create its own weather!"

I knew real fear then. I looked at the great greenish globe of Earth
that grew hourly larger beneath us, and shuddered....

       *       *       *       *       *

Seventeen hours later we were into the ionosphere. My instruments
warned that I had just enough thorium left in the pile to keep the
_Eagle_ up for another hour and ten minutes. The radar was gone, but
the weather-plant was fat and healthy.

I tried to pick up a good spot for the landing. The Mojave Desert.
Chances for clear weather were better there than anywhere else, though
I could guess even then what our chances were.

The _Eagle_ shuddered to a vibrating halt, balancing on her tail-flare
at about twenty five miles. The gyros were climbing the sonic scale,
sending their shrieking whine through every deck of the crippled ship.
I looked outside, and cold sweat beaded my face. Even at this height, a
fine mist was forming around the _Eagle_.

Freed of Venus' formaldehyde atmosphere, our tons of weather-plant were
happily doing their job. Drawing water vapor out of Earth's air. It
liked fog. _And it could make its own weather!_

I looked at the chronometer. I had just one hour now to get this ship
down through this soup that clung to us--without UVR. I had one hour to
do the job or gravity would do it for me.

I let her slip down to fifteen miles and held there, gyros protesting.
The mist thickened. I rang the crash alarm, sending all hands who were
not actually engaged in the running of the ship to their quarters and
the crash-hammocks. My hands were icy cold.

The _Eagle_ sank slowly down to five miles and hung there like a
ball bouncing on a jet of water. The mist billowed about us, turning
radioactive from the vicious lashing of the tail-flare.

I knew that the weather was perfectly clear perhaps two hundred yards
away from the ship, but the weather-plant was creating the soggy
weather it liked and I was being effectively blindfolded by the--

Blindfolded!

I grabbed for the interphone. "Bat!" I yelled, "Bat! Can you see
anything below?"

Old Bat knew right away what I wanted, but his answer wasn't what I
wanted to hear. "Too much metal under me, Morley ... too much metal."
His voice was unsteady and seamed with pain.

I glanced at the chronometer. Thirty seven minutes left. And the fog
clung to the ports.

"Morley," Bat sounded something like himself for just a minute. "I've
got a notion. Maybe ... maybe it will work. Break out a pressure-suit
and get the craneman on the ball. And Morley...." Here I could imagine
that he was smiling. "... break out a bottle of the skipper's bonded
stuff, will you?"

"What are you dreaming up?" I demanded anxiously.

"We have to get this cargo down," Bat said thinly. "You remember what
the Foundation man said before we left ... people need food, Morley...."

"What are you thinking about?" I asked again, and then as realization
came, I added angrily: "Never mind that! I know what you're planning
Bat, and you can forget it! I'll get this can down all right!"

The voice from the interphone was dry as dust. "Like hell you will. Who
are you kidding?"

I had no answer there. Without UVR to guide me, I was blind. I didn't
have a chance to get the _Eagle_ down, and we both knew it.

"I'm coming up," Bat said, "The automatics can take care of things down
here now."

I glanced at the chronometer. Twenty-two minutes to go. Bat was right.
The autos could carry on in the tuberoom now. I felt them cut into the
circuit.

My heart was heavy as I called a craneman into control to handle the
equipment. Together we unlimbered a pressure-suit from the locker. Then
I found the skipper's rations and uncorked a bottle. In a moment Bat
was in Control. When I saw him my stomach muscles tightened. He looked
as though he'd been broiled. His face was a swollen mass of angry
flesh and his clothes were seared into his hide. Every movement must
have been sheer hell for him, but he staggered into the suit and made
himself fast to the Control crane.

Before calling for the steelglas helmet, he reached thirstily for the
skipper's bottle and took a long pull.

"Ahhh," he breathed, "That's fine stuff ... real fine." He offered me
the bottle, grinning painfully. "Have one on me, Morley...."

       *       *       *       *       *

I let the fiery liquor drive down the lump that was sticking in my
throat and handed Bat the bottle. He finished it in two swallows,
looked at it regretfully, and tossed it aside. It landed in the corner
of Control where it lay, rocking senselessly back and forth with the
jolting movements of the boat.

Bat fastened his helmet on and started for the valve. I wanted to reach
out and stop him, but I couldn't. I wanted to say something to him ...
but what? How do you thank a man for buying your life with his own?
What do you say to pay a man for his pain and his torture?

That's right. You don't say anything. And neither did I. You just stand
there and watch, with your heart a lump of lead inside you. I did that,
and no more.

He turned toward me just as the inner valve closed on him and the
cable he dragged behind him. "See ya," he said with a clumsy wave.
And then he was outside in that radioactive mist of death, riding the
crane out and down. Hanging by a thin cable in that stinking fog and
using his useless mutational powers to save the hides of his ship and
shipmates ... _and_ the load of weather-plant that meant food to the
stay-at-homes.

The mass-ratio altimeter gave its last reading--four miles--and then it
was through, its sensitive coils thrown out of phase by the mass of the
planetary globe under us. Here, now, was where UVR should have taken
over.

But there was no UVR. Only a man hanging at the end of a cable in a
glowing mist that was burning his last chance of life out of him.

I heard his instructions clearly over the small panel set. "About
three miles up now."

I let the _Eagle_ down slowly. Two miles. One. Hold. Three thousand
feet. Two. One. Hold. Five hundred feet. Hold. Mojave Desert right
under us. Baldy off to the right. Lancaster about twenty miles north.
Down easy....

The tail-flare was splashing against the desert beneath now, turning
the clinging mist into a ruddy shroud. A glance at the chronometer
showed about three minutes fuel.

"Let ... her ... down ... slow." Bat's voice was fading fast as the
terrific heat seared him and the radiation burned deep.

The fuel should be gone now. No time left. Two hundred feet, one
hundred, fifty, thirty....

I heard Bat's voice sob just once through the radio. "Oh ... dear
God...!" And that was all.

No time. No fuel.

Silence!

The thunder of the jets stopped abruptly, leaving a frightening void.
The _Eagle_ slewed about sickeningly and dropped the remaining thirty
feet like so much lead. There was a rending crash as her tail section
crumpled, battered plates sinking into the sand, and then she settled
wearily to a halt amid the bubbling magma of atomized earth....

       *       *       *       *       *

So the pilot-shipment of weather-plant got here all right, and it
exceeded the Holcomb Foundation's fondest hopes. It brought fertility
where there had been only barrenness. Long rows of it still bring
richness and life to the soil and the danger of famine is gone forever.

Just remember now, the next time you take the Pacific stratojet. Look
under you at that garden of plenty. See the rows upon rows of richly
bearing plants. Look too at the interstices where a tiny Venusian moss
called "weather-plant" makes it all possible.

Bat Kendo? He died. He died doing what he wanted to do, and that's
something. The others maybe weren't so lucky. Of course you never heard
of Bat, or of the _Eagle_ for that matter. All this happened a long,
long time ago, and the old memories tarnish. Now people take their
lives pretty much as they find it, and they never wonder about the guys
who made it what it is.

Yes, humans are a strange breed. Like I say ... forgetful. Very
forgetful.



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Flight of the Eagle" ***

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