Muscles screamed and quivered with the agony of fatigue.
Worn, blistered hands left blood on the metal.
Giles Habibula, lagging a little behind, puffing noisily, yet found breath for complaint.
“Ah, poor old Giles is dying for a drink.
Perishing for one blessed sip of wine!
His precious throat is dry as leather.
Poor old Giles; lame, feeble, sick old Giles Habibula—he can’t stand this any longer.
Climbing till he feels like he’s turned into a mortal mechanical monkey!”
“I’ve been counting the rungs,” Jay Kalam said calmly, at last, breaking the silence of endless, tortured effort.
“We must be in the tower.”
A current of air presently struck them, blowing down the shaft.
“The fans, again!” muttered John Star.
“I wonder why———?”
He soon knew.
The downward wind increased.
It became a tempest, a howling hurricane.
It yelled in their ears with demoniac voices.
It ripped garments from their bodies.
It snatched at them with prankish hands, hammered them with savage blows.
“Trying———” screamed Jay Kalam above the roar of it, “to blow us—off the ladder!
Climb on—stop—fans—”
The wind whipped his voice away.
John Star climbed on, against the relentless pressure of howling air, fighting the tearing demon talons.
The flimsy metal rungs quivered, bent beneath the strain.
Steadily, painfully, he won his way against the narrow storm.
Another sound was at last in Ms ears, above the shrieking air—a whine of gears, a whirring of great rushing vanes.
The purring of the over-driven fans, deadly in the dark.
Upward he battled, inch by hard-won inch, to the top of the trembling ladder, to a wide platform of vibrating metal bars.
There he paused to play a game with death.
Somewhere in the dark above, those great blades were racing, and he knew they would never pause as they split his skull and splashed his brain.
Cautiously he moved, feeling his way.
He was out of the main air-current, now; he could move more easily.
Yet sudden, freakish blasts still drove at him savagely; they were demon hands jerking him toward the racing unseen vanes.
Toward the whine of gears he moved.
With cautious fingers he explored the frame of the vibrating machine.
He tried to shape a mental image of it.
At last he found the end of a rotating shaft; and he thrust, slowly, carefully, with the heavy little gun, three times hi vain. Then metal teeth snapped it from his hand.
The purring changed to anger.
The gears snarled and screamed.
They chewed metal, and spit the fragments savagely.
And they broke.
The unloaded motor whined briefly with rage.
Silence, then.
Peace.
The whirring, invisible vanes slowed, and stopped.
The demoniac air was stilled.
John Star waited hi the quiet dark, panting, resting his trembling muscles, while the others climbed up to his side.
“Now, the intake,” softly urged Jay Kalam.
“Before they come!”
“Wait a mortal moment,” wheezed Giles Habibula, sobbing for ah*.