River of Ice

CHAPTER XIV Forced Landing

The plane, outside of the professional, almost wingless speed ships, was about the fastest thing in the country. It headed west at such a clip as to make a perceptible lengthening out of the sunrise. The sun just seemed to hang still in the east, as if it never would clear the horizon. This was partly imagination, but partly due to the plane’s speed of over three hundred miles an hour almost due west.

In the sealed fuselage were five people. The Avenger was at the controls because he wanted to make all possible time in answer to the cries of Josh Newton from the caves on the Pacific coast. Benson was quite sure the alert Negro and the methodically intelligent MacMurdie had found the Wallers’ caves by now.

Sitting behind the man with the pale steel eyes was Smitty, looking as if he would make the plane go even faster by sheer will power. Then there were three girls — Nellie Gray, Lini Waller and Josh Newton’s wife, Rosabel.

Rosabel was like Smitty: looking as if she were concentrating on making the ship go even faster. Josh was in danger! Her Josh! That had been enough to transform the pretty Negress into a tigress, quietly biding her time, and to make her insist on going west with them.

Lini Waller had turned up once more at Bleek Street just as the four were leaving. Benson had seized her shoulders and stared into her strangely vacant eyes. “We are going to the place where you left your brother. You understand? The caves. Where your brother is.”

“I understand,” Lini had said, tonelessly. “You are going to the caves where my brother is.”

“That’s right. Now try to comprehend this. We can save much time if you will guide us to those caves. My men radioed from there, but had no chance to tell us the exact location. Will you guide us?”

“No,” said Lini Waller, just as tonelessly and calmly as a moment before she had said, “I understand.”

“Your brother’s life may be lost if we lose time tracing down the cave. You must lead us there.”

“No,” said Lini.

And that was that. Hypnotism, even for The Avenger, was out of the question. You can’t hypnotize anyone whose conscious will is gone. But he had decided to take her with him anyhow. In the first place, he was afraid to leave her alone in New York, even at Bleek Street. In the second, there was always the chance that as the plane neared the location of the ancient relics, Lini’s face would betray it by some slight expression of remembrance.

Smitty scowled. He was a little anxious about Nellie. He thought maybe she had a headache or something. She was looking out the window with a strange lack of curiosity on her face. And she seemed kind of, well, dead! She hadn’t ribbed him once since the plane started, and that wasn’t like her, either. Usually she was always kidding the big fellow — and getting quite stern and protective if somebody else ventured to kid him!

Smitty leaned forward toward Benson. “What do you suppose happened to Josh and Mac?” he asked, speaking loudly over the powerful drone of the motors that filled the cabin. Lini Waller came up and stood back of the pilot’s seat.

“Josh and Mac were overpowered, knocked out,” said The Avenger.

“Sure,” said Smitty. “But by what? They’re in a place of death. Death as old as the last ice age, to be exact. Who could knock them out?”

Lini spoke suddenly, with a slight wrinkle in her forehead. It was a wrinkle of vague pain, like the small wavelet on the surface of a very deep pond indicating a big disturbance far beneath. “My brother started to say it was the mastodon when he was in trouble.”

The Avenger’s colorless, piercing eyes swung toward her face. “Mastodon?” he repeated.

“Brent said ‘mast—’. That was all.”

Smitty grinned, but not very humorously. “You said there was a mastodon in one of the caves, chief, from what this girl told the Foundation men. Do you suppose the mastodon got Mac and Josh?”

“They were overpowered,” said The Avenger, face as still as snow in a windless night, “by some of the gang who have been giving us such trouble in New York.”

“Hey — that can’t be!” gasped Smitty. “I mean, how could it be? Nobody but this girl knows where the caves are, except probably for Mac and Josh. So how could any gang of crooks find it?”

“There was a page missing from that ancient manuscript Lini gave the Foundation directors,” said Benson quietly. “I found a corner of it later. There were traces of irregular lines ending on the torn corner. So, in the manuscript, there must have been a map of the British Columbia region in which the caves are located.”

“A map? Fifty thousand years old? Holy codfish! No map that old would be any good. The mountains themselves, the shoreline, everything would change in fifty thousand years.”

“Evidently, there has been little enough change,” replied Benson, “and enough accuracy on the ancient map for some of the gang to go by plane to the caves.”

“Well, you’re probably right,” sighed Smitty. “You practically always are. But who stole the page with the map on it? Who of the three Foundation directors still alive is behind all this?”

“I found the torn corner of the map in Mallory’s office,” said The Avenger, pale eyes absorbed with the landscape far below. He didn’t want to waste a mile by going off the radio-direction line, the best clue they had as to the caverns’ location.

Smitty started to ask more questions, realized that the man with the dead face and the terrible, pale eyes was not in a talkative mood, and refrained. He noticed that Lini was gone. And, when he looked around, he saw that Nellie was out of her seat too. Rosabel smiled a little at the anxious look on his face and nodded her head toward the tail, to indicate that Nellie was in the rear compartment. Smitty went back there.

Lini and Nellie were near the left-hand side of the tapering rear compartment. Nellie had the steel plate off the inner side of the double shell. This had exposed the control cables going to the rudders. Nellie’s white hand went out.

“Hey!” said Smitty. “What goes on? Trouble, Nellie?”

Nellie turned away from the exposed wire cables, and then turned back and replaced the plate. “I was just showing Lini some of the working parts,” Nellie said dully. “I think we’ll go back and sit where we can see out, Lini.”

The two girls went back into the cabin proper. Smitty returned to his seat. “Nellie was showing Lini what makes a plane tick,” said Smitty.

Benson’s pallid, deadly eyes turned on him for an instant. “She was, Smitty?”

“Yes. I caught the two of them back at the control cables.”

The Avenger didn’t say anything. He continued to concentrate on the straightest line to northern British Columbia. He turned on the radio. A long flight is much more monotonous than anyone who has never been up in a plane can appreciate. There’s not much to do, practically nothing to see — at twenty-one thousand feet, anyway — and the drone of the motors makes for sleep. Smitty and Rosabel cat-napped in their seats, while The Avenger sat at the controls like a thing of steel instead of a man.

Noon deepened into afternoon, and slow dusk began. They were pretty near the Pacific now. Near, that is, in terms of their high speed. Say six or seven hundred miles. Smitty was wide awake again and worried even more about Nellie. A few minutes ago he had opened his eyes from his most recent doze to see her once more coming out of the tail. With Lini close behind her.

“You got a headache, Nellie?” he asked, going back to her.

“No,” was all she said.

“Tired?”

“Not very,” said Nellie.

Smitty went back toward his seat a bit peeved; she was so unenthusiastic about talking to him. But he had barely sat down when the roar of the motors took on a lower pitch, then stopped altogether. He stared quickly at Benson. The Avenger pointed ahead and downward. There was a long, narrow, limpid-blue lake, fringed with great trees. “We’ll land there,” he said. He shut off the radio.

Smitty’s eyes showed his perplexity.

“The controls aren’t working quite right,” said The Avenger. “We’ll walk out on the tail and see why.” The pontoons were lowered. The big speed-demon of the air settled down and down, finally to ripple onto the quiet forest lake.

The plane stopped. Benson got up and opened the double door onto the wing. The two stepped out and went to the big rudder surfaces. Smitty straightened from a look at the controls. “Everything seems all right out here,” he began. “We—”

Somebody turned on a couple of hurricanes ahead of him and at the same time jerked the plane from under his feet. And Smitty went tail over apple cart. “Waugh—” he got out. Then the waters of the lake stopped his yell. He came up in time to hear another splash and to see Rosabel, astounded, frightened-looking, hit the water, too. She had been thrown right out of the plane beside Smitty and Benson. Even The Avenger had been hurled backward off the tail with that utterly unexpected starting of the plane. The two swam to Rosabel’s side and put an arm under each of hers. Then the three stared west.

The plane had taken off so expertly that they knew who was at the controls — Nellie! In no time at all it was a speck in the air; then it was gone.

“She’s gone crazy,” sobbed Rosabel. “She and that Lini Waller! They threw me out the door. I was just leaning out to see you back on the tail, and they pushed me out.”

“The rudder controls!” gasped Smitty. “If they’re out of order she’ll crash—” He stopped suddenly, remembering how Nellie had been at the control cables. “Say! Maybe she has gone crazy!” he said. “If it had been anybody else, I’d have said there was a little sabotage going on. But surely Nellie wouldn’t jam the controls to force us down, then release them and go on and leave us stranded a thousand miles from nowhere! Not when we’re in such a hurry to see if we can do anything for Josh and Mac!”

Benson didn’t say anything. He swam for shore. Smitty and he had released Rosabel after her first shock of finding herself so unexpectedly in the lake instead of the plane. She was an excellent swimmer. She and Smitty followed The Avenger toward the nearest shore. The giant sputtered and exclaimed during his powerful, if noisy, progress.

“What the dickens will we do now? We may be days from a human habitation, here in the wilderness. And we haven’t got days to waste. We’re in an awful mess!”

Then he floundered and almost choked again. He was remembering something that he should have thought of before. Something dreadful! Something that could explain the utterly lunatic way in which Nellie had ditched them here. “Chief!” he yelled. “In Conroy’s library!”

“Well?” said Benson quietly.

“When we got Nellie, there was a hammer there — but no needle!” The giant began to thresh toward shore at a terrific rate, as though the simple act of getting on dry land might help him somehow to get to Nellie’s side. “No needle in sight, chief! You know what that means? Those damned devils, they made a robot out of Nellie, like they did out of Lini Waller! That needle’s in her brain! She’s an automaton, doing just what the guy behind all this hell’s mess wants her to do!”