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Volume 8315

MOON MAID AT THE EARTH'S CORE by ANDY NUNEZ

CHAPTER FIVE — RETURN TO THE SKIES

Pulp adventure novels always seem so exciting to me. They teem with non-stop action. Real life is much more tedious. There was a difference, though, to the monotony at work in that dead city of the Mahars. For the first time since becoming stranded in Pellucidar, the world beneath Earth's surface, I had hope for a future, a life with a beautiful woman who loved me as deeply as I loved *her. Love does strange things to a man, and I am the first to admit I was giddy with the blush of romance. I seemed superhuman in my abilities, and worked tirelessly toward my goal of taking my small band of companions to the seat of the Empire of Sari and meeting with David Innes, the Emperor of civilized Pellucidar.

Of course, it wasn't all smooth sailing. When I went to retrieve my P-38, I found that little rodents had chewed some of the wiring and it had to be replaced. Others had destroyed the leather and padding inside the cockpit, so that had to be replaced also. Luckily, the damage was minor and I was able to bring the plane next to the city where we kept it covered with a lean-to made of woven branches and grasses. Everything we did had to be made nearly from scratch. The tools and equipment in the Mahar's lab were mainly geared toward biological chemistry, but Giuseppe was able to devise the most ingenious things with them.

Lightning brought in fresh meat and hides. The girls scraped and sewed. I used my survival knife to cut hides into strips so that they could join large pieces of hide across the wooden frame of our glider. We used primitive methods to shape the frame, but Giuseppe had an excellent eye, and the glider began to take an elegant shape. I drew pictures of transport planes and gliders from memory, and Giuseppe chose his design from them, refining the shape he originally had shown me.

Cables and fittings proved to be a small problem, but Giuseppe adapted some sort of furnace that the Mahars used to incinerate hazardous chemicals and refuse into a reasonable forge. We experimented with copper zinc, and tin, found in quantity within a mile of the city. Bronze was too brittle, but brass made for nice fittings. Producing glass capable of holding up to flight was beyond us; so Giuseppe designed a series of sliding panels that he could close to keep the wind off, yet open during takeoff so he could see. He also forged a set of brass mirrors that he could project from the side to see with, but even the high polish he gave them made them barely reliable.

Salome, consequently, could not understand why she had to make sets of furs, but Ee-la-nah seemed unruffled by the idea. Even in the tropics of Pellucidar, the air at several thousand feet would be a trifle chilly at three hundred miles per hour or so. Eventually, after whatever time passed back on the surface, we had everything ready. Giuseppe's glider looked like something from a pulp artist's imagination. The brass fittings were strange to me after all the nickel and chrome that coated most modern planes' parts. Giuseppe's carefully sewn wing fabric was based on his experience with the Norge, and he included an uncoupling device in case he needed to disconnect from my plane. He rigged a retractable tether to my tail boom and we were set.

We used my plane to drag the glider into position. It was tricky business, but finally we had them lined up with a long flat stretch. The glider rested on skids and would be tricky to land if the ground were rough. Of course, I considered any landing we could all walk away from to be a good one. We loaded food and tools in my tail boom compartments and our distillery equipment in the back of the glider. We worked out the weight so that Salome, Lightning and I would ride in the P-38, and Giuseppe, Ee-la-nah, and the Mahar would ride in the glider. I didn't like the idea of her not riding with me, but she was needed to communicate with the Mahar in case Giuseppe was too busy to use sign language.

Giuseppe and I checked over each plane carefully, making sure all the controls worked and that the lubricant levels were fine. We then topped off my fuel and prepared to board. I made a series of gestures to the Mahar to indicate that I would tolerate no interference from her during the flight, though inwardly I was at a loss to figure out how to enforce such a statement. She gave me a direct bearing to Phutra, and had even laboriously sketched a map of salient features that would guide me if we got off course. I shook Giuseppe's hand.

"I guess you never counted on this when you signed on with Nobile," I said.

"Adventure is adventure, and this is greater than anything on the top, eh?" he said, grinning. I go now and load the Mahar. You just fly this thing without any funny stuff."

"We're fine as long as the thipdars leave us alone. After all, the last things we have to worry about are enemy interceptors here."

Then, I was facing Ee-la-nah. She smiled much more that it gave her such an appealing look along with her big blue eyes. Unheeding, I squeezed her to me and gave her a kiss that would have been considered shameful in polite company where I came from. However, where I came from might as well had been on the moon.

"I hope this is a short trip," I said. "I miss you already. Don't be scared. Flying is fun when you get used to it."

"I will be fine. Besides, I have flown before."

I started to question her on this, when Salome spoke up. "Let us go. I am ready to see more people, and get me a new servant other than this insolent slut who throws herself at any man."

I turned on her in cold fury. "With you as a mistress, she would be hard put not to be insolent. I better not hear any more insults, or I will tie you to the bomb rack and you can travel to Sari that way." She started, but said nothing, probably because she didn't know what a bomb rack was.

Without further exchange, we got in the planes. Lightning was a bit skittish, but obeyed me as well as a trained Shepherd and found the extreme back of the cockpit to curl up in. Giuseppe came out after securing the Mahar and Ee-la-nah to make sure my engines started. They fired like I was back in Greenland. He climbed back into the glider and secured the door. Here was the big test. If the glider became airborne we were on our way, if it showed the least bit of problems I was going to land before I got too much altitude to make a crash fatal. One thing we hadn't made was a parachute, and even if I had done so there was no way to train my companions in bailout procedures.

I slowly revved up the motors and eased the plane forward. The P-38 rolled along the grass, gaining speed as the tether played out. There was a slight tug as the cable pulled taut, then glider began to follow. I gave the plane more throttle and brought it up to takeoff speed. The fighter lifted off the grass and the glider followed! With one hand on the throttle, the other on the stick, my head swiveled like a dashboard hula doll as I looked back through the canopy. The P-38 felt a little wobbly, but gave me few problems. The main concern was torque and—

It worked! The glider steadied and I gained what I thought would be an altitude too great for thipdars, yet low enough so that the air wouldn't be too thin. Of course, I had no idea if the atmosphere down here got thin. I looked ahead and the landscape melted into a jumble in the rising distance, giving the sensation one was flying in to a wall and at the same time making far landmarks almost impossible to distinguish. It was going to be a long flight, but I was confident we could reach the border of Pellucidar's only known Empire.

I trusted the Mahar's mapmaking skills to the same degree that I trusted her not to ever eat another human being, so I stayed along the jagged spine of mountains that led in the direction I considered south. I took it easy and flew straight so I could gauge how dragging the glider would affect the P-38's performance, and to listen to see if our crudely distilled aviation fuel would run smoothly. Both worked well. I waggled my wings to show how happy I was and upset Lightning. He got over it. Salome said nothing, but her face turned green whenever turbulence made the plane buck a little.

"I thought you came down here from the moon," I observed. "You had to have flown down, unless you used a parachute."

"On the moon, we have methods you can't comprehend," she said crossly.

I wanted to press Salome, but she was still pretty sore at me from the time I stopped her from beating Ee-la-nah, so I gave it up. I was going to get a decent view of the moon, though not as close as I'd like. I intended to fly to a landmark called the Great Peak and turn left, or eastward, toward the knob of land which contained Sari and Phutra. I estimated I would approach no closer than 400 miles from Pellucidar's moon, which was nearer than anybody from the surface had come to the outer moon. I considered offering Salome to drop her off on the way, but suppressed the petulant emotion. When we got to Sari, and I got Ee-la-nah out of her bondage, Salome could thumb back to the moon for all I cared.

All went smoothly for a long stretch of time. I had no compass, but Giuseppe was able to repair my altimeter and airspeed indicator. This, along with my rewound wristwatch that for a long time I merely stowed away as useless, gave me some sense of how far I was going and how much fuel I was consuming. I knew that I could not fly all the way to Sari, so we had constructed two sheet metal containers and placed an extra hundred pounds of fuel in the glider. This would allow me to reach Phutra for sure, by estimates, and hopefully back to Sari in a short hop. I intended to use my flyby of the Empire's capital to spot a safe place to land where I wouldn't be shot up by their soldiers since they possessed rifled muskets as last I understood.

Comparing a rifled musket to the smooth-bores of Korsar was like comparing rifled muskets to modern machine guns. Ulysses S. Grant remarked that a man with a musket might stand 200 yards from you and shoot at you all day without you ever knowing that you were the target. David Innes' weapons were certainly on a par with those of the last century. For all I knew, he had machine guns and tanks.

At last I saw the Great Peak. It jutted skyward far beyond the serrated tops of the rest of the range. Beyond the Great Peak, as I gently made my turn, I saw the dark sphere of Pellucidar's moon. It had none of the reflected luminosity of the outer world's moon. Instead, it appeared like a small planet, brilliantly highlighted on top and deep-shadowed on the bottom, complete with its own blotches of green and blue as pulp artists have imagine earth to be like. At four hundred miles distance it seemed tiny and its features barely visible. I hoped someday to take a closer examination. For the time being, it hovered over the surface of Pellucidar like an ominous specter, casting its gloomy shadow over the land beneath it.

I turned to remark to Salome that her home was in view to find her snoring, flabby lips rippling with each exhalation. I supposed some men would find her appealing, but I was not one of them. I longed for Ee-la-nah, to hold her in my arms, and to do more than that. My passionate imaginings were cut short, however, when I saw a black shape in the distance heading on a course guaranteed to intersect my own. I thought at first it was one of the giant thipdars, mistaking me as a rival for its territory. My speed had been great enough to avoid such encounters previously. I noted with alarm, however, that this thing was closing on me rapidly.

The object closed too rapidly for a flying reptile. To my horror, I realized that it was another aircraft, sleek and black. A single engine cowling bloomed from its nose, and from two nacelles beneath its wings came winking bursts of flame and the flat crack of gunfire!