“Maybe we should take a look,” said Vanderbilt.
“What got them,” Taylor said slowly, “will get us. We’d better take back a warning to the other camp.”
Tony felt the responsibility of deciding. Ransdell was down there—dead. And Eve?
He lost altitude and turned on power as he reached the edge of the landing-field.
Neither of his companions had been in the Hendron encampment; but this was no time for attention to the equipment of the place. The plane bumped to a stop and rested in silence.
No one appeared from the direction of the camp. Nothing in sight there stirred. There was a bit of breeze blowing, and a speck of cloth flapped; but its motion was utterly meaningless. It was the wind fluttering a cloak or a cape of some one who was dead.
Tony put his hand on the lever that opened the hood of the cockpit.
“I’ll yank it open and jump out. Looks like gas. Slam it after I go, and see what happens to me.”
Either of his companions would have undertaken that terrifying assignment—would have insisted upon undertaking it; but Tony put his words into execution before they could speak. The hatch grated open. Tony leaped out on the fuselage; there was a clang, and almost none of the outer air had entered the plane.
Taylor’s knuckles on the hatch-handle were white.
Vanderbilt peered through the glass at Tony, his face unmoving. But he whispered, “Guts!” as if to himself.
Tony slipped to earth. The two men watching expected at any moment to see him stagger or shudder or fall writhing to the earth. But he did not. There was no fright on his face—his expression was locked and blank. He sweated. He sniffed in the air cautiously after expelling the breath he had held. Then he drew in a lungful, deeply, courageously. A light wind from the sea beyond the cliffs fanned him. He stood still—waiting, presumably, to die. He looked at the two men who were watching him, and hunched his shoulders as if to say that nothing had happened so far.
A minute passed.
The men inside the plane sat tensely. Taylor was panting.
Two minutes.… Five. Tony stood and breathed and shrugged again.
“Gas or no gas,” Taylor said with an almost furious expression, “I’m going out there with Tony.”
He went.
Vanderbilt followed in a manner both leisurely and calm.
The three stood outside together watching each other for effects, each waiting for some spasm of illness to attack himself.
“Doesn’t seem to be gas,” said Tony.
“What, then?” asked Taylor.
“Who knows? Some plague from the Other People? Some death-wave from the sky? Let’s look at them.”
The first person they approached, as they went slowly toward the camp and its motionless figures, was Jeremiah Post, the metallurgist. He it was, Tony remembered, who first was affected by the illness that followed the finding of the Other People’s car. There was no proof that Post was the first to have been affected by this prostration. They happened upon him first; that was all.
The metallurgist lay on his side with his arms over his head. There was no blood or mark of violence upon him.
“Not wounded, anyway,” Vanderbilt muttered.
Taylor turned him over; and all three men started. Post’s breast heaved.
“Good God!” Tony knelt beside him and opened his shirt. “Breathing! Heart’s beating—regularly. He’s—”
“Only unconscious!” Taylor exclaimed.
“I was going to say,” Tony replied, “it’s as if he was drugged.”
“Or like anesthesia,” observed Vanderbilt.