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 telescopeview 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.”
His back was to the door, so he had to twist around while still talking, to see who came in. The small, razor-moustached man draped his overcoat on a chair and accepted the brandy the barman had poured without having to be asked. “Today, M’sieu Blake, it was a small bit of both.” His English had only a flavor of accent. “On coming back, I find I am left with one bullet.”
“How was the hunting?”
The Frenchman gave a shrug that was as much a part of France as the Eiffel tower. “Ah, that man has the lives of a cat, the hide of an old bull elephant, and the skills of a magician.”
“Keyserling?” Blake asked.
The newcomer took a chair at the table. “Who else? I have him in my sights. I shoot, and he is gone. It would be a shame to kill this man—he flies superbly!—and I would love to do it very much.” He smiled and sipped his brandy.
“This is our CO,” Blake said. “Philippe Deveraux. Thirty-three confirmed kills and maybe a dozen not confirmed. The only man on this part of the front with more is Keyserling.” He turned to Farman. “I don’t think I got your name.”
Farman gave it. “He’s just over from the States,” Blake said. “And he’s been funning me with the craziest story you ever heard.”
Farman didn’t bother to protest. In similar shoes, he’d be just as skeptical. “This Keyserling,” he said. “That’s Bruno Keyserling?”
He’d read about Keyserling; next to Richthofen, Bruno Keyserling had been the most hated, feared, and respected man in the German air force.
“That’s him,” Blake said. “There’s not a one of us that wouldn’t like to get him in our sights.” He set his empty glass down hard. “But it won’t happen that way. He’s gotten better men than us. Sooner or later, he’ll get us all.”
Deveraux had been delicately sipping his drink. Now he set it down. “We shall talk of it later, M’sieu Blake,” he said firmly. He addressed Farman. “You have been waiting for me?”
“Yes. I …” Suddenly, he realized he didn’t know what to say.
“Don’t give him the same you gave me,” Blake warned. “Now it’s business.”
“You are a pilot, M’sieu Farman?” Deveraux asked.
Farman nodded. “And I’ve got a plane that can fly faster and climb higher than anything you’ve got. I’d like a try at this Keyserling.”
“That could possibly be arranged. But I should warn you, M’sieu Farman, did you say?”
“Howard Farman.”
“I should warn you, the man is a genius. He had done things his aeroplane should not be possible to do. He has shot down forty-six, perhaps more. Once three in aday. Once two in five minutes. It has been said the man came from nowhere—that he is one of the gods from the Nibelungenleid, come to battle for his fatherland. He …”
“You might say I’m from nowhere, too,” Farman said. “Me and my plane.”
When Deveraux had finished his brandy and when Blake had downed his fourth, they went out in front of the hangars again. Farman wanted them to see Pika-Don. Pika-Don would be sixty years ahead of any plane they’d ever seen.
Her skids had cut into the turf like knives. Blake and Deveraux examined her from end to end. They walked around her, their boottips whipping the grass. “Don’t touch anything,” Farman told them. “Even a scratch in the wrong place could wreck her.” He didn’t add that the rockets concealed under her belly could vaporize everything within a hundred yards. The false-skin strips that sealed them from the slipstream were supposed to be tamper-proof, but just to be safe Farman placed himself where the men would have to go past him to investigate Pika-Don’s underside.
Pika-Don was eighty-nine feet long. Her shark-fin wings spanned less than twenty-five. She was like a needle dart, sleek and shiny and razor-sharp on the leading edge of her wings. Her fuselage was oddly flat-bodied, like a cobra’s hood. Her airscoops were like tunnels.
Blake crouched down to examine the gear that retracted the skids. Farman moved close,
ready to interrupt if Blake started to fool with the rockets. Instead, Blake discovered the vertical thrust vents and lay down to peer up into them. Deveraux put his head inside one of the tail pipes. It was big enough to crawl into. Slowly, Blake rolled out from under and got to his feet again.
“Do you believe me now?” Farman asked.
“Mister,” Blake said, looking at him straight, “I don’t know what this thing is, and I don’t know how you got it here. But don’t try to tell me it flies.”
“How do you think I got it here?” Farman demanded. “I’ll show you. I’ll …” He stopped. He’d forgotten he was out of fuel. “Ask your ground crews. They saw me bring her down.”
Blake shook his head, fist on hips. “I know an aeroplane when I see one. This thing can’t possibly fly.”
Deveraux tramped toward them from the tail. “This is indeed the strangest zeppelin I have ever been shown, M’sieu. But obviously, a zeppelin so small—so obviously heavy … it can hardly be useful, M’sieu.”
“I tell you, this is a plane. An airplane. It’s faster than anything else in the air.”
“But it has no wings, M’sieu. No propeller. It does not even have wheels on the undercarriage. How can such a thing as this gain airspeed if it has no wheels?” Farman was speechless with exasperation. Couldn’t they see? Wasn’t it obvious? “And why does it have so strong the scent of paraffin?” Deveraux asked.
A Nieuport buzzed over the hangars in a sudden burst of sound. It barrel-rolled twice, turned left, then right, then came down onto the grass. Its engine puttered. Its wires sang in the wind. It taxied across the field toward them.
“That’ll be Mermier,” Blake said. “He got one.”
Two more planes followed. They did no acrobatics—merely turned into the wind and set down. They bounced over the turf toward the hangars. One had lost part of its upper wing. Shreds of cloth flickered in the wind.
Blake and Deveraux still watched the sky beyond the hangars, but no more planes came. Blake’s hand clapped Deveraux’s shoulder. “Maybe they landed somewhere else.”
Deveraux shrugged. “And perhaps they did not live that long. Come. We shall find out.”
They walked to the other end of the flight line where the three planes straggled up on the hardstand. Deveraux hurried ahead and Mermier and then the other two fliers climbed out of their cockpits. They talked in French, with many gestures. Farman recognized a few of the gestures—the universal language of air combat—but others were strange or ambiguous. Abruptly, Deveraux turned away, his face wearing the look of pain nobly borne.
“They won’t come back,” Blake told Farman quietly. “They were seen going down. Burning.” His fist struck the hangar’s wall. “Keyserling got Michot. He was the only one of us that had a hope of getting him.”
Deveraux came back. His face wore a tight, controlled smile. “M’sieu Farman,” he said. “I must ask to be shown the abilities of your machine.”
“I’ll need five hundred gallons of kerosine,” Farman said. That would be enough for a lift-off, a quick crack through the barrier, and a landing. Ten minutes in the air, if he didn’t drive her faster than mach 1.4. Enough to show them something of the things Pika-Don could do.
Deveraux frowned, touched his moustache. “Kero-sine?”
“Paraffin,” Blake said. “Lamp oil.” He turned to Farman. “They call it paraffin over here. But five hundred gallons—are you nuts? There isn’t an aeroplane flying that needs that much lubricating. Shucks, this whole escadrille doesn’t use that much gas in a week. Besides, it’s no good as a lubricant—if it was, you think we’d be using the stuff we do?”
“It’s not a lubricant,” Farman said. “She bums it. It’s fuel. And she burns it fast. She delivers a lot of thrust.”
“But … five hundred gallons!”
“I’ll need that much just for a demonstration flight.” He looked straight and firm into Blake’s incredulous eyes, and decided not to add that, fully loaded, Pika-Don took fifty thousand gallons.
Deveraux smoothed his moustache. “In liters, that is how much?”
“You’re going to let him … ?”
“M’sieu Blake, do you believe this man a fraud?”
Challenged like that, Blake didn’t back down. “I think he’s funning us. He says he’ll show us an aeroplane, and he showed us that … that thing over there. And when you want to see how it flies, he says it’s out of fuel and asks for kerosine —kerosine of all things! Enough to go swimming in! Even if that’s what she burns, he doesn’t need anywhere near that much. And who ever heard of flying an aeroplane with lamp oil?”
Farman took Blake’s arm, joggled it, made him turn. “I know,” he said. “I’m telling you things it’s hard to believe. In your shoes, I wouldn’t believe me, either. All right. But let me have a chance to show you. I want to fight the Germans as much as you do.” In his thoughts was the picture of a whole jagdstaffel of Albatrosses being engulfed by the fireball of one of Pika-Don‘s rockets. They’d never even see him coming, he’d come at them so fast; even if they saw him, they wouldn’t have a chance to get away. Sitting ducks. Fish in a barrel.
“Mister,” Blake said, “I don’t know what you want all that kerosine for, but I’m sure of one thing—you don’t need it to fly. Because if I was ever sure of anything, I know that thing can’t fly.”
“M’sieu Blake,” Deveraux said, moving in front of the American. “This man may perhaps be mistaken, but I do not think he lies. He has a faith in himself. We have need of such men in this war. If he cannot use the paraffin when we have obtained it for him, it will be given to the chef for his stoves. We shall have lost nothing. But we must let him prove his abilities, if he can, for if there is some portion of truth in his claims, why, it is possible that we have before us the man and the machine that shall hurl Bruno Keyserling from the sky.”
Blake gave way grudgingly. “If you’re funning us, watch out.”
“You’ll see,” Farman promised, grim. And to Deveraux: “Make it a high-grade kerosine. The best you can get.” A jet engine could bum kerosine if it had to, but kerosine wasn’t a perfect jet fuel any more than wood alcohol could make good martinis. Kerosine was just the nearest thing to jet fuel he could hope to find in 1918. “And we’ll have to put it through some kind of filters.”
“M’sieu, “ Deveraux said. “There is only one kind of paraffin. Either it is paraffin, or it is not.”
Two days later, while they were waiting for the kerosine to come, Blake took him up in a Caudron two-seater to show him the landmarks. It was a clear day, with only a little dust haze in the direction of the front. Farman didn’t think much of learning the landmarks—Pika-Don’s map scope was a lot more accurate than any amount of eyeball knowledge. But the scope wouldn’t show him the front-line trenches twisting across the landscape, nor the location of the German airfields. It might be useful to know such things. Farman borrowed flying clothes, and they were off.
The Caudron looked like nothing so much as a clumsy box kite, or a paleolithic ancestor of the P-38. Its two racketing engines were suspended between the upper and lower wings, one on either side of the passenger nacelle. The tail empennage was joined to the wings by openwork frames of wire-braced wood that extended back from behind the engines. It had a fragile appearance, but it held together sturdily as it lurched across the field like an uncontrolled baby carriage. Finally, after what seemed an interminable length of bumping and bouncing, it lofted into the air at a speed that seemed hardly enough to get a feather airborne. A steady windblast tore at Farman’s face. Hastily, he slipped the goggles down over his eyes. The climb to six thousand feet seemed to take years.
Blake didn’t turn out of their spiral until they reached altitude, then headed east. The air seemed full of crests and hollows, over which the Caudron rode like a boat on a slow-swelled sea. Now and then, woozily, it swayed. A queasy feeling rooted itself in Farman’s midsection, as if his stomach was being kneaded and squeezed.
/> Airsick? No, it couldn’t be that. Anything but that. He was an experienced flier with more than ten thousand hours in the air. He couldn’t possibly be airsick now. He swallowed hard and firmly held down.
Blake, in the forward cockpit, yelled and pointed over the side. Farman leaned over. The rush of air almost ripped his goggles off. Far below, small as a diorama, the trench systems snaked across a strip of barren ground—two lattice-work patterns cut into the earth, roughly parallel to each other, jaggedly angular like toothpick structures that had been crushed. Between them, naked earth as horribly pocked as the surface of the moon.
The Caudron had been following a rivercourse. The trenchlines came down from the hills to the south, crossed the river, and continued northward into the hills on that side. Ahead, over the German trenches, black puffs of anti-aircraft fire blossomed in spasmodic, irregular patterns. Blake banked the Caudron and turned south, yelling something over his shoulder about the Swiss border. The antiaircraft barrage slacked off.
Recognizing the front would be no problem, Farman decided. He tried to tell Blake, but the slipstream ripped the words away. He reached forward to tap Blake’s shoulder. Something whipped his sleeve.
He looked. Something had gashed the thick fabric, but there was nothing in sight that could have done it. And for some unaccountable reason Blake was heeling the Caudron over into a dive. The horizon tilted crazily, like water sloshing in a bowl. The Caudron’s wire rigging snarled nastily.
“Use the gun!” Blake yelled.
There was a machine gun mounted behind Farman’s cockpit, but for a shocked moment Farman didn’t grasp what Blake was talking about. Then a dark airplane shape flashed overhead, so close the buzz of its motor could be heard through the noise of the Caudron’s own two engines. The goggled, cruel-mouthed face of its pilot turned to look at them. Blake threw the Caudron into a tight turn that jammed Farman deep in his cockpit. Farman lost sight of the German plane, then found it again. It was coming at them.
War and Peace Page 21
