This news, and his manner, confirmed me in the idea which I had formed. It was that the business before us was immediate; Pete and I had stumbled upon no mere plan and project but upon an enterprize nearly prepared. Bane lacked, or at least he could employ, a couple more pilots; he might make use of Pete and me; but not if it required time to turn us to his purposes.
Time, obviously, pressed him; it was a rebellious element which he could not control. He wanted to take time, now, to indulge himself in personal punishment of us; but time defied him. There was a touch, too, of authority from headquarters, whoever and wherever they were. So he contented himself with escorting us to the terrace.
The men had left the luncheon table; they were in the house where, as I soon was given to understand, Pete must remain.
"Logan does not go with us; nor your father," Bane informed Helen and me. "You can speak to him; he's in his room," Bane told her. "Take what you want for the trip."
"How long?"
"A day."
She asked nothing more but turned from him and went into the house, he watching her; and I watched how he hungered for her, how his eyes caressed her hair, the curve of her cheek, the white of her neck and followed the line of her figure to her pretty legs and her little feet. So I recognized, with a rush of relief, how selective was his insanity and how it guarded her.
Brutally, with no regard for them at all, he had slain Selby, Kent, the army pilot and the mail flyer; how many more, I could not know. With complete callousness he planned, with his airplanes and ton bombs of TNT, the most frightful and pitiless catastrophe because the ganglion of preventive mercy was milked dry in his mind; but other ganglia, filled by his mother with chivalry and respect of another sort, held full.
He hungered for this girl but he hungered as much for her soul and mind as for her body. He held her, physically, in his power; but by physical force, he would take no advantage. He must win her, by wooing, after his own way. That was what I saw.
Sally Gessler saw it, too. Her, he could have for the asking; and he would not trouble to ask. Her eyes never left him but he, when Helen disappeared, ignored Sally. He said to me:
"You're ready." It was a statement, informing me that I was to travel as I was.
"Yes," I accepted it.
"I'll show you before this time tomorrow who is sane. Go down to the bus."
The seaplane, which had crossed the lake, was at the stone pier. It was a large, cabin monoplane of the passenger-carrying type with nothing particular to distinguish it. A crew of two were aboard, strangers to me; and Bane did not bother to make them known to me when he and Helen entered the cabin. He said to the pilot, "How are you, Sander?" and to the mechanic, "G'day, Larkin." Each man touched his cap. They were good servants of the beefy, reliable type of the two who had towed us. Sander would never mistake a radio compass correction or miscalculate a landing level; an excellent pilot for a daylight passenger bus. But for finding the way about in fog and by night without bearings, in a one-place, five-mile-a-minute monoplane, give me Boggs or Donley—or myself or Pete.
Bane held to the same preference, I knew. He could supply himself with any number of pilots like Sander for passenger planes or freighters; but of the combat type, he had had only four to sit at his table until Pete and I followed him home; and we were not yet converted to him.
The object of taking me to headquarters—wherever they were—obviously was to convert me and, through me, convince Pete and make us trustworthy combat pilots in the imminent enterprise with the automaton planes and the ton bombs of TNT. Pete, I realized, was held as a sort of hostage for my good faith and behavior upon this educational expedition. Lacey, I supposed, was similarly held hostage for his daughter.
Quietly she took the seat to the right in the front of the cabin behind Sander's compartment. Bane placed her travelling bag in a rack and pre-empted the chair to the left. I sat behind her. Larkin closed the cabin and posted himself aft. Only the five of us were aboard. We rose and pointed westward, Larkin manipulating a device which pulled up the pontoons and lowered wheels for field landing.
The disc of a radio ear-phone dotted the cabin wall beside Bane; now and then he bent to it. We flew steadily, not fast, at a hundred and fifty miles the hour, approximately, and up eight thousand feet which Sander dropped to six when we were clear of the hills. Westward, always.
As flight, it was mere transportation, wholly common-place; but never before had a flight so excited me.
Frequently, when I had flown past cities, especially when bound on bombing tests at sea, I had imagined, theoretically, what must happen if something snapped in my brain or in another pilot's head, and a modern, postwar bomb detonated in Broadway or Wall Street. The thought of the catastrophe used to hold me, for seconds, fascinated by the cataclysm I could cause. It is a satisfaction of the sense of power—isn't it?—which impels every child to destruction. The same sense of power, from my potential destructiveness, pleased me at those moments, with nothing at all abnormal in my brain.
Bane, looking down, made himself in his mind the demi-god which I had imagined myself momentarily at thought of my titanic power of destructiveness. In his mind, this did not end with the moment; it met nothing to forbid it, no restraint. In his mind, the barrier between the inborn impulse to prove superiority by smashing, the barrier built by example, by precept and training, was swept away. I saw him smile, as he looked down; and I knew he lived in the pomp and glory of his contemplation of a civilization utterly at his mercy.
How dangerous a habit today for civilization to drive men mad! It was safe enough for society when all that the man, made mad, could do was to seize a stone and hurl it; still safe enough when society, besides making him mad, supplied him a spear and then a gun; still safe enough when it added to his equipment also a motor-car; but now he seized airplanes, some of them automatic, and ton bombs of TNT.
I saw him smile, looking down, and I went sick at the image of him over a city and smiling as his hands released ton bombs of TNT; and I knew he could do it. Nothing in his mind would stop the message to his hands; the great bombs would drop and detonate.
Nothing in his mind would stop him; but something elsewhere? Suddenly I went warmer as I saw him lift his head and look about to her and cease to smile; for he met, in her eyes, terror. What did he expect, I wondered; what did he want and demand there?
Approval of himself, of course; he craved her approval.
So, society, after driving him mad and supplying him with airplanes and tons of TNT, perhaps still set some check on him; he wanted approval.
Not approval of any person, of any girl. Sally Gessler's approval, for instance, was less than nothing to him. He required the approval of the lovely, level, honest grey eyes which had come to comfort him, when he had been confined in the sanitarium, and which now stared at him in terror.
I thought how, on the terrace, he had denied to her what already he had done, trifling as those killings were in comparison to his plans. I thought how he had cried to her "they fell; fell; fell," of the army pilot and the mail flyer whom he had murdered. He had not told her, for he dared not.
Suddenly the reason for the effigy declared itself to me. Casting himself into crime, he would carry her with him but he could not carry herself; so he had, of himself, fashioned her effigy of wax and wood and seated it in the airplane which he dispatched on his murders. I thought of savages, who fashion clay figures of animals over which they wish to gain power, imagining that by enslaving the figure they may later control the creature itself; so he had enslaved her effigy. Unable yet to bend her to his purpose, his mad mind had found satisfaction in sending her effigy on errands pleasing to him, frightful to her.
Partly it was in practice of control of the mechanism that he had killed Selby and Kent and the other two; partly also, now I was sure, the murders had been some savage rite in which he imagined he was gaining power over her by enslaving, to his purpose, her effigy.
Some of this, she seemed to discern; for as she stared at him, her manner changed; she choked down her terror and repulsion. A flicker of fiery blood flamed in her cheek. She, if anyone, held power to control him.
When he spoke to her, she replied so as to please him.
"Perhaps, perhaps," tapped the tiny pulse in her temple, "I can yet do something with him."