Raiders Invisible — Reading Companion

There were old pals on her--buddies, gone in a flash of time!

This wasn't a war game. This was tragedy, stark before his eyes.

The Black Fleet forgot its mimic battle. Radio telephone messages winged over the horizon to the approaching Blue Fleet. The Black dreadnoughts hove to; launches with ashen-faced men in white manning them dropped overboard; a dozen destroyers rolled in the swells around a crumbled, charred egg-shell that but minutes before had been an omnipotent giant of the sky.

Chris Travers, aloft in sunlight suddenly bereft of its beauty, jammed the stick of the scout full over. He could do nothing, he knew. He could only return to the ZX-1 and tell the story of its sister as he had seen it.

But why, he wondered as he flew almost blindly, had the ZX-2 so quickly flamed to oblivion? The helium of its inner bags had been uninflammable, as had the heavy oil of its fuel tanks; the ten engines were Diesels, and hence without the ordinary ignition system and gasoline. Safety devices by the score had been installed on board; nothing had been overlooked. And the weather, perfect.

It was uncanny. It seemed totally unexplainable.

Swarms of planes droned between sea and sky, all speeding in the one direction, west, to where the crumpled remnants of a dirigible were slipping quickly beneath the billows, beyond the sight of man. Planes of war game umpires, of officials, of newspaper correspondents and photographers. And soon a spectral, gleaming wisp of silver nosed out of the east, and the lone scout flying east dropped in altitude to meet its mother.

Mechanically, his mind elsewhere, Chris shoved the button which reared the automatic clamp behind the cockpit in preparation for affixing the scout to the plane rack beneath the ZX-1. The dirigible, far in advance of the Blue Fleet, was roaring along at its full one hundred and fifty to hover over the grave of its sister. Chris eyed its course and changed his. To jockey into the rack, he had to pass the dirigible and come up underneath from its rear.

The air giant roared closer. As the distance between then loosened, Chris's brow wrinkled and he swore softly in puzzlement.

"Now, just what's wrong with them?" he exclaimed, "The darned zep isn't flying straight! She's wobbling in her course!"

It was hardly apparent, but true. Ever so slightly, the snub nose of the ZX-1 was swaying from side to side as it sped through the air; ever so slightly, her massive stern directional-rudders were wavering.

She was less than a mile away now. At that time, there were no other planes in sight; none flying in that vicinity save Chris's. He glued his eyes to the telescopic sight. A moment later, sheer horror swept his face.

The scout leaped as its throttle rammed down. The gleaming, thousand-foot shell of the ZX-1 roared by it at equal altitude, making it a puny fly-speck in the sky. But the fly-speck was faster. It turned in a screaming bank; it straightened; it lunged back after the swaying, retreating mammoth like a whippet, lower, now, than its quarry. It maneuvered expertly as it gained, for one of the best pilots of the service was at its controls, and there were deep lines graven in his face, lines of anguish and intolerable suspense.

Through the telescopic sight, Chris had not seen a single white-clad figure standing beside the glass ports of the dirigible's control car. But he had seen, slung from the rack along her belly, a single plane--the same rather peculiar-looking plane he had seen hanging beneath the rack of the ZX-2 a few minutes before she had gone down in flames!

And in that plane, he knew surely, was the answer to the mystery.

Speed cut to just a trifle more than the dirigible's. Chris passed a few feet underneath the huge expanse of her lower directional rudder. From so close, its uncontrolled wavering was terrifying.

His faculties were concentrated on the task of sliding the scout's clamp into the groove of the plane rack, but he was also surveying the lone airplane hanging from it. A powerful machine, painted in Navy colors, a peculiar knob on the upper side of each half of the top wing gave it its unfamiliar appearance. Its pilot was obviously aboard the dirigible, working....