Universe Twister - Keith Laumer [184]
"Good lord!" he burst out. "I'm flying!"
2
The moon came out, revealing a forested landscape far below. For an instant, Lafayette felt a frantic impulse to grab for support; but the instincts he had acquired along with the wings checked his convulsive motion with no more than a sudden, heart-stopping dip in his glide.
"Keep calm," a semi-hysterical voice screamed silently at him from the back of his head. "As long as you keep calm, you'll be all right."
"Fine—but how do I land?"
"Worry about that later."
A lone bird—an owl, Lafayette thought—sailed close, looked him over with cold avian eyes, drifted off on owl business.
"Maybe I can stretch my glide," he thought. "If I can make it back to the capital and reach Daphne . . ." He scanned the horizon in vain for the city lights. Cautiously, he tried to turn, executed a graceful orbit to the left. The dark land below spread to the horizon, unrelieved by so much as a glimmer.
"I'm lost," O'Leary muttered. "Nobody has ever been as lost as this!"
He tried a tentative stroke of his arms, instantly stalled, fell off in a flat spin. He fought for balance, gradually spiraled out into straight and level gliding.
"It's trickier than it looks," he gasped, feeing his heart hammering at high speed under his sternum—or was it just the rush of air? It was hard to tell. Hard to tell anything, drifting around up here in darkness. Have to get down, get my feet on the ground . . .
He angled his wings; the horizon slowly rose; the note of the wind in his ears rose to a higher pitch; the buffeting of the air increased.
"So far, so good," he congratulated himself. "I'll just hold my course until I've built up speed, then pull out and . . ." The horizon, he noted, had risen still higher. In fact, he had to bend his neck to see it—and even as he rolled his eyes upward, it receded still further.
"Ye gods, I'm in a vertical dive!" he pressed with his outspread fingers—but it was like thrusting a hand into Niagara Falls.
"There was nothing in How to Solo Solo about this," he mumbled, gritting his teeth with the effort. "Why in the world didn't I sprout inherently stable wings while I was at it—"
A tree-covered ridge was rushing toward him with unbelievable swiftness; Lafayette put all his strength in a last-ditch effort. His overstrained wings creaked and fluttered. A dark mass of foliage reared up before him—
With a shattering crash, he plunged into a wall of leaves, felt branches snapping—or were they bones?
Something struck him a booming blow on the head, tumbled him down into a bottomless silence.
How lovely, Lafayette thought dreamily, to be lying in a snow bank, dreaming you're in a big, soft bed, warm and cozy, with an aroma of ham and eggs and coffee drifting in from the middle distance . . .
He paused for a moment in these pleasant reflections to wonder why it all seemed so familiar. Something was nagging at the corner of his mind: a vague feeling that he'd been through all this before—
Oh, no, you don't, he cut the train of thought short. I know when I'm well off. This is a swell hallucination, and I'm not giving it up without a struggle . . .
"You've had that thought before, too," the flat voice of experience told him. "It didn't work last time, and it won't work now. You've got problems, O'Leary. Wake up and get started solving them."
Well, there's one consolation, he countered. Whatever my problems are, they're not as silly as what I was dreaming. Wings, already. And a gang of Wayfarers on my trail. And a mummy that came to life, and—
"Don't look now, O'Leary . . . but you've got a shock coming."
Lafayette pried an eye open. He was looking out through a screen of oversized leaves at a vista of treetops—treetops the size of circus tents, spreading on and on—
He clutched convulsively for support as his eye fell on the curving expanses of rough-textured chocolate-brown bark on which he lay.
"Oh, no," he said. "You've got to be kidding. I didn't really crash-land