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I was thoroughly familiar with the mechanism of every known make of flier on Barsoom. For nine years I had sailed and fought with the navy of Helium. I had raced through space on the tiny one-man air scout and I had commanded the greatest battleship that ever had floated in the thin air of dying Mars. To think, with me, is to act.
And toward the close of the week there came another surprise for Claire in the shape of a letter from Stillman, which ran: MY DEAR MISS ROBSON. I am going to take a little flier at the bean market. That was my father's business and I know a few things about it at least to the extent of recognizing the commodity when the sack is opened.
Turning, I saw a dozen black pirates dashing toward us from the melee. We had been discovered. With shrieks of rage the demons sprang for us. With frenzied insistence I continued to press the little button which should have sent us racing out into space, but still the vessel refused to budge. Then it came to me the reason that she would not rise. We had stumbled upon a two-man flier.
"But I certainly did not know that the Aurora was such a clipper." "Smith says she is one of the fastest launches on the river, and that if he had had another man to help him with the engines we should never have caught her. He swears he knew nothing of this Norwood business." "Neither he did," cried our prisoner, "not a word. I chose his launch because I heard that she was a flier.
An airship has no wires and can at the same time slow down and even shut off its engine, so that it need be no more noisy than a motor-car. Engine failure also is not so serious as in an airplane, for the gas-bag will always keep the ship up until there has been a chance for repairs. Up to the present, too, the airship is less of a fair-weather flier than the airplane.
No one hailed from the white-winged flier, but I heard some one on board say that he saw lights on the sloop, and that he made her out to be a fisherman. I sat long on the starlit deck that night, thinking of ships, and watching the constellations on their voyage. On the following day, September 13, a large four-masted ship passed some distance to windward, heading north.
"They look like burning glasses." "That's just what they are," said Grim sadly. "The top row are sun-lenses, that throw a terrible ray for a distance of two to three hundred feet. Melts everything in its path men trees, rocks even. You saw one in action in the sun-tube with which poor old Peabody was cut in half. The lower row of lenses on the flier are search beams." "Search beams?"
Driving my fleet air craft at high speed directly behind the warriors I soon overtook them and without diminishing my speed I rammed the prow of my little flier between the shoulders of the nearest. The impact sufficient to have torn through inches of solid steel, hurled the fellow's headless body into the air over the head of his thoat, where it fell sprawling upon the moss.
He was in the afterglow of the meet, for with Titherington, the Englishman, and Tad Warren, the Wright flier, he was going to race from Belmont Park to New Haven for a ten-thousand-dollar prize jointly offered by a New Haven millionaire and a New York newspaper.
The instructor addressed was unable to answer. "You have been up in her. You know more than I do about her." "Perhaps a passenger would help her," suggested another pilot. "I don't see how." The flier shook his head. "Anyway, I would like to see how she climbs with two up. From the little I tried her out, I think she is the fastest climber I have been in anywhere. Come up for a bit, John."
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