Cabell was saying, “He rammed his elbow into my ribs, and he kicked Cyrano in the head!”
The chopper was tilted so that he could look down through the still unclosed door. A searchlight from the boat briefly caught the king’s naked body. His arms were flailing in an effort to keep himself upright. Then John had disappeared into the darkness.
“He couldn’t survive!” Boynton said. “It’s at least a thirty-meter fall!”
They would not be able to go back down and make sure. Not only were some shooting at the chopper, others were running now to a rocket battery. Though there was no chance the pistol shots could hit the chopper, the heat-seeking rockets would be .unavoidable unless Boynton got the machine to a safe distance.
However, Boynton was not the man to be so easily frightened. And he was undoubtedly infuriated that their prisoner had escaped.
Now he was flying the copter, not away, but toward the boat. He was bringing it to a point about 90 meters opposite the rockets. There went the four rockets the machine carried, flames spurting from their tails.
And there went the battery in a huge ball of flame and a cloud of smoke, bodies and pieces of deck and metal flying on all sides.
“That’ll stop them!” Boynton said.
Sturtevant said, “How about strafing them?”
Cyrano was startled. “What? Oh, use the machine gun? No, let us depart with speed. If there’s one survivor, he could get to another rocket battery, and we’d be done for. We have failed our mission and lost too many brave fellows to risk more casualties.”
“I don’t see how we’ve failed,” Boynton said. “Sure, we didn’t bring John back, but he is dead. And it’ll be a long, long time before the boat is ready to operate.”
“You think John is dead, eh?” Cyrano said. “I would like to believe that. But I will not say for certain that he is dead until I see his corpse.”
67
Groaning with pain, the crew of the Jules Verne quickly checked themselves for injuries. Three had ribs that hurt so badly they were not sure they were not cracked or broken. Frigate thought that his neck muscles were either torn or severely strained. Tex and Frisco had bloody noses, and the latter’s knee was paining him. Pogaas’ forehead was skinned and bleeding. Only Nur was unhurt.
There was little time to worry about themselves. The balloon was now rising but was drifting away from the mountain. The storm clouds were disappearing as swiftly as burglars who hear a police siren. Fortunately, the light system was still working. Frisco could see the flight instruments. Nur got a flashlight, and he and Frisco applied a thin liquid to the pipe connections. Nur, examining these through a magnifying glass, reported that he could see no bubbles. Apparently, no hydrogen was escaping.
Nur opened the top hatch, and he and Pogaas climbed out onto the load ring. While the Swazi directed the beam of the flashlight, Nur went up the ropes like a monkey. He could not get close enough to the neck of the bag to apply a paste. But he did report that the envelope seemed to be tight around the entrance of the pipes.
Frisco heard this with skepticism. “Yeah, they seem to be O.K. But we can’t really tell unless we land and deflate the bag.”
Frigate said, “As long as we have positive buoyancy, we’ll stay aloft. I don’t think we should land until we come up against the polar winds. That ought to be tomorrow if we’ve estimated our travel distance correctly. If we touch down, we might lose the balloon. For one thing, we don’t know how the locals will react to it. In the early days of Terrestrial ballooning, a number were destroyed by ignorant and superstitious peasants when the aeronauts landed in rural areas. The peasants believed the balloon to be the devil’s work or the vehicle of evil magicians. We might run into such people.”
Frigate admitted that it made him very uneasy to be without ballast. However, if they must, they could always unbolt the chemical toilet and throw it out. Of course, the situation might be such that there wouldn’t be time to do this.