The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers Read Online Free PDF

speed, against the breeze he anticipated, he did now. This was a fine car but, after all, it was standard; and standard wheel-bearings aren’t made to take such speeds.
    So he eased up and was angered beyond his fears when he passed the man with the rifle. The man was just a blur. But he could see the blur imperiously wave its hand for still more speed.
    “Maybe he thinks I haven’t the guts,” gritted the test driver.
    He turned at the opposite end of the flat. And on the last lap he really tramped down.
    Two hundred and forty, two sixty, two ninety! With sweat-drenched white face he fought the wheel. Three—
    The man screamed and slowly eased up on the acclerator. The car, skipping around like a bug on a pond, gradually slowed. Then it screeched to a stop near the man with the rifle. And the right front bearing made a sound like a bagful of gravel. One more second at that last speed . . .
    “In Lucifer’s own name,” panted the driver to the man with the rifle, “what have you done to her? The way that motor’s geared, it oughtn’t to have the power to pull a kiddy car up a one per cent grade.”
    “How fast?” said the man.
    “I think I touched three hundred. I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t dare look . . .”
    There was a second shot down by the salt flat. The driver’s reckless young eyes began to film. He stood upright for almost ten seconds, with a hole in his heart; then he fell!
    The men came from the van. And the driver took out an automatic and fired at the hood of the test car.
    There was a soft roar, like that of a volcano far underground. Then the car was the disappearing black heart of a white flame that blossomed like a great rose around it.
    The men waited till the warped, fused chassis and motor block had cooled, then loaded them into the van. With them—and the body of the test driver and the “jack-rabbit”—the closed truck rumbled leisurely toward the distant city.
    Hardly out of sight of the truck, over the rim of the horizon, another man-made thing of speed was hurtling through space.
    This time it was a plane.
    At four thousand feet, and against the same west breeze that the sedan driver thought would slow up his car, the plane streaked like a flash of light. Then it banked, dipped, headed up, and went through maneuvers no one ever saw a plane go through before.
    To begin with, it didn’t look like much of a ship. It was a three-year-old small cabin ship with a single motor. It had just one feature that would have surprised a pilot, had one been around to be curious.
    The single propeller was about three times too big for the motor, a pilot would have said. And it had a sharper pitch than any propeller ever had before.
    The plane stopped its stunting and straightened out again. It went fast, faster. It began to look like a line in the sky instead of a plane. It was going—what? Five hundred miles an hour? Six? There was no way of knowing, save that the ship kept on disappearing into a dark streak in the sky.
    The pilot eased up, face as white, bewildered and fearful as had been the face of the sedan’s driver at the car’s unbelievable speed. A little more, and the motor would be torn right out of this old crate.
    He banked, whirled, headed up.
    The plane began going almost straight up into the sky. It was a fantastic angle of climb. It simply couldn’t be done. Yet this plane, in no way remarkable, was doing it—and not stalling.
    The pilot leveled out once more; then he saw the small dirigible far off to the east.
    The dirigible was cleverly painted. Blue-gray, it blended with the sky so that only because of a flash of the sun was the plane pilot able to glimpse it at all. And of course, in those last seconds of his life, he wasn’t able to see the occupants of the dirigible.
    A man in the small hanging cabin was watching the plane through a telescope. A little earlier, he had watched the car go at its terrific pace over the salt flat. He nodded now, hat far down over his