Chapter 11: "Bullard, of the I.B.C.!"

The controls of a meteor ship held steady without the touch of the pilot’s hand. Chet Bullard was staring at a radiocone on the instrument board in the control room where a voice from some super-powered station was calling. His own radio had been crackling a call, and now this response was coming across the void.

“Orders from the Stratosphere Control Board: You will proceed at once to New York. Radiobeacon 2X12 will guide you down. Your message received and we acknowledge report of the finding of the space-flyer, Pilot Haldgren. Do not discharge any passengers and land nowhere else than at New York without direct orders of the Board. Keep your directional signal on full power; our cruisers will pick you up in the highest level. Signed: Commander of Air.”

Spud O’Malley, it was, who broke the silence of the room where only the sound of the terrific exhaust came thinly through.

“May divils confound him! And it’s back on the Moon with those other beasts I’m wishin’ I was. At least a man can get close enough to slam them in their ugly faces; but the Commander and his cruisers! Sure, there’s nothin’ we can do!”

“Just take our medicine,” said Chet Bullard quietly. “But I have proved him wrong; Haldgren, here, is the living evidence of that. And I said I would laugh him from the Service--well, I’m not so sure of that.”

“But surely,” broke in Haldgren’s booming voice, “there will be only praise for what you have done. I do not understand--”

“You don’t know the Commander, my boy,” Spud broke in dryly. “And you don’t know that the lad, here, defied him to his face and ran the gantlet of his cruisers’ guns to get away and go after you.”

“Ah!” grunted the giant. “And now I understand. It is the old story--an incompetent man in a place of authority--”

Chet broke in.

“Not quite right; this Commander of ours has done much--he is a driver of men--but there are some of us who think he lacks vision. He can never see beyond the stratosphere he rules so ably; and his position is supreme.”

“There is still the Governing Council--we will appeal--”

But the master pilot was not listening to Haldgren’s words; his slim, sensitive hand was reaching for the ball-control to build up still more the tremendous blast of a forward exhaust that was checking their speed and making them as heavy as if their bodies were of meteoric iron.

A forward lookout showed a black globe; its circle was rimmed with fire from the Sun that it blotted out. A hemisphere of night lay below--the black, mysterious night of a waiting Earth. But one strong signal came in on the instruments at Chet’s side to show him where on that horizon was New York; and the call of a flagship of cruisers was flashing before him as the lift of the Repelling Area was felt.

“Follow!” flashed the order. “You will follow to New York!” And, through the black night, faint flashes of light marked the fleet of swift guardians of the skies that closed in, then swept downward and out--an impregnable convoy about the speeding, roaring ship.

And there was that in Chet’s face as he handled the controls that brought Anita Haldgren to his side that she might lift his free hand in wordless comfort and press it to her face.

That venerable and beloved man, the President of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, stood silent before a vast audience. Throughout the great auditorium was silence; each of the gathered thousands was listening to the shrieking sirens from the landing field on the roof overhead.

Skylights above showed the night air ablaze with red, through which the vivid green of landing signals pierced in staccato bursts. From the roof of that building to the highest level of the stratosphere the air was cleared; no craft of the Service would venture to pierce the barrage of light and radio waves that hemmed that aerial shaft. And down the shaft, in a thunder of roaring exhausts, came a shining shape.

She sparkled and flashed in the crimson and green of that emergency light, and from her bow poured a tornado that blasted the air, then streamed out behind in hot gas like a comet of flame. Then the thunders died; the shining shape turned once slowly in air to show her blunt nose and cylindrical body before she settled softly as a homing bird to the embrace of great waiting arms of steel. And, inside the building, a white-haired man was saying:

“They are here! Thank God, they are here! Their radio has prepared us; our signals have guided them home. And now it is not New York, nor even the United States of America alone who attends; the whole world will be summoned. Look!”

Behind, and high above him on a wall, was a radio panel. Its signal lamps went suddenly dark. The thin, blue-veined hand of the speaker was pointing.

“Only twice has the world-call flashed: once when the Molemen came and the future of the world was at stake; once when the Dark Moon crashed down from the void and the serpents of space menaced aerial traffic. And now--once again!--the whole world is summoned! Every city and hamlet of Earth--every ship of the air and the sea--every vessel on the ocean, under the ocean, and in the air levels above--”

His voice broke sharply. From the panel there came a thin call, a quivering that was more a trembling than a sound; it reached out to touch raspingly the nerves of every listener. Then the whole board burst forth in a flash of fire where a flaming crystal leaped to life--and none could see that pulsing flame without thrilling to the knowledge that it was calling a whole world with its wordless summons.

The light died; a television detector whined as its motors came to speed; and each watcher knew that the waiting world was connected with that auditorium in New York; all that happened, there--each sight and sound--was circling the globe.

An announcer’s voice roared briefly before the regulator cut down on its volume.

“You are seeing the Radio-central Auditorium in New York. On the landing stage above, after a journey of five hundred thousand miles, a strange craft has settled to rest. Its pilot: Chester Bullard, once rated as Master Pilot of the World! Its journey, now safely completed: from the Earth to the Moon, and return!

“The world is waiting to greet Pilot Bullard, though of this he, as yet, is unaware. World-wide radio control is now transferred to Radio-central Auditorium in New York! They are coming! They are entering!”

But the thousands gathered in that great hall heard no other words from the radiocone. Their attention was focused upon the broad stage, where, descending from a lift, a strange group stepped out upon the stage, stood an instant in startled wonder that was near embarrassment, then took the seats to which they were shown.

And again the venerable President of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale was speaking.

“It is less than a month since I stood here before you, when, as again is true to-night, the entire personnel of the executives of the Stratosphere Control Board was gathered to do honor to the pioneers of space--the discoverer--”