Presently, the queen, sitting on an attached bench in the lead chariot, gave the word to proceed. Her driver, standing up, shouted at the moose to go at top pace. She did not use reins and was not so much the driver as the director. Sentient animals did not need these and would have resented them.
They raced across the drawbridge and out through the enormous gateway of the outer walls. The people caught unawares scattered before them. Then they were going east on the red brick road and were quickly past the walls. Hank, looking south, saw the black plume of smoke from the burning aircraft.
A mile from the castle, the chariots turned south onto a dirt road. It soon left the plateau and began winding down the face of the cliff. It was just wide enough for two small wagons to pass each other, but the moose took the inner curves as if they were sure that they'd not meet anyone coming from the other direction. Hank hoped they were right.
Lamblo had to shout several times at her animals to slow down, and once she pulled on the brake handle by her side. Somehow, the whole cavalcade—cervuscade?—got down to the bottom without accident. Here, Hank thought, the animals would slow down, take a breather. But no. Now they were going even faster. The trees on the sides of the road flashed by. Eventually, his weight began to tell on Lamblo's beasts, and the chariot dropped behind the others. Glinda, looking back, shouted something, and the others checked their pace.
They came from the semidarkness of the heavy woods into bright sunlight. The desert lay before them. Tawny sand and red and black rocks of from house-size to egg-size. Glinda stopped the chariots. When Hank's pulled near hers, she said, "We'll walk from here."
He did not have to ask her why. Pulling the vehicles through that rugged, ragged waste would have worn out the moose more in a mile than the six miles of racing.
He wondered if that was the only reason when he saw boxes unloaded from the only four-wheeled chariot. They were opened, and the contents passed out. Hank took three of the thin iron javelins Lamblo handed him.
"What're these for?"
The snub-nosed blonde pointed at a white arc springing from one high rock to another.
"They're not dangerous if you don't get in their path. But if any roll at you, throw one of these through it."
She spread her palms up and outwards.
"Gaguum!"
Which was Quadling for "Boom!"
"They explode. Usually, anyway. Sometimes, you have to throw a second one through them."
Javelins were not their only protection. As they walked out slowly, they were joined by a group that had arrived a few minutes behind them. These were archers, male and female, their arrows tipped with round iron balls. The weight of these would prevent long-range shooting, but, apparently, they were thought adequate for their purpose. The archers formed a circle around the queen's party.
They went up a tortured slope of projecting sheets of rocks and pockets of sand. When they got to its top, they could see the wreck burning on the downward side of the slope. Dark marks on the rock showed where the craft had struck near the end of a slanting sheet, had bounced, and then had slid down the bottom half of the grayish apron. Hank wanted to urge more speed; he was vibrating with curiosity. But Glinda walked slowly, and nobody was going to break the discipline of matching the pace with her.
She stopped for a moment and looked around.
"Good!" she said. "No fizhanam in sight. They do, however, come up swiftly, Hank."
The searing heat from the flaming wreck kept them from getting closer than a hundred feet. There was nothing to do but to wait for the flames to die and the metal to cool. Or so Hank thought. Twenty minutes later, more soldiers and moose came, hauling with much labor six four-wheeled wagons. These held tanks and pumping machinery. A greenish foam was sprayed from three of them, and this quickly smothered the burning gasoline. Then water was pumped from the other three to dissipate the foam and cool the hot metal.
Hank had thought that the Quadling technology was at about what it had been on Earth in A.D. 1300. But even A.D. 1923 did not have this fire-quenching foam. He had better wait until he was familiar with this culture before he made any conclusions about the comparative advancement of science and technology here and on Earth.
He could now get near enough for a closer look at the wreck. Breathing through his mouth because of the stomach-churning stench of roasted flesh, he walked around the wreck and also looked at the pieces that had been scattered by the two impacts. The hawk had reported correctly. The fuselage had been severed about three feet behind the rear cockpit as if by a giant's sword. The missing part might be out on the desert to the south, but he doubted it. It was probably lying on Kansas soil.
The burned and twisted skeleton of the plane looked like that of a D.H.4B, a two-seater scout and light bomber biplane. The Army Air Service had over a thousand of them. It usually carried two .30-caliber machine guns in front of the pilot in the front cockpit and one mounted by the rear cockpit. The two fore guns, bent, lay about thirty yards ahead of the wreck. There was no third machine gun visible. Hank thought that it may have been removed from its mounting before the plane took off for the fatal mission.
Normally, the D.H.4B carried two men, but there was only one, the charred mass in the pilot's seat.
However, the crash had hurled from the rear cockpit some cartons of ammunition, a BAR (Browning Automatic .30-caliber assault rifle) 1918 model, a smashed camera, and cases containing film. The BAR was undamaged except for some scratches.
He stood by while soldiers got the body out of the cockpit. When it was laid out on the rock, he forced himself to approach it. Though he had seen some badly burned corpses in France and two at a Missouri landing strip, he felt like vomiting. The gloves and clothes had been burned away, and the boots fell off in strips while the body was being carried. The fingers were missing. The face was smashed in, but it would have been gone anyway. The goggles had been knocked off the head. The ears and nose were gone, and the eyesockets were empty.
He looked into the black mass of the face and wondered what the pilot had looked like when alive. Grimacing, he searched for dog tags but could find none. If the man had identifying papers on him, they had been destroyed by fire. However, the two gold bars embedded in the fried flesh showed that he had been a first lieutenant.
A soldier brought a charred belt and holster containing a Colt .45 automatic pistol. The ammunition in its clip had exploded and destroyed the weapon.
However, some of the boxes thrown out of the rear cockpit held loaded magazine boxes for the BAR, and others contained ammunition which would fit his New Service revolver. And he had plans for making more.
Glinda seemed to be undisturbed by the ghastly stinking thing on the rock. Some of the soldiers, however, were retching, and many were as pale as he probably looked.
Glinda asked him some questions about the airplane. Hank replied that the flying machine was a military one. He was assuming that it had been sent through the green haze on orders.
"Are you thinking as I am?" she said. "That the hazes through which you and this man came through are not natural openings? That they were made by your people?"
"I may be wrong," he said, "but they could be the results of experiments by the Signal Corps. Its headquarters are at Fort Leavenworth. Still..."
He did not believe that forcing the openings could have been the goal of the Signal Corps. These had come about as accidental byproducts—what was the word?—serendipitous, from serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century? At least, the first time had been unforeseen, but the second time must have been on purpose.
"If they were formed by your people," she said, "they don't know how to keep them stable. And you must have accidentally come across one and flown through. I wonder if that was their first attempt or if others had been made before then?"