Therefore, they would not shoot the plane down.
What they would do, probably, would be to try to force their quarry to land. Unless ... no use attempting to imagine what was in their bag of tricks. He would find out soon enough.
The planes were slowly but steadily closing the gap between them and Jack's plane. One pigeon. Two falcons.
Below, a forest spread out, dark green like an Earth woods except here and there were irregularly shaped areas of orangecolored trees. The crater was receding fast. Ahead was more forest. In the distance were the peaks of a mountain range. Now and then the sunlight flashed on a river. Or was there more than one? A large lake appeared on the right.
A number of tiny boats with single masts and bright white and purple triangular sails scudded across the smooth green water.
Jack was too high to make out the figures on the decks.
He started as something touched his neck. It was -Fappy's finger, of course.
He was very jumpy. For a second, he had thought that an insect had landed on his neck.
Her wondering and anxious expression showed him that he had been silent too long.
"The plane on my left is now even with us," he said. "The other ... here it comes! It's even with us now. Now they're rising.
I think they plan to get above us and force us down."
Jack shouted, "Oh, no, you don't!"
Tappy gasped and jumped a little at his outburst.
Savagely, he turned the wheel to the left, pushing in on it at the same time.
The craft curved to the left and dropped swiftly.
Jack, glancing at Tappy, saw that her eyes were wide open, and she had paled.
"I'm trying to shake them!" he said. "Hang on! We may be in for a rough ride!"
He was thinking, Why in hell didn't I grab the radiator and try to shoot them with it?
He was doing better than he had thought he would in such a situation. So far, he had not done badly for one who considered himself to be an artist, not a man of action, ten thousand miles from being an Indiana Jones. But that had been on the ground.
He had frozen for a while when in the air, and he still was not completely thawed out.
The pilots of the Gaol machines had quick reflexes, though.
They had not been caught with their mouths open. Their planes had curved and dropped, too, following his course by a split second or so. Now they were above him again, diving at the same angle and velocity. They were also Jockeying so that each would be just above the end of one of the wings.
He turned the wheel and pulled it back until the plane was on an even keel. At least, he thought that it was. By now, he assumed that one of the instruments on the panel was an angle indicator. It looked like the ones he had seen in movies showing an airplane's cockpit. It was round and in its center was a horizontal line. The line swung up at one end and down at the other, or vice versa, as one wing dropped and the other rose.
At the moment, it was straight across, and the wings seemed to be level, too.
Give him enough time, and he might figure out most of the functions of the instruments.
But he was not Going to be given that time
The bottoms of the fuselages, twelve or so feet above the tips of his wings, began lowering. He noted with a part of his mind that the wheels had withdrawn into the shell. He supposed that the wheels of his craft had also withdrawn. But he had heard no sound of machinery moving.
Jack told Tappy about the situation. She lifted the radiator with both hands, holding it before her face.
"Yes, I know," he said. "But wait a minute. I want to try something."
By then, the fuselage bottoms were only six feet above the wingtips of Jack's machine. The gap between them constantly varied by a foot or so. The rough air bounced Jack's plane up and down and did the same to their pursuers. They would not be able to touch their bottoms against his wingtips. Otherwise, the wingtips might break. Or something else and worse might happen.
They were betting that he would not try to call their bluff.
"Let's see!" he said loudly.
He released much of his grip on the wheel rim. At the same time, he pulled back hard on the wheel. The nose of the craft lifted sharply, and the wingtips almost struck the other planes.
The pilots must have been startled, but they lifted their own planes quickly enough to avoid the collision. They did not slow down, however. They shot ahead of Jack,"s machine.
Jack took his hands off the wheel. The nose dropped, and the craft headed downward at an angle of perhaps forty-five degrees in relation to the horizon. He had expected it to stall and to fall like a stone. But it must have some sort of safety factor, a fool-compensator, in its program. In several seconds, it began to level out. The machines in front of him began climbing and turning at the same time. For certain, they would come back and attempt the same forcing-down.
He had gained some time and distance, however. And the sky, which had been clear, was suddenly dark on the horizon. He hoped that the clouds would be heavy with rain. A lightning and thunder storm would be welcome, too. He just might be able to lose the Gaol in a storm.
He said, "Tappy! Are we still going north? Headed directly toward whatever you want to get to?"
She turned her head slightly to the left and to the right. Then she pointed a few degrees to her right. Jack turned the machine until she nodded, and he straightened out the course. He had seen that one of the indicators on the panel had swung its pointer, too.
The needle tip now rested by a symbol which he supposed must indicate north.
Soon, too soon for him, the Gaol had returned. One of them rode on his left, making no attempt to get above his wingtip.
He stretched his neck to turn and look through the window in the top. At first, he saw only sky. Then abruptly and sinisterly, the nose of the second machine appeared. It was directly above Jack's machine and descending on a horizontal plane.
He understood at once what its new position meant. It was going to lower itself on the top of Jack's plane. Then it would land, in a manner of speaking, on his plane. It would decrease its speed until its quarry would have to support part of the weight of the Gaol craft.
Its pilot must know what he was doing. He must be sure that Jack's machine could not sustain the added weight. And that it would be home, however slowly, to the ground.
A moment later, a grinding noise and a shudder running through the fuselage announced that Jack was right.
The window was blocked by the blue bottom of the fuselage.
Jack told Tappy what had happened. Her alarm and puzzlement vanished. She held the radiator out to him.
He took it and said, "I'd rather not shoot through the skywindow."
One of the panel dials had on its face a vertical tube like a thermometer. The "mercury" was a bright orange. Its top had gone down, passing symbols marking, he supposed, altitude. The machine was losing speed and height at a rate that upset him. Lint he was not going to panic. Not now, anyway.
His mouth was very dry, and a low-burning pressure in him told him that he must urinate. Soon. Or the pressure would be intense, and the burning would not be low.
"I want to open the window on the door in my side." he told Tappy. "There are two buttons. The forward one is orange. The one behind it is yellow with a blue stripe running across it."
She had shown him how to unlock the operational program.
Maybe she was familiar with the design of the cockpit.
Tappy smiled and groped along the door to her right unt she found the buttons. Then she rested a finger lightly on the yellow one.