Short fiction complete, p.35
Short Fiction Complete, page 35
Farman went. The area in front of the hangars had been paved—an uneven spread of asphalt. Half a dozen rattletrap airplanes stood in a line, facing out toward the field. Where the pavement met unpaved ground, it was one mud puddle after another. Farman had to be careful where he put his feet; his flight boots had been clean when he took off this morning. The soldiers didn’t seem to mind. They splashed cheerfully through the wet and scuffed their heels on the tufts of grass.
The planes were all the same type—biplanes with open cockpits and two-bladed wooden propellers and radial-type piston engines. The kind of planes, Farman thought, that shouldn’t even be flying any more. Nevertheless, they were obviously working airplanes, with oil stains on their cowls and the smell of gasoline and patches glued-over holes in the fabric of wings and fuselage. A crop-dusting outfit? Did the French have crop-dusting outfits? Then he realized those things in front of the cockpits were machine guns. Air-cooled machine guns rigged to shoot through the propeller. And those odd, ovalshaped tail assemblies . . .
Some kind of museum?
“That is a strange aeroplane you have,” the moustached soldier said. His accent was as thick as the grass on the field. “I have not seen one like it.”
Farman hadn’t known either of them spoke English. “I’ll need to make some phone calls,” he said, thinking of the ambassador in Paris. A mechanic was working on one of the planes they passed; he was standing on a wooden packing crate, tinkering with the engine.
A movie outfit, doing a period flick? But he didn’t see any cameras.
Another biplane taxied in from the field—a Nieuport, like the others. Its engine racketed like a lawn-mower. It joggled and bounced in the chuckholes. There were a lot of chuckholes in the mud at the pavement’s fringe. The plane came up on the pavement and the engine cut out. As the propeller turned around to a spasmodic stop, Farman realized that not just the propeller but the whole engine had been spinning. What kind of crazy way to build airplanes was that?
The Nieuport’s pilot climbed up out of the cockpit and dropped to the ground. “Guns jammed again!” he yelled loudly, hellishly mad. He flung a small hammer on the ground at his feet.
Three men came out of the hangar carrying packing crates. They set them down around the Nieuport’s nose, got up on them, and started working on the guns. The flier pulled off his scarf and draped it over the cockpit’s side. He turned away, spoke a few French words to the mechanics over his shoulder, and walked off.
“Monsieur Blake!” the big soldier hailed. When the flier didn’t seem to hear, the soldier ran to him, caught his shoulder. “Monsieur Blake. A countryman.” The soldier beside Farman pointed to the flag on Farman’s sleeve.
Blake came over, stuffing a goggled cloth helmet into a pocket of his heavy overcoat as he approached. His hand was out in welcome.
“This one has teach all my Anglais to me,” the big trooper grinned. “Is good, non?”
Farman scarcely heard him. All his attention was on this American. “Harry Blake,” the man introduced himself. “ ‘Fraid I won’t be able to hear you too good for a while.” He swung a glance at his Nieuport’s motor and raised hands to his ears to signify deafness. He was young—not more than twenty-two or three—but he had the mature poise of a man much older. “I’m a Lafayette with this outfit. From Springfield, Illinois. You?”
Farman accepted the hand in numb silence. Calling himself a Lafayette, he’d obliterated Farman’s last incredulous doubt. It wasn’t possible—not real. Things like this didn’t happen.
“Hey, you don’t look so good,” Blake said, grabbing his arm with a strong hand.
“I’ll be all right,” Farman said, but he wasn’t really sure.
“Come on,” Blake said. He steered Farman into the passageway between two of the hangars. “We’ve got what you need back here.”
The troopers came after them. “Monsieur Blake. This man has only now arrived. He has not reported.”
Blake waved them away. “I haven’t either. We’ll report later. Can’t you see when a man’s breathed too much oil?”
The soldiers turned back. Blake’s hand steered Farman onward. Puddles slopped under Blake’s boots.
Behind the hangars, the path split in two directions. One way led to a latrine whose door swung loose in the breeze. The other led to a shack huddled up to the back of a hangar. It was hard to guess which path was more frequently used. Blake paused at the parting of the ways. “Think you can make it?”
“I’m all right.” He wasn’t, really.
It takes more than a deep breath and a knuckling of the eyes to adjust a man to having lost six decades. Between books about aerial combat he’d devoured as a kid—two wars and all those brushfire skirmishes—he’d read some Heinlein and Asimov. If it wasn’t for that, he’d have had nothing to hang on to. It was like a kick in the belly.
“I’ll be all right,” he said.
“You’re sure? You breathe castor oil a few hours a day and it doesn’t do a man’s constitution much good. Nothin’ to be embarrassed about.”
Every now and then, Farman had heard castor oil mentioned, mostly in jokes, but he’d never been sure what it did to a man. Now he remembered it had been used in aircraft engines of this time. Suddenly, he understood all. “That’s one problem I don’t have.”
Blake laughed. “It’s a problem we all have.” He pushed open the shack’s door. Farman went inside at his nod. Blake followed. “On-ree!” Blake called out. “Two double brandies.”
A round little baldpated Frenchman got up from a stool behind the cloth-draped trestle that served as a bar. He poured two glasses almost full of something dark. Blake picked up one in each hand. “How many for you?”
Whatever it was, it looked evil. “One,” Farman said, “for a start.” Either this youngster was showing off—which didn’t seem likely—or it wasn’t as deadly as it looked. “A double, that is.”
Blake led the way to a table in the far corner, next to a window. It was a plain wood table, stained and scarred. Farman set his glass down and took a chair before he tried a small taste. It was like a trickle of fire all the way down. He looked at the glass as if it had fangs. “What is this stuff?”
Blake had sampled from each glass on the way to the table, to keep them from spilling. Now he was almost halfway through one of them and the other was close to his hand. “Blackberry brandy,” he said with a rueful grin. “It’s the only cure we’ve found. Would you rather have the disease?”
Flight medicine, Farman thought, had a long way to go. He put his glass carefully aside. “My plane doesn’t use that kind of oil.” Blake was on him right away. “Something new? I thought they’d tried everything.”
“It’s a different kind of engine,” Farman said. He had to do something with his hands. He took a sip of the brandy, choked, regretted it.
“How long you been flying?” Blake asked.
“Ten, twelve years.”
Blake had been about to finish his first glass. He set it down untouched, looked straight at Farman. Slowly, a grin came. “All right. A joke’s a joke. You going to be flying with us?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” Farman said, holding his brandy glass in both hands, perfectly steady—and all the time, deep inside him, the small trapped being that was himself screamed silently, What’s happened to me? What’s happened?
It had been a tricky mission, but he’d flown a lot of tricky ones. Ostensibly, he’d been taking part in a systems-test/training exercise off the northwest coast of Africa. High altitude mach 4 aircraft, their internal equipment assisted by the tracking and computer equipment on converted aircraft carriers, were attempting to intercept simulated ballistic warheads making re-entry into the atmosphere. He’d lifted from the deck of the airplane tender Eagle in the western Mediterranean. Half an hour later he was circling at Big Ten—one-oh-oh thousand feet—on-station north of the Canary islands when the signal came that sent him on his true mission.
A guidance system had gone wrong at the Cape, said the talker aboard the Iwo Jima, and the range-safety system had failed. The misdirected warhead was arching over the Atlantic, farther and higher than programmed. Instead of splashing in the Atlantic, its projected impact-point was deep in the Sahara. It carried only a concrete block, not thermonuclear weaponry, but diplomatic relations with France—which still maintained military bases in this land it had once governed—were troublesome. Standing orders for such an eventuality were that, as a good-faith demonstration, an attempt should be made to intercept it.
Operation Skeetshoot’s master computer said Farman’s Pika-Don was the only plane able to make the interception. No other plane was in the right position. No other plane had enough altitude, or fuel load. No other plane had such an advantageous direction of flight at that moment. Farman sent Pika-Don streaking toward interception point at full thrust.
As planned.
Nothing had really gone wrong at the Cape. It was a pretext. Washington knew the French were about to test a new model nuclear bomb. They would explode it above the atmosphere, in the radiation belt; the rocket would be launched from their main testing site, the Saharan oasis of Reggan; they would select the moment of launch to coincide with the arrival of a solar proton storm, when subnuclear particles from the storm would blend with the bomb’s fission products, rendering surveillance by other nations more difficult and the findings less certain.
The proton storm had been already on its way when Farman left the Eagle’s deck. It was being tracked, not only by American installations around the world, but French stations also. Code message traffic was high between New Caledonia and Reggan. The time of the storm’s arrival was known to within five seconds.
Farman hadn’t paid much attention to why Washington wanted to snoop the test; the French were, after all, still allies in spite of the frictions between Paris and Washington. Asking questions like that wasn’t Farman’s job; he was just the airplane driver. But they’d told him anyway, when they gave him the mission. Something about Washington wanting to have up-to-date knowledge of France’s independent nuclear capability. Such information was needed, they said, for accurate judgment of how dependent France might still be on America’s ability to wage modern war. To Farman, the explanation didn’t mean much; he didn’t understand much about international politics.
But a warhead dropping into the atmosphere, sheathed in the meteor-flame of its fall—that he could understand. And a multi-megaton fireball a hundred miles up, blazing like the sun brought suddenly too close—that, too, he could understand. And a mach 4 airplane riding her shock-wave across the sky, himself inside watching instruments and flight-path guide scopes, and his thumb on the button that would launch the Lance rockets sheathed against her belly. Those were things he understood. They were his job.
Nor did the mission call for him to do more than that. All that was really necessary was to have Pika-Don somewhere in the sky above Reggan when the French bomb went off. Pika-Don would do everything else, automatically.
All the planes in Operation Skeetshoot were equipped the same as Pika-Don. All of them carried elaborate flight recorders; and because they were fitted to intercept thermonuclear warheads, and their own Lance rockets had sub-kiloton fission tips, those recorders included all the instruments needed to monitor a nuclear explosion—even a unit to measure the still-not-fully-understood magnetohydrodynamic disturbances that played inside a nuclear fireball. (And it was known from previous tests, there was something unusual about the magnetic fields of French bombs.)
Nor would there be much risk if Pika-Don were forced down on French or French-friendly territory. All Pika-Don carried was standard equipment—equipment the French already knew about, in configurations and for purposes they also understood. There would be nothing the French could find to support a charge of deliberate snooping, no matter how much they might suspect. Not that the possibility was large; the explosion, after all, would be out in space. There’d be no blast effects, certainly, and very little radiation. Enough to tickle the instruments, was all.
And already the hot line between Washington and Paris would be explaining why an American plane was intruding on French-controlled airspace. Everything had been planned.
Farman watched his instruments, his flight-path guide scopes, his radar. Pika-Don slashed the thin air so fast she drew blood. She was up to one-thirty thousand now; rocket launch point lay five thousand higher, two hundred miles ahead. Reggan moved onto the edge of the inertial-guide map-position scope, ahead and off to the south. The projected trajectory of the warhead was a red line striking downward on the foreview guide scope. An X-slash marked Skeetshoot Control’s computed interception point.
Something flared on the radar near Reggan. It rose, slowly for a moment, then asymptotically faster and faster, shining on the radar screen like a bright, fierce jewel. The French rocket. It had to be. Farman’s breath caught as he watched it. The thing was going up. The test was on.
It rose, was level with him, then higher. Suddenly, it quivered like a water drop, and suddenly it was gone from the screen in an expanding black blindness like a hole in the universe; and simultaneously the cockpit was full of unendurable white light. The sky was flaming, so bright Farman couldn’t look at it, didn’t dare. He had just time enough to think, terrified, Not in the radiation belt! and then Pika-Don was spinning, spinning, spinning like a spindle—light flashing into the cockpit, then blackness, brightness, then blackness again, repeating and repeating faster and faster and faster until light and darkness merged to a flickering brilliance that dazzled not only the eyes but the whole brain. Farman battled the controls, but it was like fighting the Almighty’s wrath. The flickering blaze went on and on.
And slowed, finally. Stopped, like the last frame of a halted movie projector, and it was only daylight again, and Pika-Don’s disabled pilot circuit had cut in. She was flying level, northwestward if the compass could be trusted, and the sun was more than halfway down in the west, although Farman was sure that much time hadn’t passed.
The map scope confirmed the compass. So did the airspace radar view. The controls felt all right now, and Pika-Don seemed to fly without difficulty. He turned straight north toward the Mediterranean and came out over it not far from Oran. He curved west then, toward the spot he’d left the Eagle. He watched the foreview guide scope for the Eagle’s homing beacon. It didn’t come on. He spoke on the radio, got no answer. Equipment damage?
He took Pika-Don down to fifty thousand. He used the telescope-view scope on the ships his radar picked out. None were the Eagle; old freighters, mostly, and two small warships of a type he’d thought weren’t used any more except by the Peruvian Navy.
His orders said, if he couldn’t find his base ship, go to Frankfurt. The big base there could take him. He turned Pika-Don northwestward. He crossed the French coast. Overcast covered the land. It shouldn’t have been there. Fuel began to run low. It was going into the engines faster than the distance to Frankfurt was narrowing. He tried to cut fuel consumption, but he couldn’t cut it enough. He had no choice but to put down in France.
“Look, Mister. Either you’ve got orders to fly with us, or you don’t,” Blake said. “What outfit are you with?”
It was restricted information, but Farman didn’t think it mattered much. “The CIA, I think.”
He might as well have said the Seventh Cavalry with General Custer. “Where’s your base?” Blake asked.
Farman took another swallow of brandy. He needed it, even if not for the reason Blake thought. It wasn’t so bad, this time. He tried to think of a way to explain the thing that had happened to him. “Did you ever read ‘The Time Machine’ ?” he asked.
“What’s that? A book about clocks?”
“It’s a story by H.G. Wells.”
“Who’s H.G. Wells?”
He wasn’t going to make much explanation by invoking H.G. Wells. “It’s about a man who . . . who builds a machine that moves through time the way an airplane moves in the air.”
“If you’re having fun with me, you’re doing it good,” Blake said.
Farman tried again. “Think of a building—a tall building, with elevators in it. And suppose you don’t know about elevators—can’t even imagine how they work. And suppose you were on the ground floor, and suppose I came up and told you I was from the twentieth floor.”
“I’d say that’s doing a lot of supposing,” Blake said.
“But you get the idea?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“All right. Now imagine that the ground floor is now. Today. And the basement is yesterday. And the second floor is tomorrow, and the third floor is the day after tomorrow, and so on.”
“It’s a way of thinking about things,” Blake said.
Give thanks the elevator was invented. “Take it one step more, now. Suppose you’re on the ground floor, and someone comes down from the twentieth floor.”
“He’d of come from somewhere the other side of next week,” Blake said.
“That’s the idea,” Farman said. He took more of the brandy. He needed it. “What if I told you I . . . just fell down the elevator shaft from sixty years up?”
Blake appeared to consider while he started on his second glass. He permitted himself a smile and a chuckle. “I’d say a man’s got to be a bit crazy if he wants to fly in this war, and if you want to fight Huns you’ve come to the right place.”
He didn’t believe. Well, you couldn’t expect him to. “I was born in 1946,” Farman told him. “I’m thirty-two years old. My father was born in 1920. Right now, it’s nineteen . . . seventeen?”
“Nineteen eighteen,” Blake said. “June tenth. Have another brandy.” Farman discovered his glass was empty. He didn’t remember emptying it. Shakily, he stood up. “I think I’d better talk to your commanding officer.”
Blake waved him back to his chair. “Might as well have another brandy. He hasn’t come back yet. My guns jammed and I couldn’t get them unjammed, so I came home early. He’ll be back when he runs out of bullets or fuel, one or the other.”
