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The substance was rubbery and lifelike in its resiliency, its tenacious grasp upon the Jeter-Eyer plane. By this means the plane was lowered to the "ground." Jeter and Eyer watched, fascinated, as the stuff slipped and lost its grip, and slowly retracted to become part of the dome above.
Jeter and Eyer went across to him as he was saying his last words into the microphone before stepping into his sealed cabin for the flight. Kress saw them coming and his face lighted up. "Lord," he said, "I'm glad to see you two. I've something I must ask you." "Anything you ask will be answered," said Jeter, "if Tema and I can answer it. Or granted if it's a favor you wish."
There was something too final about the guide's calm reply. Both adventurers remembered again, most poignantly, the fate of Kress. The leaders stepped through the door. A flight of steps led downward. Several of the swarthy-skinned folk walked behind Jeter and Eyer. There was no gainsaying the fact that they were prisoners.
I guess he didn't belong to anybody before. And another wagon has a chair on it, and in that chair the cutest little girl you almost eyer saw, hair all frizzed at the ends, and a wide blue sash and her white frock starched as stiff as a milk-pail. Everybody says: "Aw, ain't she just too sweet?" The Caledonias have tried to make quite a splurge this year.
Without a word they climbed in and drove themselves to their dwelling combined home and laboratory in Mineola. There they fell to on their own ship, which was being built piece by piece in their laboratory. Every half hour or so one or the other would go to the lawn and gaze aloft, seeking Kress. "He's out of eyesight," said Eyer, the last to go. "Is the telescope set up?"
Jeter and Eyer could imagine the minions of Sitsumi and the Three, below the floor of the white globe, standing-to on platforms about the unseen engines which gave life and movability to this ship of the stratosphere. How many there were of them there was no way of knowing. They had guessed two hundred. There might have been a thousand. It scarcely mattered. Sitsumi's face was set in a firm mask.
Why didn't Kress use the parachute ball? Where is it? I'll wager we'll find answers to plenty of those questions if we live!" "If we live?" repeated Eyer. "You mean ?" "You know what happened to Kress? Or rather you know the result of what happened to him?" "Sure." "Why should we be immune? I tell you, Eyer, we're on the eve of something colossal, awe-inspiring perhaps catastrophic."
"I'm sure we are being observed, every foot of altitude we make. I don't care to run into something up here that will wreck us. Right now, Eyer, if we happened to be outside this sealed cabin instead of inside it, we'd die in less time than it takes to tell about it." All known records for altitude the only unknown one being Kress' had now been broken by Jeter and Eyer.
A search of the sky above Manhattan failed to disclose any visible substance from which the light beam might emanate. That seemed to indicate some unbelievable height. Yet, Kress must have reached that base. Else why had he been destroyed and sent back to Jeter and Eyer as a challenge? Jeter's mind went back to Kress.
I know we're a pair of fools to think of matching a few drums of gas and a bunch of popguns against the equipment of an enemy capable of moving mountains but what else is there to do?" "Nothing," said Eyer cheerfully, "and I've got a feeling that you and I will manage to acquit ourselves with credit." The radiophone buzzer sounded. Hadley was speaking.
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