Part 2

The radio brought a rakish melody faintly to the earphones. The music soothed Conway, though if he had listened to it on the ground he would have turned to something else. It made him forget to some extent the loneliness of the infinity that stretched away above him. The earth was invisible now.

* * * * *

At fifteen thousand feet the temperature had dropped to five degrees below. Conway put on his mask and adjusted it.

His goggles began to fog and, reaching down, he turned on his batteries; then, picking up his log sheet, made an entry:

“4 volts; much colder.”

The air was becoming thinner, lighter. There was less oxygen to breathe, and he found himself sucking in the icy air in greedy gasps. Stooping, he twisted a valve that opened an oxygen tank. After that his breath came normally.

An airman going rapidly aloft to great altitudes sometimes experiences an acute discomfort called, in aviation parlance, “bends,” or sometimes “rickets.” These “bends” may produce pains behind the flyer’s ears, like mastoiditis, or an apparent buzzing in the ears and head. If prolonged these pains become unbearable. Conway suffered from this trouble now, and slowed the progress of the balloon until his body could become accustomed to the change in pressure of the air.

At sixteen thousand feet the _Marie_ entered the first layer of clouds. The mist hugged tight around the basket; whereas before--when in clear air--Conway had been able to see a distance of fifty miles, he could scarcely see ten feet now. The feeling of isolation and aloneness was even more pronounced. The temperature was fifteen degrees below, yet snow filtered down from the clouds above, passed Conway slowly, Gradually the rounded top of the huge bag was covered with snow, a perceptible weight to carry into the rarefied air as the flight progressed. Conway spilled more sand from his ballast bags, a thin yellow stream of grains that fell away like beads of amber glass.

At twenty thousand feet the _Marie_ lifted herself out of the clouds and into clear sunshine. The sky here was a deep and lifeless blue. Clouds stretched out in all directions--seemingly into infinity, low ridge after low ridge, with valleys in between: a flat plain of brilliantly white mist that was painful to the eye. Above these clouds there was no haze; the sun was intense, yet cold, unfriendly.

It was ten minutes until three o’clock. The radio was still bringing in music from an invisible, distant world. The bends grew less painful as the minutes passed.

But Conway’s body was gradually growing numb from the lack of pressure on it--a normal phenomenon at extremely high altitudes. Some men may go to forty thousand feet before this sets in; others feel it coming on at thirty thousand. Conway began to suffer from it at thirty-five. He felt no cold, no pain; his body seemed to rest comfortably, with a kind of sensuous inertia that lulled him toward a seductive semiconsciousness. He tried to fight this feeling, tried to rouse himself. He knew its symptoms and its dangers: in its final form a few minutes of complete paralysis, then sleep. The oxygen would feed his lungs until it became exhausted, then sleep would carry him to death in the thin, anaemic air eight miles above the earth. He had felt that way on other flights, although less so than now. And he still had nine thousand feet to go before the record would be safely his.... The mercury in the thermometer had tumbled down to twenty-nine below.

* * * * *

There was a sudden suffocating feeling in Conway’s lungs. Quickly he changed from the first oxygen tank to the second; then, with a knife that dangled on a string inside the basket he cut the rubber tubing of the first tank and hacked at the lashings that protruded into the car. The empty cylinder fell silently away; the balloon lunged upward gently, hesitated with a slight jerk, then went up again.

Conway was dimly conscious that his radio was silent. He tuned it carefully, examined it at length without success. Finally he leaned over the side of the basket and looked down at the antenna--it was gone. Slowly he scrawled on his log:

“Cyl. dropped. Broke antenna off; no more music.”

He busied himself for some minutes with entries in his log, writing now in an unsteady hand, clumsily. He set down the time shown on the clock and the voltage being drawn from his batteries--anything he saw or anything he thought about recording to occupy his mind.

Insidiously the numbness grew upon his body. He seemed unable to see his instruments clearly; he was like a drunken man, his vision blurred. Doggedly he shook his head, trying thus to clear his sight. His senses seemed all befuddled. Foolhardy though he knew the expenditure of energy to be--for he was not cold--he took to waving his mittened hands, clapping them together gently, as a freezing man might do when slipping into a fatal stupor in the cold. But that did no good; and he took up his pencil again and tried to make another entry in his log. His mind seemed to work in vagrant opposition to his will, disobeying reason and experience.

He read his altimeter and his clock and thermometer. These readings he put down carefully, with painful labor. The altimeter registered thirty-eight thousand feet; it was three-twenty by the clock; the temperature was down to thirty-four below. He found the line on the log below where his last entry had been made. There was something distantly familiar about the figures already there and the ones he was trying to write; he fumbled in his mind to recall the connection--failed.

Time passed now in endless throbs. His legs felt numb; his feet like slugs of lead that hung inside his fur-lined moccasins in curious detachment from his body. With difficulty now he made new figures on the paper. Wearily he glanced at other entries and wondered where he had seen them; he glanced at all his instruments and back to the log once more. Slowly realization came to him.

There were three entries that gave the time of day as three-twenty! The clock, also, said three-twenty! He puzzled that; finally, through a blur, knew that the clock had stopped! He stared out into space, trying to collect his wits, incredulous.

“The oil!” he thought. “How long ago?”

The altimeter registered forty-one thousand feet. He knew, dimly, that he must hurry; but there was no conscious fear among his muddled thoughts. Suddenly there was that suffocation in his lungs; he changed to the third cylinder of oxygen, his movements heavy. It was later than he had thought--the time was now almost too short!

Speed! Conway dropped the remainder of his sand, cut away the second cylinder to lighten the balloon still further. His movements were sluggish, and he fumbled stupidly. The paralysis was moving upward in his body, was seeping into his arms already; would soon sweep up and touch his sight and hearing and his brain.

His foggy mind worked incoherently. Up two thousand more.... Down twenty thousand--the air was thick down there.... Thirty minutes on the last tank.... Never make it! Go down now! But a dogged disregard for safety made him go ahead.

* * * * *

Vaguely he remembered dropping his batteries to lighten the balloon still more. Speed! If he got caught up there without oxygen, he’d be dead before he could get down! The altimeter registered forty-two. He reached for the valve-cord with clownish awkwardness, then released it: he’d go on up. His mind worked things out in blurred succession as the needle crept slowly around the dial.

A free balloon is equipped with a “rip panel” in its top, which, when torn free, allows a complete deflation of the bag. The loss of gas permits the cloth of the bottom portion of the balloon to fold back within the upper portion, forming in that way an enormous cap, umbrella-like, over which the netting hangs. The netting holds this cap in place, and the balloon parachutes to earth. The descent is rapid.

The needle of the altimeter paused at forty-three thousand as the nerves in Conway’s muscles died. He found himself unable to grasp the valve-cord with his hands; his arms were like wooden stakes, detached entirely from his shoulders. He could still hear and see, although there was a roaring in his brain. The balloon had stopped its climb, had reached its peak, would go no farther.

Conway realized that death was near. Unable to pull the cord that would release the gas, helpless at an altitude where life would perish without oxygen, he would be snuffed out in a few quick minutes when the last cylinder was empty. The rip-cord and the valve-cord dangled temptingly in the basket just in front of him; either would have served his purpose, would have sent the balloon back to earth again. But he could not control his muscles enough to pull either one of them. Every muscle in his arms and legs was uncontrollable. Only his head and neck were still unparalyzed.

There came that suffocating feeling now again. The tank was almost empty, would be gone in one more breath! Desperately, with strength born of panic, he sucked his lungs full. Then he bent his neck and raked his face against a rope that extended upward from the corner of the basket. His lungs seemed bursting; the mask still clung tenaciously on his face. He raked again, a grotesque movement, and the mask came halfway off. His head swam, reeled crazily; he wanted air--he had to breathe! He set his teeth hard over the cord that extended to the rip panel, bit hard down upon it, tried to jerk it with his head. He lost his balance, crumpled forward and lay, unconscious, on the basket floor.

* * * * *

In the deathlike silence of the upper air the rasping sigh of escaping hydrogen echoed hollowly. The huge bag of the _Marie IV_ crumpled slowly, collapsed, the bottom portion folding upward in the netting. It started down, gaining momentum rapidly. Air, passing through the ropes and rigging of the balloon, turned to howling, shrieks as speed was gathered.

The _Marie_ fell three thousand feet while the hydrogen was going out. When the bag was empty it should have parachuted, but it did not. It folded up into a knot in the apex of the netting, like a huge fist, gnarled and bulging on one side. Helpless from the force of gravity, the derelict was falling at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, the cloth and netting whipping violently upward in a high-flung streamer. The figure in the bottom of the basket lay as it had fallen, crumpled grotesquely.

The balloon plunged earthward at a constant speed now--air resistance was so great that it could gain no greater velocity. As it descended and reached denser air it even slowed a trifle, but still fell like a rock nearly three miles a minute. The flat plain of the clouds seemed to lift steadily up toward the basket of the balloon; the balloon itself seemed to drop but slowly. Then, at twenty thousand feet, the clouds enveloped it and there was no trace left of where the falling derelict had gone.

* * * * *

Kisner and Welkfurn, waiting at the club for hours now, were silent as the minutes passed and brought no word of Conway. At first there had been tense moments of angry denunciation from Kisner, a hysterical venting of his fears and feelings of impending evil. Welkfurn realized fully now the gravity of his failure to return in time with the clock. At first he made explanations hotly, told of his experiences in town, tried to pacify and allay Kisner’s agitation; but the other man would not listen.

They waited anxiously until the time when Conway should have returned to earth again: they knew how much oxygen he carried, how long it would supply him; and when the time was up, they drove silently from the club to the balloon hangar and waited there, scanning the sky and hoping desperately to see the balloon descending near at hand, yet knowing that winds in the upper air were apt to drift the bag many miles Before it returned to earth. Time passed, and no word came of it. They waited now apathetically. They were sure that Conway was dead, and Kisner blamed Welkfurn bitterly.

“Why are we waiting here?” Welkfurn asked woodenly. “The balloon won’t come down around here--the wind will drift it.”

“All kinds of winds up there. Can’t tell where it went. One wind might drift it one way, then up a little higher another wind might blow it back. Anyhow--”

Suddenly Welkfurn cried eagerly:

“Kisner, _look_!” He pointed up as he spoke, and finally Kisner saw a speck of gray above another speck of dark, three or four miles to the east. These specks fell together, rapidly, in a straight line earthward. Kisner, running to his car, obtained binoculars, focused them quickly.

* * * * *

The basket of the balloon stood out quite plainly through the glass, the bag above it twisted hopelessly in the netting. There was no one in the car, and for a moment Kisner hoped that Conway had left his craft when higher up, was somewhere now coming down dangling on his parachute. The wreck hurtled toward the earth. Kisner judged that it was at six thousand feet when he first saw it. It reached four, then three; was plainer to be seen as it descended.

[Illustration: The figure seemed to hang a moment on the rim, seemed to try to struggle free, then toppled from the car.]

Then something lifted itself up inside the basket, seemed to hang a moment on the rim. It moved! Kisner saw it clearly! Then it sank again. The _Marie_ was almost to the ground--two thousand feet, dropping at one hundred fifty miles an hour. The figure rose again, dully, lethargically. Slowly it climbed up higher in the basket, seemed to try to struggle free. It seemed to slump again, but rose a moment later, and toppled from the car, falling for a time in line with the plunging wreckage. Something white bubbled up above it, checked its fall. Lazily it drifted down. The balloon struck the ground four hundred feet below. Before the parachute had come to earth, Kisner and Welkfurn rode frantically along a road toward where it would come down....

Six minutes later they were lifting Conway carefully into the car. Nearer dead than alive, he fainted as they put him in.

* * * * *

Late that evening Conway--the altitude-record holder of the world--and Kisner and Welkfurn sat before a roaring fire in the club. The balloonist was slightly pale, and was weakened from exposure. He should have been in bed recuperating, but his excitement had not waned, and he was not sleepy. From time to time he sucked deep breaths of air hungrily, held them in his lungs, and let them go.

“Can’t explain it all,” he said. “Can’t see how it happened.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Kisner asked.

“That clock! I saw three entries on my log, all the same! It woke me up a little, scared me. After that I don’t recall what happened. Must have been out on my feet; don’t recall a thing.

“How I pulled the rip-cord of the balloon I can’t see. When I came to, we were coming down like a brick--she hadn’t parachuted normally at all. I saw the cloth of the bag rolled up in a ball in the top of the netting, just enough to slow us up a little. By the time I got my mind working, we must have been down low--I didn’t see the altimeter. Just remember thinking: ‘Big boy, you gotta jump!’ Had a hard time getting out, too; just did make it. Kept thinking, ‘Must be awful near the ground. Hurry! Hurry!’ Well, you saw me come over the side.”

“Good thing she _didn’t_ parachute just right up there,” Kisner pointed out. “Your oxygen tanks were empty--if you hadn’t come down fast, you’d have died before the balloon got down where the air was dense enough that you could breathe!” He puzzled the matter a moment, shook his head. “Don’t see how you did it, Con.”

“Well see what I put on the log when I was up there,” Conway said tiredly. “Say, Welk, you run over and get it--get the log. We’ll have a look at it.”

Welkfurn nodded and arose, pulled on his overcoat. He started toward the door, and Conway called after him, grinning:

“Don’t be gone long, Welk; don’t get to talking on the way!”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March, 1929 issue of _Blue Book_ magazine.]