The Rocketeer

by Peter David

  As it was, Cliff’s head remained intact, even if the Standard didn’t. His helmeted head erupted through the floorboards right at Malcolm’s feet.

  Malcolm looked down in horror and screamed. This was too much. In hysterics, he kicked at the helmet before Cliff could catch his breath to get a word out, and the intrepid flier’s head was suddenly ringing, his brain sloshing around in his head—if he had a brain, that is, as he kept telling himself. Malcolm, in the meantime, acting out of sheer, gut-wrenching panic, reflexively yanked on the control stick with everything he had.

  The stick, mounted in the floorboard that had been shattered by Cliff, was barely attached as it was, and then it wasn’t attached at all. It came out with a rending of wood, and Malcolm smashed himself square between the eyes with it. The world became hazy and dark, and Malcolm’s thoughts drifted back to the Red Baron. And that was where they stayed as Malcolm lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Cliff, for his part, didn’t realize that Malcolm had passed out. All he had was a good view of Malcolm’s feet. He’d cut the rocket thrust, not wanting to be plowed straight through the entire plane, and now was struggling like mad to disengage himself. Slowly he managed to pry his helmeted head out of the hole and dropped free. The landing gear broke his fall, however, and he threw his arms around it, holding on for dear life in the pull of the slipstream.

  The air roared around him and Cliff fought down his urge to rush. Instead, he made sure he had a firm grip before he reached out and snagged the lower wing. He took a deep breath and then climbed up onto it. The airplane was shimmying beneath his feet, but Cliff was anchoring himself on, clutching on to the wing struts. Slowly, agonizingly, he dragged himself forward until he was only inches away from Malcolm. His plan was to try to calm the old flier down, maybe actually talk him through a landing. It was then he realized that the clown was out cold.

  He shifted his weight to try to shove Malcolm’s shoulder, hoping to jostle him awake. But the shift caused the Standard’s wing to dip sharply. Cliff fell backward, slid on his ass down the length of the wing, and tumbled out into empty space.

  For the briefest of moments, flailing about in midair without a plane or even a parachute, he panicked. And then he remembered how he had gotten up there in the first place and felt a little sheepish even as he punched the ignition buttons. He angled around and zoomed back toward the plane, now knowing his problem was going to be tougher than he thought.

  This time he didn’t overshoot the plane but snagged the fuselage. His hands, however, were flat against the plane’s surface, and he wasn’t able to touch the control button to shut off the rocket. As a result, the rocket’s thrust, which had only moments before been his salvation, now were proving to be his damnation. It began to push him, slowly but inexorably, headfirst toward the scything propeller of the plane.

  Suddenly Cliff realized he was in a real jam. If he lifted a hand so that he could shut down the rocket, he’d lose his grip and go flying straight into the propeller, shoved into it by his friend, Mr. Rocket Pack. But he couldn’t resist the thrust of the pack much longer.

  Desperately, he reached out with the toe of his boot and just barely managed to hook the open cockpit, halting his progress perhaps an inch from the whirring blade. His full length stretched along the fuselage, Cliff held his breath as the fin on his helmet sparked as the edge of the propeller struck it. He lifted a hand and shut the rocket down, and then sighed in relief. His problems were over.

  The plane abruptly lurched toward the heavens, practically standing on its tail. Screaming, Cliff slid down the length of the Standard, smashing through the rudder and ripping half of it clean off.

  He plummeted off, dazed and barely conscious, spiraling down in freefall toward the swirling clouds below, becoming smaller and smaller and then vanishing into them as the Standard flew higher. Seconds later there was the roar of the rocket engine and Cliff soared upward once more. Beneath his helmet his jaw was set and determined.

  He sensed that he might be running out of both time and luck. He had already screwed up twice, and both rimes he had gotten off lucky. Who knew how fast the thing consumed fuel? How could he be sure, every time he clicked the ignition buttons, that they would start again? It wasn’t like a plane where, if it ran out of power, you still had a chance to glide it down to a safe landing. With this thing, it either didn’t work or it did, and either he didn’t die or he did.

  But he wasn’t going to die. Not today, dammit.

  Cliff reached the Standard and this time didn’t overshoot it, and he didn’t botch up turning off the rocket with the proper timing and didn’t, well, screw up either. He snagged the cockpit, cut the engine, poised on the wing, and started to reach toward Malcolm . . .

  . . . and just to make things interesting, the Standard—stalling at the apex of its climb—began to drop back to earth. The engine noise departed in a manner that, to Cliff’s practiced ear, indicated that it had had more than enough for this lifetime, thank you very much.

  Riding the spiraling Standard to its doom, he struggled frantically to unfasten Malcolm’s seat belt. As he did so, he shouted, “Malcolm! Wake up! Wake up!”

  Malcolm did the worst thing he could possibly have done in the situation as the Standard plummeted faster and faster: he woke up.

  He saw the creature staring at him through buglike amber eyes. Some sort of alien or creature or whatever the hell it was, and Malcolm screamed and started to pound at it. He didn’t know what was happening—perhaps it was the middle of some hideous dream—but he was going to teach this creature from the pits of hell that Malcolm Willis still had a few good punches left in him, that was for sure.

  Cliff batted away Malcolm’s fists and snapped, “Don’t fight me, dammit! It’s me! Cliff!”

  Malcolm marveled at the insidiousness of the creature, that it would usurp Cliff’s voice. It terrified him even more than ever, because the nightmare monster might have even more tricks up its inhuman sleeves. Then Malcolm, in his panicked haze, remembered that he had the control stick gripped in his hand, and he swung it around and smashed the monster on the head.

  Once again the world around Cliff took on the general appearance of the inside of a bell. And now he realized that the clouds were far above them, which meant that the ground was not especially far below them. They had maybe seconds left at most.

  He could have just leapt clear, ignited the rocket, and have done with it. But then he’d have to live with the knowledge that he’d left Malcolm behind. Malcolm, who had been trying to do him a favor and paid for that attempted kindness with his life.

  No. It was either together or not at all. But if it was going to be together, it was clearly going to have to be the hard way. So be it, then.

  Cliff slammed his helmeted head forward and it smashed into Malcolm’s unprotected cranium. That was more than enough to send the already-groggy Malcolm screaming back to dreamland. And then Cliff saw the ground yawning up at them and realized that he had under ten seconds to prevent that trip to dreamland from being one way.

  Throwing his arms around Malcolm from behind, he shouted, “C’mon, you tub of guts!” He punched the rocket to life, and the jet pack blasted them skyward, with Malcolm going seat and all. They punched through the top wing in a shower of shattered wood and canvas, and barely a second later the Standard hit ground zero . . .

  Which just happened to be, in a turn of events that was cosmically just, Bigelow’s brand-new fuel truck. The airplane and truck went up in an enormous explosion that rocked the airfield.

  The spectators saw the blast first, and seconds later heard the tremendous noise and felt the skin-searing heat. Bigelow staggered back, almost knocked clear off the observation podium. On the ground, Peevy and the others were watching with breath-holding suspense, for from where they were sitting, Miss Mabel had made her final swan dive with all hands aboard.

  And then, just when it seemed that there was no way that it could possibly happen, the helmeted flyin
g man seemed to hurtle right from the midst of the fireball. He was firmly gripping Malcolm, who was unconscious and still strapped into his seat.

  To small children it proved that Fearless Freep was so fearless, he was able to sleep through something as incredible as this. To the adults it proved that miracles could happen. To Peevy it seemed a final vindication of everything that he’d worked for up to that moment in his life. And for Bigelow, it was a meal ticket that could set his table for the rest of his life.

  He stepped forward, starting to shout, but the rocket man never even slowed down. He angled upward toward the clouds again as the crowd went absolutely crazy. Malcolm, just coming to, looked around in utter confusion, not certain just how he had managed to get down onto the runway, considering that he was supposed to be dead along about now. But he heard the cheers and then saw the adulation, and the reporters trying to shove and get through to him, stumbling over each other, and he did what seemed to be the most appropriate thing—he grinned widely and raised the broken control stick above his head like a scepter.

  “Sister Mary Francis!” roared Bigelow, watching the flying man soar against the blue sky. “What I wouldn’t pay for that act!”

  As if holding a casual conversation, Peevy said, “Five hundred bucks a show?”

  “Easy!” said Bigelow.

  And the tone of Peevy’s voice changed immediately, from casual speculation to hard-edged negotiation. “We’ll take it,” he said.

  Bigelow shot him a stunned look, picking up on the tone that Peevy had suddenly taken. Peevy was already in motion, heading toward his truck, and Bigelow came right after him. The circus man was glancing around, trying to ascertain Secord’s whereabouts, as if he couldn’t believe what the exchange between himself and Peevy signified. But Secord was nowhere around and . . .

  “You mean to tell me that’s—” began Bigelow, pointing to the horizon line.

  Peevy turned and snapped, “You don’t know who he is! That’s part of the deal, understand?” Without waiting for an answer, he hopped into his truck and peeled out in the direction of the flying man, leaving an amazed Bigelow behind to cope with the flood of reporters.

  Behind Peevy, Eddie and his men were also piling into their cars. They pulled forward, honking at the crowds blocking their way.

  The reporters, meantime, were surging around the pay phones, trying to call the story in. Fistfights were breaking out, and over the general shouting of the crowd could be heard the openings of stories being bellowed into the phone, orders being issued.

  “You heard me! Hold the front page!”

  “That’s right, a flying man! And I got the pictures to prove it!”

  One elderly woman, determined to tell her sister of this phenomenon, was saying, “Hello, Louise?” only to have the phone ripped away from her.

  “Pardon me, toots,” said a reporter. “Your time’s up.”

  The old woman decked him with a roundhouse right, and went back to her conversation without missing a beat. “You’ll never believe what I saw at the air show today . . .”

  11

  The black sedan barreled along on the road, with Spanish Johnny leaning out a back window, clutching a pair of binoculars. “There!” he shouted. “I think I see him up there!”

  Rusty leaned out of the other window and squinted. “Nah. That’s a bird. No, it’s a plane.”

  “I see the bird, I see the plane. Over there! Heading toward the plane! That’s him!”

  “Don’t worry about him!” snapped Eddie to Mike, who was at the wheel with some popcorn balanced between his legs. “Don’t lose sight of the truck. I got a feeling they’re connected somehow. And when we find where they connect, we find the rocket pack.”

  High above the earth, Cliff burst through a cloud, trailing wisps of vapor. His arms were spread wide as if in thanksgiving, and a howl of pure joy burst forth from him.

  It was incredible, beyond belief. As the rocket pack had proven consistently reliable, and with the pure accomplishment of having saved Malcolm from fiery death, Cliff’s fears had fallen away to be replaced by a giddy euphoria.

  It was like seeing the world through entirely new eyes. Here he had always thought that flying in a plane gave him freedom, even power. Now he felt as if he had been kidding himself all that time. Being crunched into a cockpit was crippling compared to what he was experiencing now. The wind whistled past his body, and he stretched his arms out like a plane, experimenting with directions by angling the fin of his helmet.

  It was staggeringly easy. What had there been to be afraid of? He was doing what no man had ever done in history, what men had only dreamed of. Men had given their gods the ability to fly as free as birds, but not themselves.

  Not anymore though. Now there was Cliff Secord, the flying man. He had come through his literal baptism by fire, and now nothing could stop him. The idea of ever returning to flight the way it had been was as unthinkable as an adult deciding that he was going to return to crawling as sole means of locomotion.

  Up ahead he saw a Mercury Airways Tri-Motor, and they had most definitely not seen him. Inside were nice, ordinary passengers who were entertaining themselves with the notion that they were flying. They weren’t flying. Even the pilot wasn’t flying, not really. Cliff understood that now. The plane was doing the flying. The plane was feeling the wind rush beneath it, the plane was hurtling forward. The people were just along for the ride.

  Time to show them that.

  He hit the thrust and, seconds later, had overtaken the plane. He cruised past the windows as astonished faces pressed against the glass, pointing and gawking. A pretty stewardess peered out. Cliff boldly tossed her a salute and tilted his head to see her better . . .

  . . . and spiraled completely out of control. With a scream he plummeted out of sight, dropping like a stone.

  On the ground, his truck racing, Peevy spied the tumbling speck in the sky and breathed a prayer as he veered sharply onto another road.

  Cliff was flying with all the grace of an anchor. Birds flapped to get out of his way as he plunged down, down, the ground coming up even faster than it had when he’d been fighting to save Malcolm.

  Gone were airy thoughts of gods and man’s ultimate destiny. Banished were notions of pilots not really knowing what flight was. The only thing that was pounding through Cliff’s brain at the moment was how mortified he would be if they found him smeared into jelly against a boulder somewhere.

  Cliff saw that he was plummeting toward a farm, and corrected his worry. Now he was concerned that he might literally hit the broad side of a barn and end his life as a cliché.

  He pulled out of it at literally the last second, angling off and roaring along the ground at an altitude of a less-than-impressive five feet. He shot past a woman who was hanging up laundry and, before he could slow himself down, became utterly enmeshed in a sheet she had been hanging up. She screamed and he kept on going, trying to untangle himself and having zero success.

  His next nonstop was an orchard, smashing into a pair of wooden ladders that were supporting a couple of fruit pickers. They grabbed on to the branches, narrowly averting falls, and watched in amazement at the ghost that soared away past the fruit trees.

  Cursing and yanking, Cliff finally managed to disengage himself from the sheet. He tossed it aside and it fluttered away as he turned his attention back to trying either to stop or to get some altitude.

  Before he could do either, he saw what he was zipping toward and screamed. He threw his arms up in front of his head reflexively, as if his helmet weren’t going to afford him enough protection, and before he could slow himself down, he smashed through a fence that was bordering a cornfield.

  Wood splintered and flew as Cliff shot straight down the middle of the cornfield, chewing up a furrow from one end to the other.

  Two good ol’ boys sat perched on another section of fence. They had not seen Cliff make his explosive entrance, nor his equally dynamic exit. What they did see, though,
was stalk after stalk being uprooted and sent flying by something that was fairly low to the ground and moving with remarkable speed. There was a succession of cracking and thudding, of corn being smashed down as loudly as possible.

  A scarecrow with the poor luck to be in the way of the unseen force blasted skyward, twirling through the air and landing a couple of feet away from the silent spectators. They watched the trail of destroyed corn work its way across to the far end, and then turned and looked at each other with surprising calm.

  “Big gopher,” said one. The other simply nodded.

  Cliff burst out of the cornfield, and just had time to congratulate himself for surviving that debacle when he discovered he was on a collision course with Peevy’s speeding truck. Screaming once more, and feeling as if his vocal cords had gotten one hell of a workout, Cliff veered in one direction while Peevy swerved in the other. The truck spun out and scudded to a halt in a ditch just off the road.

  In the meantime, Cliff finally managed to cut his thrust. However, the laws of motion required that he keep moving forward until some outside force acted to stop him. In this case, the outside force turned out to be a duck pond. He skipped across it like a stone, sending alarmed ducks skyward and quacking as if they were saying, Who’s this idiot who thinks he can fly? He didn’t fly much longer, though, as he crashed headlong into a thicket of reeds, bringing to a rather inglorious end the maiden flight of Cliff Secord, rocket-propelled pilot.

  By the time Peevy caught up with him, certain that he was going to find a corpse, he instead discovered Cliff sitting up in steaming water, looking rather dazed but otherwise in one piece. Having found Cliff to be alive, Peevy’s natural and immediate inclination was to kill him.