Jandar of Callisto

15. THE HAND OF FATE

Helpless in the grip of gale-force winds, we were driven farther and farther off course, flying ever further south over the trackless maze of jungles known as the Grand Kumala.

Night was upon us now, the magically swift, sudden nightfall of Thanator. I do not believe I have yet in this narrative described the strange and almost supernatural nature of daybreak and nightfall on the jungle moon.

Day and night would seem to have no connection with the presence or even the number of Thanator's moons in her skies. Those strange skies of drifting golden vapor, like curdled flame of amber and yellow, remain constantly brilliant and evenly luminous for a period of something that seems like twelve hours. Then they dim and darken, without any apparent cause, to darkness which lasts for an equal period.

At this colossal distance, of course, the sun is far too small to have any important effect as far as illuminating the surface of Callisto is concerned."

I have noticed, time and again, that the daylight sky of Thanator remains uniformly brilliant when no moons are aloft, as it does when all four of the inner moons and even the titanic sphere of Jupiter are in the heavens. From this I can only suppose that, at periodic intervals, Thanator is bathed in some unknown radiation which sparks a luminiferous effect in the golden vapor of her upper atmosphere, which is probably a layer of some inert gas like neon which becomes incandescent when subjected to electrical current. Perhaps at regular intervals Jupiter gives off a storm of electrical particles which interact with the inert gas of Callisto's stratosphere. Or perhaps the luminous periods are due to the actions of some completely unknown force or phenomenon. I cannot say with any degree of certainty; I can but report the phenomenon as I have personally observed it.

At daybreak, then, the entire dome of the sky flushes with soft brilliant radiance which takes about seven or eight minutes to go the full cycle from a velvety brown gloom to full noontide luminance. The experience is most startling when you are first exposed to it―it is almost as if the entire heavens are illuminated by some colossal explosion. The luminosity remains constant, unvarying, a sourceless glow, until the hour of nightfall, when the phenomenon is reversed. Again, it takes about seven to eight minutes, as nearly as I can calculate the time without a watch, for full daylight to be replaced by brown velvet darkness.

The only effect this cycle has on the appearance of the moons is that, of course, they seem more brilliant at night, when they are not in competition with the radiance cast by that dome of glowing golden vapors.

Hence night was suddenly upon us. It was as if some cosmic magician cast his spell over an entire world, darkening its sun. I groaned a bitter curse

It would be difficult enough to unsnarl or repair the vital control wires by day; by night it might well prove impossible.

"Is there nothing you can do, Lukor, to free the wire?"

He shook his head grimly.

"I have been working the pedals, hoping to dislodge the quarrel, but to no avail," he said.

"What is it? What has gone wrong?" Darloona asked suddenly. We had been conversing, Lukor and I, in terse whispers, to avoid spreading panic. The girl, sunk in a brooding melancholy, had not been aware of our dangerous plight. But she must have overheard us talking, for now she turned a questioning gaze on our pilot, the old Swordmaster. He explained the problem in swift, economical terms.

"Every second is carrying us farther south at a frightful speed," he concluded. "We are many korads into the Grand Kumala by now, and traveling yet deeper with every moment that passes. Unless I can somehow free the aileron and turn the flying contraption about and to the east, we shall end up at the pole!"

"Is there nothing you can do?" solemn-faced Koja inquired in his harsh, expressionless voice.

"Nothing," Lukor said with grim finality. "I fear to use the pedals again, for any further attempt may snap them. The quarrel from the crossbow has them snarled and they may well be frayed by this time, from rubbing against its edges. But they are most certainly not broken. Neither does the aileron seem to have been pierced by the bolt. The shaft seems merely to have lodged itself in the slit between the inner surface of the aileron and the rear surface of the wing. But unless we can manage to remove the obstruction, we are helpless, and will be carried hundreds of korads off course, for my city of Ganatol is far behind us by now, and to the east."

I bitterly regretted the untimely arrival of darkness in that it would make all the more difficult the feat I knew I must now attempt.

With a swift word to Lukor, advising him to adjust the balance of the ornithopter as best he could in order to compensate for the shift in weight, I climbed out of the cockpit and put one leg over the side.

"Jandar―what are you trying to do?" Darloona shrieked as the flying machine swung giddily to port under my weight. I forced a careless laugh, although it was somewhat difficult to do as my heart was in my mouth at the time.

"Tut, Princess," I said gaily. "If the aileron control wire is fouled there is nothing to be done but to clear it. Steady as you go, now, Lukor―"

And I climbed out onto the wing.

I am not really a particularly brave man, although the necessities of chance and fate have occasionally forced me into the role of one. Hence, in all candor, I must admit I was frightened. I was acutely aware that we were hurtling through the night at something under a hundred miles an hour in a flimsy craft made of baked and compressed paper.

I was also terribly conscious of the fact that we were flying at something like fifteen hundred feet above one of the thickest of all jungles, and that the slightest misstep would hurl me to a swift and certain death.

The wind whipped past me, clutching at my body with invisible fingers. My eyes teared from the blast of stinging air until I was almost blind. My hair and my garments whipped about me with such force that

it was all that I could do to keep my hold on the edge of the cockpit.

If I lost my grip I would be torn loose like a leaf in a hurricane, and the wind would whip me away to hurl me like a human bomb down through the thick branches far below. I recall once reading an adventure story by Lin Carter in which his hero is marooned on the narrow ledge of a mountain peak, high above a deep lake. When at length the hero could retain his balance no longer and sprang into the air, he fell like a stone into the lake―but lived, because he fell at just the precisely correct angle so that his body met the surface of the lake with a minimum impact.* But there was no lake below me, and, alas, I had no solicitous Author watching over my fortunes, ready to bring a bit of aerodynamic hocus-pocus to my rescue, had I fallen!

Bracing myself against the terrific force of the gale, I strove to reach the tightly lodged crossbow bolt. But my arms were not long enough―my fingers brushed the hullward edge of the aileron but fell several inches short of where the quarrel was wedged.

There was nothing else to do, then, but to climb outside the wing, and stand on the pontoon-like undercarriage. This undercarriage, which I mentioned somewhat earlier, consisted of two long pontoons, one to either side of the hull, filled with the compressed levitant gas that rendered the contraption airworthy. Had it not been for them, there would have been no way I could have reached the snarled wire, for of course the wing itself could not bear my weight.

With infinite care, still clinging with both hands to the cowling of my cockpit, I lowered first one leg and then the other, until at last I was standing on the portside pontoon. It was braced by narrow struts to the pontoon on the starboard side, and both were attached to keel and to the base of the wings by yet more struts. I sincerely hoped that these members were strong enough to bear my weight. If they were not, then we were in real trouble!

Now, standing sidewise on the gas-filled pontoon, I removed my grip from the cowling of my cockpit, and transferred my grip to the edge of the wing itself. This I did in agonizing slow motion, because I was terribly afraid that the wind would tear me loose and whirl me away into the night.

Looking up, I caught a glance at Darloona. She was staring at me with awe and terror in her enormous eyes. Her face was pale, and one hand lifted so that her knuckles were pressed tightly against her lips.

Suddenly I felt recklessly heroic! It was delightful to discover that someone aboard this flying deathtrap was even more frightened than I!

I wondered if the beautiful Princess of Shondakor still considered me a weakling and a coward. Doubtless she was convinced by this death-defying feat that I was a lionhearted hero. I could have laughed out loud at the thought. Actually, I was so terrified my knees were trembling.

Now I was clinging with both hands to the edge of the wing, my feet resting one in front of the other on the pontoon. Again I strove to reach the lodged bolt, but I simply could not.

Well, there was nothing else to do, so I sat down on the pontoon, straddling it uncomfortably, my legs hanging over either side, my hands above me, holding onto the edge of the wing.

Now, slowly and with enormous care, I transferred the grip of each hand from wing edge to the struts which held the pontoon fastened beneath the portside wing.

I breathed a silent prayer that the Sky Pirates of Zanadar had built the strongest paper airplanes known to the universe!

Now I released the strut with my left hand, and leaned far out to the side, groping for the underside of the aileron.

By tilting myself at a sickening forty-five-degree angle, I finally managed to reach the damned crossbow bolt. My fingers were numb with the cold wind, but I could feel the pointed tip of the quarrel where it was thrust through the slit between aileron and wing surface.

Gripping it between the tips of my fingers, hanging almost face down over the jungles that rushed by at a nauseating velocity beneath me, I began working the head of the quarrel back and forth, back and forth, gradually working it loose.

When, after an infinity of time that was probably only two minutes in duration, I had worked it so loose that it trembled at a touch, I reached up around the aileron and felt along the shaft of the quarrel to see if it was entangled with the guy-wire.

To do this I had to stretch from my place until most of my body was hanging over empty space. I retained hold of the pontoon with my right leg alone, which was hooked over it, while my left leg hung free.

My fingers were trembling with the strain. My wrist and forearm were numb and taut. With infinite care I felt the tangle of the wires and, wriggling the crossbow bolt between my fingers, I managed to draw it free of the wire a fraction of an inch at a time.

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!

It was about three days later that Fate again took a hand in our affairs.

We had been working our way due east, or as due east as we could ascertain, for it was difficult to tell directions on a world in which no sun lights the sky, arcing from east to west like a natural compass needle. According to what we could tell, the nearest settlement of men should be a dozen korads in that direction.

We covered quite a bit of territory in three days―the bulk of the Grand Kumala, in fact. Our progress through the jungle country was greatly facilitated by the discovery of a swift-flowing river which poured out of the mountains and curved away east, probably joining with the Ajand further on.

It had not been difficult to cut supple lianas, lash together fallen logs into a crude and flimsy raft, and set ourselves adrift. The rushing current carried us many leagues, and we traveled faster and easier than had we been forced to hack a path through the dense jungle underbrush on foot. Poling our way past obstructions, battling off the attacks of nameless river creatures―I shall not bore my reader with a drawn-out account of our struggle downriver, for it is easily told in summary.

We were forced, towards the close of the third day, to leave the river and press forward on foot, for here it angled away sharply to the south.

Towards nightfall disaster struck.

Without the slightest warning, as we were making our way across an open glade, a gigantic beast sprang roaring from the underbrush right into our midst, scattering us to all sides.

It was a full-grown deltagar, a horned, scarlet, tigerlike beast such as the one I had ridden to its death in the arena of Zanadar, as big as four tigers rolled into one, armed with claws like steel hooks and glistening bared fangs like naked scimitars―a fearsome opponent even for a heavily armed hunting party to encounter. And we were but three men and a girl, and armed but lightly.

The monster charged Koja and me. The arthropod snatched me up under one arm and leaped out of the way, his grasshopper-like lower limbs carrying the two of us halfway across the jungle clearing with a single bound.

Baffled, snarling, the deltagar whirled to charge Darloona, who was on the other side of the glade from our position. She turned on her heel and ran into the shelter of the thick underbrush to avoid its charge. The beast went crashing after her but gallant Lukor sprang in its path, brandishing his rapier and yelling to capture its attention.

Alas, the brute was in no mood for a challenge. Hunting must have been poor in this sector of the Kumala, for the deltagar looked half-starved, ribs thrusting like curved struts through the scarlet fur of its sides. So it did not swerve to engage Lukor but merely clouted him aside with a terrific buffet from one mighty paw, and sprang after the fleeing girl. In an instant the jungle had swallowed it up, but we could hear it crashing and floundering through the bushes, getting further and further away.

The savage blow of the deltagar's forepaw had knocked the old Swordmaster reeling. He lay sprawled some distance away, white-faced, scarlet leaking from his scalp. Koja sprang after the deltagar, in search of Darloona, while I paused to see what I could do for Lukor. As soon as I ascertained that the old man was not seriously harmed―merely unconscious and bleeding freely from a light scalp wound―I followed Koja to help in the search. But I met Koja returning to the clearing: neither Darloona nor the deltagar were to be found. She must have fled far into the depths of the jungle to avoid the hungry predator.

The next two days were consumed in a grim and desperate search for the lost Princess of Shondakor. We searched day and night for any sign of the missing girl, but we found nothing.

The deltagar, however, left a clear track due to its enormous size and weight. Acting on the assumption that the beast was also tracking the Princess, we tracked the beast. I was in a restless fever of impatience, for I was horribly conscious of the fact that Darloona was completely unarmed.

Towards dawn on the third day of her disappearance we burst suddenly through a screen of trees and gazed in amazement at an incredible sight.

At first my heart lifted with buoyant hope. But ere long those hopes were dashed into despair.

For the sight upon which we stared in grim silence was more terrible than words can express.

I shall never exorcise from my memory the profound horror of what I saw as we stepped through the fringes of the jungle and stared at that which lay before us on the broad plain under the golden skies of morn . . .