Islands in the Sky Read online

  “There are more than two here,” said Argyle.

  The fallen men got to their feet. All four of the subordinate Airmen rushed at Peyton. He hit the foremost of them on the chin, weaved past him, hit another man twice in the face, then floored the one he had just struck with a fourth blow. The two hit the floor at once, but their comrades were at Peyton’s back, hitting him repeatedly. His head rang with the blows.

  He crouched low under his protecting arms like a man trying to fend off bricks falling from a ruined wall. He turned and both belabored his face. Under the weight of many blows he fell. His nose and cheeks were covered with blood. “This is fun,” he snarled, as he rolled over and got to his knees.

  All four of them were upon him at once, kicking and buffeting. General Argyle had not moved from his perch on the table. He drew his long holder from a breast pocket, carefully inserted a cigarette and lighted it.

  “He’s had enough,” he said. The four Airmen straightened up. Peyton lay on the floor, face down. Dizzy but game, he turned his battered body over and got slowly and painfully to his feet. His face and knuckles were bleeding.

  “Who said I had enough?” he demanded thickly. “I’m not even warmed up yet.”

  “Peyton,” said Argyle, “you’re going to tell us who is leading the troublemakers down in the Underways.”

  “All I’m going to tell you is that cockroaches are aristocrats compared with Airmen who have to have the odds of five against one!”

  “I was wrong,” Argyle sighed to his men. “He hasn’t had enough after all.”

  VIOLENTLY they threw themselves upon Peyton. All of them were bigger than he. As they bunched close, they shut out all view of the walls, the floor, General Argyle. Their blows struck like alternate sledgehammers. He heard them grunt and snort with their efforts. Shriveling under that bombardment, he still kept his feet and made some sort of return. One man howled in pain as Peyton got home on his face.

  Three or four minutes, longer than eons, went by. From far off, General Argyle yelled, “Stand easy!” and they fell back from him on all sides.

  He was going down. He knew he had kept on his feet only because the flying fists on all sides had held him there. Now he collapsed heavily. He felt as if he would come apart at the joints. Blood was all over him.

  One of the Airmen turned him face up with a boot toe. Argyle stood over him, looking down cruelly.

  “Are you going to talk?” he demanded.

  He sounded as if he were far away on a faulty telephone. Peyton managed to shake his head from side to side.

  “You were right about my not killing you, Peyton. The public wouldn’t stand for it. But you won’t get away from me. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll send you to the prison hospital. After that you’ll have only light confinement.”

  “And—if—I—don’t?”

  Argyle jerked his thumb downward, as he had done at the circus to signal the death of Willie Burgoyne.

  “Back to the Pit!”

  Atomic power was generated there. With knowledge of atomics, Bengali’s committee might contend on equal terms with the Airmen—

  “Below the Pit,” Argyle said, “there’s a deeper and tougher hole yet, where the prisoners go who are too tough for even the atom-smashery. Food’s thrown down once a day. No lights. No beds. They mine ore to make inerton for the atomic containers. If they don’t send up their quota, there’s more misery. Start talking, or down you go.”

  Peyton tried to form words of defiance. He couldn’t make his pulped lips respond. All he could do was stick out his tongue and make an unpleasant, scornful sound.

  Argyle turned and opened his mouth to give an order. At that moment a remnant of strength woke in Peyton’s mauled body. He dragged himself erect again, hit Argyle under the ear. Argyle reeled rubber-legged across the room and floundered against the wall.

  At the same moment the last energy flowed out through those knuckles and Peyton fell, more limply than before. He could not see or feel, but he heard an Airman speak.

  “He’s put, cold as the end of a dog’s nose.”

  “Pick him up, then,” Argyle commanded. “The Pit’s going to get him, and the Hole under the Pit.”

  If they touched him, Peyton did not know. He didn’t know anything except a dream of the Flying Island and himself blowing it into bubbles with a handful of atomic power.

  THE Hole below the Pit was blacker than space without stars. Nothing shone or made noise in the hollowed vestibule, until a trapdoor creaked high above and yellow lamplight stole down in a patch.

  “Hello!” called a guard.

  The door to the mine corridors opened. A phosphorescent face came into view, turning upward.

  “What is it?” the face asked.

  “You were three-quarters of a ton short on delivery yesterday. Eight tons today or you get tear gas for dinner.” The trapdoor slammed. The yellow light vanished. The convict spokesman went back into the gallery. Faces, hands and bare arms gave Pit glow enough to reveal a soot-colored tunnel of rock, outcropped with veins and mottlings that looked like black lead. Six convicts leaned on crowbars and shovels while the spokesman told what the guard had said.

  “The six of us could dig eight tons,” the biggest convict growled. “Five of us can’t. That new guy is welshing, the one they sent down in a basket.” He pointed with his crowbar at the bruised phosphorescence that was Blackie Peyton’s face. “Listen, new guy.If you don’t start heaving your weight down here, we’ll stomp you.”

  “I’ve been stomped by experts,” retorted Peyton. “I don’t think you boys can do the job any better. And I’ve dug as much as anybody here.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “It’s the truth. I’ve found native inerton, the stuff they use to make containers and motor linings for atomic power. I’ve peeled off enough sheets, in the five or six days I’ve been here, to clear us all out of this Hole.”

  “If we waste more time and get under our quota, we’ll do without food and get a big whiff of tear gas to sleep on.”

  “Tear gas?” repeated Peyton. “That guard has tear gas bombs up there?”

  “We’ve had it before.”

  “Swell!” Peyton cried. He went over to a little nook in the tunnel. From it he dragged something that looked like a big, rough megaphone, six feet long and tapering from a finger-wide mouthpiece to a two-foot bell. It was dull black and he had trouble lifting it. “This is what I’ve done with the inerton I found.”

  “If we broke that thing up and mixed it with rock and dirt,” a convict said hurriedly, “it could make enough ore to—”

  “Nobody breaks it up,” stated Peyton. “This is a flying machine. It’s crude, but it’s inerton and it can fly. If it has atomic.”

  He took from a pocket of his soiled trousers a dark cylinder, also of inerton, about as large as a pistol cartridge. At sight of it, the other convicts shrank away.

  “Don’t handle that carelessly,” warned one.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Peyton said. “I came down here to do it. Yeah, I let them put me down here, so I could get my hands on inerton and atomic and take them away. I had to be brought down on a stretcher, but I got enough strength to reach out and steal this from a dump we passed.”

  He slid the cylinder of atomic into the small upper end of his cone. “She can fly now. Who wants to come up with me? I’ve got a crashout all planned.”

  “Nothing doing,” growled the big convict. “We wouldn’t have a chance. They’d kill us all.”

  “You want to stay down here forever?”

  “No—”

  “Rest of you feel that way?” There was no reply, only a general fidgeting. Peyton’s gleaming lip curled. “Then I’ll go alone. Why should I drag any excess baggage?”

  The other convicts went into a huddle. One argued that Peyton’s escape would be charged against them, with resultant penalization. Peyton broke this discussion off.

  “You seem to think that life’s
sweet, even here. I don’t. See this?” He pried the bit of atomic from its lodging in the cone’s end. “It has just container enough to hold it when it’s carefully handled. Monkey with me and I’ll drop it and we’ll all be through with our troubles.”

  Nobody spoke. With cone and cylinder, Peyton backed toward the door that led to the recess beneath the trap. He opened it, went through and closed the door behind him.

  The light of his face was barely enough for him to see by, but he managed. Setting the cone on the floor, its tip pointing toward the place where the trapdoor would be, he drew his thumbnail sharply across one end of the little cylinder of atomic. With orderly haste he set it in the tip of the cone, scratched-end down, and fastened it there with a piece of the metal. Then he threw his arms around the upper part of the cone.

  Something hissed, like escaping air. The cone stirred, rose. He clung with all his strength and even then was almost dislodged. The speed of the rising cone was something more than an elevator, something less than a bullet. Peyton saw the trapdoor above, ducked his head and let the cone-tip strike and hurl the trap open.

  He rose like a pheasant into a yellow-lighted chamber, narrow and dingily lighted. As the cone drew him clear of the trap, Peyton let go and fell clumsily, but on his feet. He faced a guard, whose utter amazement made him helpless. Peyton hit the guard in the face, in the belly and in the face again. Guard and cone both clattered down onto the floor.

  XI

  PEYTON flung himself down beside the stunned man, clawing at round objects dangling “from his belt. They were thin metal containers of tear gas. He rose, went to a box-shaped radio that gave two-way communication with upper levels. A couple of kicks wrecked it. He walked quickly to a metal door marked “Decompression Chamber.”

  Inside, he set the slack-off mechanism and, as once before, took a shower. It felt good. After a long enough wait, he went out the other side, completely nude and carrying only the gas bombs. Before he closed the exit door behind him, he tossed in a bomb. It burst in the decompression chamber. He smiled. Nobody would chase after him until the tear gas had dissipated.

  He went to the elevator to the next level and paused to smash another radio box beside it. A uniformed guard in the elevator cage ripped out an oath of amazement. Peyton faced him, a gas bomb poised.

  “Don’t move!” he cautioned in a deadly voice. “Come out here and reel off that uniform.”

  The guard obeyed. Taking the uniform, Peyton entered the elevator and sent it upward. While it ascended, he got into the clothes. They were not a bad fit. All he needed was a truculent swagger to complete his disguise as a petty prison employee.

  At each level he passed through a decompression chamber, rode up in the elevator beyond. Each chamber he turned into a pursuit obstacle by dropping one of his gas bombs. Each radio set he destroyed. One or two guards whom he passed looked up, nodded, but did not challenge him.

  He permitted himself to feel a little easier.

  At the eleventh level he paused. There, he knew, a freight elevator was constantly being loaded with atomic. He sought it, unobtrusively joined the group of lesser guards and prison trusties who were transferring metal cases full of inerton cylinders from a great stack to a car. So careful were they, and so engrossed in handling their fearful load, that he had no trouble in filling his pockets with small cylinders ranging in size from pistol-cartridge to pint-bottle. Eventually he strolled away to an elevator marked “To Outer Grounds.”

  It arose, carrying him straight to the surface. The change in pressure was somewhat unpleasant, but not distressing. Outside it was night, a little chilly, with a sky full of stars. Near him he heard the voice of the subway kiosk:

  “New York subway here.”

  In that direction he turned his steps.

  GRAMP HOOKER came to the door of the shabby saloon among the pilings of the Underways, carrying a mug of beer. He peered through the dim light at a man in uniform who stood there.

  “You came here asking after me?” queried Gramp. “Is this an arrest? You ain’t got anything on me—”

  The uniformed man snatched off his low-drawn cap. Gramp dropped the mug.

  “Blackie!” he exclaimed. “Get that cap back on. Every Airman and Airman’s jackal is after you. They know you escaped early tonight and this place is full of snitchers. I’m not important, a screwy old man. They don’t bother me, but—”

  “Get me into that office with Bengali,” said Peyton.

  “He isn’t here. Follow me.”

  Gramp led the way along the street to a sideway, little more than a trail among the masses of pillars that crossed it. Boldly he squeezed in among the pillars themselves. Peyton, close behind, saw that some of the upright posts bore rough marks, like trail-blazes on the trees of a forest.

  Deep in this maze, Gramp lifted his voice in a quavering hoot, like that of an owl. It was answered. Gramp plunged forward to a gravelike depression among the pilings, in which sat Bengali, no longer elegant and immaculate, over a small fire in a tin can. Bengali jumped up and seized Peyton’s hand.

  “You did what we hoped—hit for the bar and found Gramp!” he said. “How did you get away from that prison?”

  “Too long a story,” replied Peyton. “You still have a chance to lick the Airmen?”

  “It’s now or never. Argyle is going to jump up to the Flying Island at noon for a showdown with Torridge.”

  Peyton whistled. “Just like that, huh?”

  “He knows there’s an uprising brewing and wants to be in the saddle before it happens. Otherwise, as New York’s chief general, he’ll have to stick here and put it down. Once he’s running things, he’ll be set for anything. And if fie fails, if Torridge wins, then Torridge will be so careful and tough that we’d be doomed at our first move. It’s now or never, and I think it’s never.”

  “Cut that out!” piped Gramp. “Here’s Blackie and he’s up to something. Right, Blackie?”

  “Right. Bengali, you said once that you had experimental motors that could be flown with atomic.”

  “I have, twelve of them. We have no planes—the Airmen hold those—but on a high level is a museum with some old models that’re in good condition. We could fit the motors into them.”

  “How about pilots? The only ones who know how to fly are Airmen—”

  “The devil you say!” snorted Gramp. “When I was a kid, my dad carried me down to Kitty Hawk to watch the Wright boys mizzle that box-kite of theirs around. First World War, I shot six Heinies out from in back of Richthofen himself. In Nineteen-twenty-seven, if I hadn’t gone on a drunk, I might have been the first man across the Atlantic, instead of Lindbergh. I flew and fought in China, Ethiopia, Spain, Greece, Libya. And if I’d had sense enough to dye my hair and lie about my age twenty years ago, I’d have been in the Third World War and a big Airman today.”

  He shook his knobbed finger under Peyton’s nose.

  “Listen, I’ve fought and flown jalopies that these Airmen couldn’t even roll out of the hangar.”

  “That answers me, I guess,” Peyton laughed.

  “But what I lack is atomic power,” mourned Bengali. “I haven’t any to give Gramp for a flight.”

  “As Gramp says, the devil you say! Look what else escaped from stir.” Gingerly Peyton began to empty his pockets . . .

  The aeronautical section of the museum was lofty and spacious, full of archaic aircraft. To one side was a wall made up of window glass, now black with the night outside. From the ceiling hung a frail fabric of hickory lath and silk, such as Gramp Hooker called a box-kite. Below it stood a dull lead-colored plane, with steel-faced wings and fuselage. Against another wall were ranged several small fighters of by-gone wars. Nothing in that exhibit dated any later than 1948.

  ACROSS the threshold sprawled the gray-uniformed night watchman, twitching and moaning softly where a sweeping blow of Peyton’s padded length of lead pipe had spilled him. Gramp, entering beside Peyton, looked with beady eyes at the fallen man,
then knelt to tie him.

  “Gosh, what technique!” Gramp exclaimed.

  Bengali and the others, carrying the inerton motors, moved past with admiring side glances.

  “Peyton’s a past master at his art,” Bengali agreed.

  “Get your blow in first, eh?”

  “First, second, third, fourth and all the way,” Peyton said. “This lad and the one we rushed at the door ought to be the only opposition in this wing. Now we’ve got the place to ourselves and it’s not midnight yet.”

  The motors, each about as big as a two-gallon pail, were stacked together. Bengali had also brought a canvas bag, which he now opened, revealing black powder.

  “I made it myself,” he explained. “Some of you go into the gun room. Bring all the old muzzle-loaders that have flintlocks in good condition. We have no percussion caps. Peyton, I thought I’d have good news for you, but it’s bad.”

  “Bad?” echoed Peyton. “What about?”

  “About your friend Thora. I hoped to bring her here. I knew that she and you—”

  “How did you know?”

  “She told me that—and much more. After you were carried off to prison, she came and gave me information. On what she’s told, I’ve based most of my findings about Argyle’s planned coup. Argyle, with every armed plane, will go up in the stratosphere at noon tomorrow and board the Island. The Airmen on duty here are behind him.”

  “You started to talk about Thora,” Peyton reminded him harshly.

  “She became one of us. I went to get her before meeting you to rush the museum guards. She’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Peyton clutched Bengali by the front of his coat. “Gone where?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think Argyle knows, either. I understand he’s got an order out for her to be brought in, dead or alive. I’m sorry, Peyton.”

  Peyton’s eyes slitted. “She’s in with us, you say. She’s where neither you nor Argyle can find her. That means she’s up to a game of her own, something in connection with this uprising, and something she’s doing alone. She’s all right, Bengali. I’m sure of it. And I’m not going to waste valuable time worrying. She needs us to work along with her.”