After which she made a circular motion close to her head with her right hand. She looked very puzzled.
"I don't get it," he said.
She reached out and ran her finger along the instrument panel until she located the compass. Holding the tip of her finger on it, she turned her head toward him. with the other hand, she made the circular movement.
He said, "Oh! You mean ... you don't know now where that place ... your goal ... destination is? Where we've been headed since we got here?"
She nodded vigorously and sat back. Now she looked distressed.
"I'm sorry," he said.
That did not help her. Or him. And it was a winner of an understatement.
"It must've been that white-hot ball, that St. Elmo's fire," he said. "That last explosion. It was a huge sphere of electricity discharging. Somehow, it glitched that homing sense, whatever it is that was leading you straight to your destination. I thought that was some sort of psychic power. But it could be electricalsemi-electrical, anyway."
Tears rolled down her cheeks.
"We still have the panel compass," he said. "And maybe your, uh, power, homing sense, will come back soon."
No use telling her that the compass was probably messed up, too. He intended to go by it until he knew that it was malfunctioning.
A half hour later, they shot out of the storm. The late afternoon sun shone unimpeded by clouds and revealed that they were only about two thousand feet above the ground. The mountains were behind them. Ahead was a plain that ran over the horizon. Isolated trees and groves of trees were scattered over it. A river made S-turns across the terrain. The vegetation was much thicker along its banks.
Many animals were heading toward or away from the water. The land reminded him of an African veldt except that the grass was a bright green and many of the beasts did not look like Earth fauna.
Not like present-day animals, anyway. Some of them looked like mammals that had roamed Earth many millions of years ago.
For instance, an elephantine creature with a long proboscis and four tusks, two turned upward and two downward. Its ears were rather small, though. That must mean that this area did not have a hot African-like climate.
Heading north by the panel compass, Jack flew for another thirty minutes. Meanwhile, he worried about Tappy. She was still weeping. And then there was the fuel supply. Which of the indicators showed how much was left? To take her mind off her loss-if it could be done-he asked her to locate the fuel indicator. She touched an instrument much like the altitude indicator except that the liquid in the tube was a bright green and the symbols alongside it were different.
"Looks as if it's half-full," he said with a cheeriness he did not feel. "We can still go a long way. How about that?"
Despair had been covering her face like a transparent mask. It did not change.
The plain eased into hills which soon arched their backs, like a meow of alarmed cats, to become mini-mountains. Colossal trees seemed to stride over these, trees the lowest branches of which curved downward into the ground, forming enormous Gothic arches.
After an estimated forty miles, the plane put the hills and the great trees behind it. Ahead was another vast plain. Five miles from the edge of the forest was a broad shallow valley. In its center was a very strange phenomenon.
"There's a dark and roughly circular cloud about a half mile across," he told the girl. "Every seven seconds, something in its center glows. Must be very bright to get through that cloud. Can't make its outlines out. Wait a minute! Let me count ... ah! The glow lasts seven seconds. And there's a camp, a big one, circling the cloud. Tents, huts. Lots of people scattered around. Vehicles parked past the camp, some planes parked beyond them."
He swung the plane back and straightened it out parallel to the edge of the forest.
"We'll land along here someplace and then hide the plane, if we can. I don't want to get any closer. If they're C;aol ... hope they didn't see us."
As he turned the craft, he had seen men behind some big instruments aimed at the cloud. A small party was entering the cloud.
The flash silhouetted the men when they were first enveloped, but, a few seconds later, they were no longer visible.
Tappy's finger touched the side of his face. When he turned his head, he saw her smiling. The despair was gone. She leaned forward, traced a fingertip along the instrument panel, and stopped it at the compass. Her gestures after that, plus her evident joy, told him that they were close to their destination.
He was concentrating on landing, but he said, "Those people there. Are they Gaol?"
He glanced at her. She was drawing the edge of her right hand across her throat. Then she nodded.
"We have to get down and hide the plane," he said. "I hope the camp doesn't have radar equipment. If they do, they'll have spotted us by now. Everybody's attention seemed concentrated on the cloud."
He was also worried that their three pursuers might suddenly appear and see them.
He lowered the window, leaned out, and checked the wheel wells, what would be called fenders if this were a car. The wheels were still within the wells. Okay. If he had to land it on its belly, he would. He asked Tappy about the wheel-lowering control. She did not know where it was.
He took the craft down parallel to the edge of the forest. Except for some bushes here and there, the plain made an excellent landing field. It was not as smooth as a concrete strip, of course, but it would do. He flattened out the angle of descent about ten feet above the ground and slowly eased it down. Then he leaned out through the window again. The wheels fore and aft on the left side were halfway out of the wells. Must be some radar in the plane that automatically activated the wheel-lowering mechanism when it came within a certain distance of the ground.
The front wheels touched a second before the back wheels, which came down with a bang.
"How do I stop this plane?" he said. "Where are the brakes?"
He had released his grip on the inflatable wheel rim, but the vehicle was still going at about five miles an hour. He had to steer around several bushes blocking their path.
Tappy groped along the panel until she touched a slight protuberance, a purple panel glowing with a faint light. She pushed in on it. The panel lost its glow, and the plane slowed down, then stopped.
He pressed the panel again and turned the plane into the forest.
Somewhere on that panel or maybe on the wheel was a control that would permit him to lessen or increase the speed below five mph.
At the moment, he would have to do without it, improvise.
"Can the wings be folded?" he said.
She shrugged.
"Don't know, right?"
The plane taxied between the arches of two trees, its wingtips almost scraping the bark. Then he swung sharply right and went under an arch. When the craft was behind the trunk, unseeable from the forest edge, he pressed the purple panel. The plane rolled about ten more feet before stopping. It was still behind the tree, which had a trunk ten times thicker than that of a California sequoia.
The seat belts hardened and slid back into their recesses.
"Know how to back this thing up?"
Tappy shook her head.
As he got out of the plane, Jack realized how tight and tense he was. His body ached, and his neck muscles were as stiff as a hardcover book. After he got Tappy to knead his neck, he could bend his head without the neck vertebrae cracking. He did the same for her. Then they explored the area, though making sure not to go too far. It would be easy to get lost in this vast shadowy place where the longest line of sight ended at sixty feet.