Thanks to whatever Almighty God or Gods rule this world, the crossbowmen of Zanadar use smooth-headed bolts! For if this article had been barbed with a hooked arrowhead I could never in a million years have worked it free from the tangle of wires in my precarious position, hanging head down over the abyss, holding on with my right arm alone, and unable to see what the hell my left hand was doing!
With a twangg of suddenly-drawn-taut wires the quarrel came free and flew away, and I felt as glad as the inhabitant of Death Row whose local governor has had a change of heart just as they were strapping him in the chair.
Wires creaked as Lukor tested his pedals.
The aileron flapped up and down.
Everything was fine again, and I could begin drawing my aching, ice-cold, and exhausted body back to a more secure seat on that pontoon. Taking it very slowly I retraced my former actions until I was standing erect on the pontoon. Then, moving my hands an inch at a time―my whole arm from wrist to shoulder trembling with strain and fatigue―I inched my hold along the wing until I was facing the cockpit again. Darloona, Lukor, and Koja were staring at me.
I got the feeling none of them had been breathing while I had been out on the wing.
From the ache in my lungs I suddenly realized I had been holding my breath, too.
I hooked one half-frozen arm over the side of the cowling, arid hauled my left knee up onto the edge of the wing. Then I levered my weight up, until my right foot was off the pontoon.
And then it was that the hand of Fate played an amusing little trick
My right arm, numb from the strain, slipped sickeningly, hurling me backwards.
My right leg, which was still stiffly extended, came crashing down with all my weight on the heel.
Directly onto that hollow pontoon of stressed paper which was filled with the levitating gas
And punched a hole right through it!
We sagged, our aerial contraption floundering from side to side as the precious gas went screaming out through that horrible rent in the balloon-pontoon.
The flying machine veered suddenly to port. hanging at a steep angle.
Obviously both pontoons held the same amount of gas, thus perfectly balancing the weight of the craft.
And it was equally obvious that, with one pontoon breached, we were no longer airworthy.
I tried to plug the hole with a bunch of cloth, with the palm of my hand, with my foot―it was no good. The gas was escaping rapidly. The pontoon was almost half empty by this time, and we were losing altitude very fast.
Lukor played on the controls like a virtuoso on the keyboard, striving to right our sickening tilt, striving to bring the flying machine into a smooth glide. but it could not be done.
The gale was too powerful.
As we lost flying trim, sagging drunkenly to port, the flat of the wing swung about―caught the full force of the howling gale―and was torn to rags in an instant.
I was almost flung loose as half the wing fabric sheared away and slapped me violently in the side of the head.
We fell in a long wobbling curve towards the tree tops far below.
In mere moments we would hit those upper branches, and at the speed we were traveling our craft would be torn apart and we would be slammed with killing force to the ground below.
My mind was working now with incredible rapidity.
Suddenly, the most audacious plan sprang full-blown into my head. It had about one chance in a thousand of working―but, unless we tried it, we wouldn't have even that one chance.
Yelling like a madman I told my companions what to do.
They must have thought me insane, but the urgency and the note of command in my voice must have been so completely compelling that they sprang almost instantly to obey my directions.
It was probably that instantaneous obedience on the part of Darloona, Lukor, and Koja that saved all our lives.
It was a crazy gamble but there was simply nothing else to do.
They climbed out of their cockpits onto the starboard pontoon, which was still, thank the Gods, airtight!
The moment they were all out on the pontoon, I swung underneath the hurtling keel like an acrobat, swung along a strut until I, too, clung on that last pontoon.
Then, hacking away with our swords flying, like crazy men, we cut loose the pontoon!
All was a tumbling fall through whirling darkness―the treetops horribly close―wind blinding us―it was a miracle we managed to cut the pontoon clear of the hull and wing in time.
But we did.
Now a dead weight, the hulk of the flying craft was swept away from us. It struck the treetops with a sickening impact that tore it apart, smashing it into a spray of flying fragments. It must have been traveling at close to a hundred miles an hour when it suddenly lost all buoyancy at once, and swerved into collision with the trees beneath us.
As for we four mad mariners of the sky, we dangled with our hands alone clinging to the stubs of the severed struts. The sole remaining pontoon floated above us like a weightless log. With the dead weight of the wings, hull, and empty portside pontoon cleared away, the amount of gas in the remaining pontoon was just barely sufficient to hold us aloft.
Our brush with death had been so miraculously close that I was tempted to ascribe the whole affair to some unseen Jovian Providence. A few seconds delay would have been fatal―we would still have been hacking away at the struts when the craft collided with the treetops.
It was the narrowest escape I have ever experienced, or have ever heard of, for that matter.
We spent the rest of that night on the ground. Not even up in the crotch of one of the soaring borath trees, which would have afforded us safety from the predators who prowled the jungle aisles at night. No―we had, all of us, had enough of aerial high jinks to last a lifetime. I, for one, would be delighted to try my luck against any creature aprowl in the jungle rather than leave the safe flatness of solid ground.
Our levitating pontoon, of course, was not enough to hold the four of us aloft for long. But the blessed thing did indeed suffice to break our speed of descent so that we floated down, buffeted by the winds, and climbed off onto big solid branches. It took us a long time to climb down to the ground from there; we were all shaking with fatigue and nervous exhaustion from our narrow brush with destruction. But reach the good old terra firma (or Callista firma, as you prefer) we did at last.
We were just too bone-weary to worry about anything else right then, so we decided to camp right where we were. Lukor still had the flint-and-steel in his girdle wherewith he had lit his oil lamp when he and I had been exploring the secret passages within the walls of the royal citadel of Zanadar, so we managed to make a good bonfire with dead leaves and dry branches. Then we curled up and slept the heavy dreamless sleep of the completely exhausted.
The next day we found a jungle stream from which to drink our fill of cold, clear, deliciously pure water. And Koja, the hunter, spotted a game trail beaten to the water's edge. While we hid he watched the trail, and before very long a family of vastodons, the elephant boars of the Thanatorian jungles, came down the trail for a drink. He rose out of hiding, flailing away with his whip-sword, and managed to kill a cow vastodon.
Hacking boar steaks off the kill with our blades and roasting the dripping red meat over a fire, we feasted gloriously. I have eaten in the finest restaurants in my world, from Antoine's in New Orleans to Luk Chow's in Hong Kong, but never have I enjoyed a meal more than that half-raw, half-charred chunk of bloody vastodon steak chewed down without tenderizer, spices, or even salt and pepper.
Of course, this was the first food I had eaten in the past two days, which may have lent savor to the entrée!