Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Citadel of the Star Lords by Hamilton Edmond
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page
Ebook has 655 lines and 26249 words, and 14 pages
CITADEL OF THE STAR LORDS
Out of the dark vastness of the void came a conquering horde, incredible and invincible, with Earth's only weapon--a man from the past!
As he gunned his plane northward through the night, Price thought of the roller-coaster when he'd been a kid, of how you went faster and faster until you hit the big plunge.
Well, he was on the big plunge now. And what would end this roller-coaster ride--prison, or escape, or a crash? It had to be one of those.
He looked down, and there was only blackness. The deserts of California and Nevada are dark and wide, and he was keeping well away from the airways beacons and the main highways.
He kept the Beechcraft as high as he could. He was flying without lights, but with what they already had against him, that minor infraction wasn't important. He kept looking back, expecting every minute to see the red-and-green winglights of Border Patrol planes coming up on his tail.
If he was lucky, if he slipped them long enough, if he crossed north without being sighted by the passenger planes that shuttled between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, he might just make it to Bill Willerman's and get the Beechcraft under cover. If--if--if--
There was another if, Price thought bitterly. If he'd had any brains, he wouldn't be in this spot at all.
He turned on the radio. He flipped the dial around, getting loud music from a Vegas hotel, then a political speech, then more music--and then a news broadcast. As he'd expected, he was at the top of the news.
"--so that even while Arnolfo Ruiz, firebrand revolutionary exile, is under arrest by Mexican police, United States authorities are conducting an intensive air-dragnet search for the American pilot who smuggled Ruiz across the border. That unknown pilot is known to have returned across the border an hour ago, and police of three states have been alerted.
"The AEC announces that its next test will be that of an experimental small new H-bomb whose effects will be studied for--"
Price savagely cut the radio. He damned the announcer, and Ruiz, and himself. Most of all, himself.
He might as well look the truth in the face. If it hadn't been this, it would have been something else. He'd been playing the fool for years, ever since Korea. Other fliers had come home from there and taken up their jobs again, but a job had been too dull for him; he'd drifted along with the fast-buck fly-boys out for fun and excitement, hauling hunting and fishing parties, spending the profits in bordertown bars, going broke and starting over again--and now finally this. His roller-coaster ride was about over.
It would be over for good if he didn't reach Willerman's ranch before daylight. Bill would hide the plane for him. He'd saved Bill's neck a couple of times in the old days, and he could depend on him. But he had to reach him, first.
He saw the glow in the sky that came from the lights of Las Vegas, and he kept warily wide of it. He looked back again. No Patrol planes yet. As he rushed on, Price began to feel that he was going to make it.
Then, suddenly and disastrously, everything happened at once.
He saw lights on the ground ahead--an oddly scattered pattern of lights too thin to be a town, too wide-spread to be a ranch.
At the same moment, two fast jets screamed down from the upper darkness and nearly tore his wings off. They curved around for another pass at him.
"Air Force planes!" thought Price. "Hell, that tears it--"
He had less than a chance in a million to lose them, and he knew it. But he was going to be a long time in jail, and he might as well give them a run for it. Just possibly, the slower Beechcraft could get away in the dark the next time they overshot him.
He gunned the plane wide open, rushing high over the scattered lights. And then, incredibly, he was free of his pursuers. He looked over his shoulder and saw them drawing back.
It didn't make sense. Why would they suddenly draw back? Anyway, with those jets off his tail, he still had a chance.
Price looked down. Among the lights down there he saw lights on a queer steel tower. He'd seen pictures of a tower like that somewhere. It wasn't an oil-rig, but something he couldn't remember.
And then, suddenly, he remembered, and a terrible coldness choked him and his flesh flinched as he saw a door into nightmare opening.
That tower, and the announcement of a new H-bomb test, and the distance he was from Vegas, and the way those frantic jets had drawn back....
"Oh, no," said Price. "Oh, no, oh no, oh no--"
He was still saying it when the bomb went off and the universe cracked wide open under his racing plane.
The cataclysm that hit Price was without light or sound. That, when he thought of it later, was the most awful feature of it.
He felt a shock, but not the shock of ultimate annihilation he expected. This was a shuddering impact as of the plane, himself, hitting some barrier and forcing through, a rending, tearing, dizzying thing that was like no sensation he had ever experienced.
He yelled, naked terror forcing the air from his lungs. His weight flung against the straps, and he knew from that that the plane was in a spin. Mechanically, his hands reached to the controls. He levelled off....
Price's mind was a mad turmoil. What had happened?
He had blundered right over the bomb test-area, right over the bomb-tower. And the jets guarding the area had tried to stop him. Probably, if his radio hadn't been off, he would have heard them screaming frantic warnings to him.
But had the bomb really gone off? If it had, he would surely have been instantly annihilated.
He hadn't been. He was alive. The plane was ticking along through the night. The instruments functioned.
Price couldn't think. The mind just could not grapple with a thing like this. He sat, mechanically touching the controls, and the Beechcraft roared on and on.
Gradually, his mind came alive. He shakily swung the plane around. He was going back to Las Vegas. Right now, arrest and prison looked good to him compared to what had happened, or nearly happened.
If he hadn't been so tensely trying to escape, he thought, he would have remembered about the bomb-tests coming up. There had been newspaper stories. Guarded stories about a radical physical effect detected during explosions of the new-type H-bombs, and mention of elaborate preparations being made to study these unusual effects.
Price's thoughts leaped suddenly. He recalled a scientist's statement that the center of explosion of the new-type bomb might be like the eye of a hurricane, a focus of inconceivable forces but affected in a radically different way by those forces.
It seemed an insane speculation. Yet everything about this was insane. He would be himself, if he didn't get down to Earth soon.
He could not see the glow of Las Vegas anywhere in the night. He cut his radio in and spoke hoarsely into it.
"Beechcraft 4556 calling Las Vegas Airport! Come in, Las Vegas!"
There was no answer. The radio seemed operative--but when he turned the receiver dials, not a sound came out.
"Knocked out," Price muttered. "And no wonder, if--"
He couldn't finish the thought, it was too soul-shaking a thing to speculate on, the thing that might have happened to him.
He curved the plane around, looking for highway lights, for an airways beacon, anything.
Nothing. Nothing but the darkness and the stars.
A little frantically, he swung the plane around and started eastward again. He must have missed Las Vegas. But if he kept going east, he'd surely cut the main highways. There were always lots of cars on them at night, in the summer.
He flew on and on. And the darkness continued. No lights at all, not even the glimmer from a lonely ranch.
Nothing.
He would have landed, gladly now, but he did not know where he was or what was under him. The Beechcraft was equipped with extra fuel tanks for long flights away from any source of supply, and they had been full when he started. He could fly a long time yet.
He flew.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page