They didn't show anything.

"Dammit, I can't stand this any more," Pop said and reached a hand and
arm between us and brought it down on about fifty buttons, I'd judge.

The other buttons just went down and up, but the Atla-Hi button went
down and stayed down.

The violet blob of Atla-Hi on the screen got even brighter in the next
few moments.

The door closed with a tiny thud.

We took off.

CHAPTER 4

_Any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of
thinking, and truly inaccurate principles._

--_Thomas de Quincey in_
Murder Considered as
One of the Fine Arts

For that matter we took off _fast_ with the plane swinging to beat hell.
Alice and me was in the two kneeling seats and we hugged them tight, but
Pop was loose and sort of rattled around the cabin for a while--and
serve him right!

On one of the swings I caught a glimpse of the seven dented gas tanks,
looking like dull crescents from this angle through the orange haze and
getting rapidly smaller as they hazed out.

After a while the plane levelled off and quit swinging, and a while
after that my image of the cabin quit swinging too. Once again I just
managed to stave off the vomits, this time the vomits from natural
causes. Alice looked very pale around the gills and kept her face buried
in the chinrest of her chair.

Pop ended up right in our faces, sort of spread-eagled against the
instrument panel. In getting himself off it he must have braced his
hands against half the buttons at one time or another and I noticed that
none of them went down a fraction. They were _locked_. It had probably
happened automatically when the Atla-Hi button got pushed.

I'd have stopped him messing around in that apish way, but with the
ultra-queasy state of my stomach I lacked all ambition and was happy
just not to be smelling him so close.

I still wasn't taking too great an interest in things as I idly watched
the old geezer rummaging around the cabin for something that got
misplaced in the shake-up. Eventually he found it--a small almond-shaped
can. He opened it. Sure enough it turned out to have almonds in it. He
fitted himself in the back seat and munched them one at a time. Ish!

"Nothing like a few nuts to top off with," he said cheerfully.

I could have cut his throat even more cheerfu