Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 01.djvu/78

a pilot and cameraman who came over the island at midday, in spite of Doctor Harriman's prohibition of such nights, and who circled brazenly about looking for the flying youth.

Had they looked up, they could have seen David as a circling speck high above them. He watched the airplane with keen interest mixed with contempt. He had seen these flying ships before and he felt only pity and scorn for their stiff, clumsy wings and noisy motors with which wingless men made shift to fly. This one, though, so directly beneath him, stimulated his curiosity so that he swooped down toward it from above and behind, his great wings urging him against the slip-stream of its propeller.

The pilot in the open rear-cockpit of that airplane nearly had heart failure when someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind. He whirled, startled, and when he saw David Rand crouching precariously on the fuselage just behind him, grinning at him, he lost his head for a moment so that the ship side-slipped and started to fall.

With a shouting laugh, David Rand leaped off the fuselage and spread his wings to soar up past it. The pilot recovered enough presence of mind to right his ship, and presently David saw it move unsteadily off toward the mainland. Its occupants had enough of the business for one day.

But the increasing number of such curious visitors stimulated in David Rand a reciprocal curiosity concerning the outside world. He wondered more and more what lay beyond the low, dim line of the mainland over there across the blue waters. He could not understand why Doctor John forbade him to fly over there, when well he knew that his wings would bear him up for a hundred times that distance.

Doctor Harriman told him, "I'll take you there soon, David. But you must wait until you understand things better—you wouldn't fit in with the rest of the world, yet."

"Why not?" demanded David puzzledly.

The doctor explained, "You have wings, and no one else in the world has. That might make things very difficult for you."

"But why?"

Harriman stroked his spare chin and said thoughtfully, "You'd be a sensation, a sort of freak, David. They'd be curious about you because you're different, but they'd look down on you for the same reason. That's why I brought you up out here, to avoid that. You must wait a little longer before you see the world."

David Rand flung a hand up to point half angrily at a streaming flock of piping wild birds, heading south, black against the autumn sunset. "They don't wait! Every fall I see them, everything that flies, going away. Every spring I see them returning, passing overhead again. And I have to stay on this little island!"

A wild pulse of freedom surged in his blue eyes.

"I want to go as they do, to see the land over there, and the lands beyond that."

"Soon you shall go over there," promised Doctor Harriman. "I will go with you—will look out for you there."

But through the dusk that evening, David sat with chin in hand, wings folded, staring broodingly after the straggling, southing birds. And in the days that followed, he took less and less pleasure in mere aimless flight above the island, and more and more watched wistfully the endless, merry passage of the honking wild geese and swarming ducks and whistling songbirds.