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Updated: June 3, 2025
Beatrice was leaning forward now, sheltering her face in the hollow of her arm. Had she fainted? Stern could not tell. He still was fighting with the mechanism, striving to bring it into some control. But, without headway, it defied him. And like a wounded hawk, dying even as it struggled, the Pauillac staggered wildly down the unplumbed abyss. How long did the first wild drop last?
The pistol clattered over the wet, shining stones. Stern, cursing madly, leaped and snatched for it with the other hand. Before he could even reach it a swift foot tripped him powerfully. Headlong he fell. And in a second one of the very ropes that had been used to drag the Pauillac from the depths was lashed about his wrists, his ankles, his struggling, fighting body. "Beatrice! Shoot!
Cleared land and farms extended far beyond even Newport Heights, where the Pauillac had first come to earth at New Hope. Well-kept roads connected them all with the settlement. And for some miles to southward the primeval forests had been vanquished by the ever-extending hand of this new, swiftly growing race. "With my help and theirs!" she rejoined presently.
His every instinct was to veer, to retreat back to solid earth, and land somewhere, and once more, at all hazards, get the contact of reality. But Stern resisted all these impulses, and now already had driven the Pauillac right to the lip of the vast nothingness. Now they were over! "My God!" he cried, stunned by the realization of this thing. "Sheer space! No bottom anywhere!"
A sweep of the Pauillac hid the light from view. Even that faintest ray vanished. But what? It came again! Much nearer now, and brighter! And another gleam! Another still! Three of them and they were real! With a tremendous effort, Stern fixed his fevered eyes upon the lights. Up, up at a tremendous rate they seemed speeding.
On and on, a very vulture of the upper air, planed the Pauillac. Stern shouted with all his strength. The girl might possibly hear him and might come out of their cave. She might even signal and the nearness of her presence mounted upon him like a heady wine. He swung the searchlight on the canyon, as they swept above it.
Her eyes sparkled with the boldness of the plan its peril, its possibilities. But Allan only shook his head. "And expose the Pauillac on the beach?" he asked. "One good swing with a war-club into the motor and then a week's siege and slow starvation, with a final rush interesting, but not practical, little girl. No, no; the better part of valor is to recognize force majeure and wait!
Once we clear some land here, crops will grow themselves! I don't think we'll do better than this, Beta. Shall we land and see?" A quarter-hour later the Pauillac had safely deposited them on a high, rocky plateau about half a mile back from the edge of the river canyon. Stern, in his eagerness, was all for cave-hunting that very evening, but the girl restrained him.
An occasional short raid with the Pauillac had stocked the colony with firearms, chemicals and necessary drugs, cutlery, ammunition and some glassware, from the dismantled cities of Nashville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and other places unidentified. Allan foresaw almost infinite possibilities in these raids.
Stern, keenly attentive to the engine, advanced the spark another notch, and now the needle crept to 102 1/2. "We'll be across before we know it," thought he. "At this rate, I shouldn't be surprised to sight land any minute now." A quarter-hour more the Pauillac swooped along, cradling in her swift flight to westward. But all at once the man started violently.
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