It was purple—a dark, royal purple with white trim around the edges of wing and tail, and around the engine cowl. Little flashes of light sparked from its nose, and Farman heard something—it sounded like thick raindrops—spattering the upper wing close to the passenger nacelle. Tracer bullets flashed past like quick fireflies.
“Use the gun!” Blake yelled again. They were climbing now. They leveled off, turned. The German plane came after them. “Use the gun!”
He was being shot at. It was appalling. Things like that didn’t happen. In a moment, Farman was too busy to think about it. He got turned around in the cockpit, fumbled with the machine gun’s unfamiliar handles. He’d never handled a gun like this before in his life. He found the trigger before he knew what it was. The gun chattered and bucked in his grasp. He looked all over the sky for the purple airplane. It was nowhere in sight. Blake hurled the Caudron through another violent maneuver, and suddenly there were three German planes behind them, high, the one with the white trim in front and the others trailing. The one with the white trim shifted a little to the left, turned inward again. It nosed down, gun muzzles flickering.
Farman swung the machine gun to bear on the German. He pressed the trigger. The gun stuttered and a spray of tracers streamed aft as if caught in the slipstream. They passed under the German, not even close.
Aerial gunnery wasn’t something Farman ever had to learn. Combat was done with guidance systems, computers, and target-seeking missiles, not antique .30-caliber popguns. He raised the gun and fired another burst. Still too low, and passing behind the German, who was boring close in, weaving up, sidewise, and down as he came. The gun didn’t have any sights worth mentioning—no target-tracking equipment at all. Farman wrestled with the clumsy weapon, trying to keep its muzzle pointed at the German. It should have been easy, but it wasn’t. The German kept dodging. Farman emptied the machine gun without once touching the other plane. He spent an eternity dismounting the empty magazine and clipping another into place while Blake hurled the Caudron through a wild series of gut-wrenching acrobatics.
A section of the cockpit coaming at Farman’s elbow shattered and disappeared in the wind. He got the gun working again—fired a burst just as the German sidled behind the Caudron’s right rudder. The rudder exploded in a spray of chips and tatters. The German swung out to the right, gained a few feet altitude, turned in again and down again. His guns hurled blazing streaks. Blake sent the Caudron into a dive, a turn, a twist that almost hurled Farman out of his cockpit. Abruptly, then, the German was gone. Little scraps were still tearing loose from the rudder, whipped away by the slipstream.
“Where?” Farman shouted. He meant, where had the German gone, but his thoughts weren’t up to asking a question that complicated.
“Skedaddled,” Blake yelled back. “We’ve got friends. Look.”
Farman twisted around, saw Blake point upward, and looked. Five hundred feet above them five Nieuports cruised in neat formation. After a moment, the formation leader waggled his wings and they curved off eastward. Farman looked down and saw they were far behind the French lines, headed northwest. They were flying level and smooth—only the slow, gentle lift and descent of random air currents, like silence at the end of a storm. “You all right?” Blake asked.
“I think so,” Farman said. But suddenly, as the Caudron slipped into a downdraft, he wasn’t. His stomach wrenched, and he had time enough only to get his head over the cockpit’s side before the first gush of vomit came. He was still there, gripping the coaming with both hands, his stomach squeezing itself like a dry sponge, when Blake circled the airfield and slowly brought the Caudron down to a three-point landing. All Farman could think—distantly, with the part of his brain not concerned with his own terrible miseries—was how long it had been since anyone, anywhere in the world, had even thought about making a three-point landing.
He wouldn’t admit—even to himself—it had been airsickness. But after a while the horizon stopped wheeling around him and he could stand without needing a hand to steady him. He discovered he was very hungry. Blake went down to the mess hall and came back with a half-loaf of black bread and a dented tin of pate. They went to the shack behind the hangars. Henri gave Blake a bottle of peasants’ wine and two glasses. Blake put them down in the middle of the table and sat down across from Farman. He poured, and they went to work on the bread and pate.
“He was trying to kill us,” Farman said. It just came out of him. It had been there ever since the fight. “He was trying to kill us.”
Blake cut himself another slice of the bread. He gnawed on the leathery crust. “Sure. And I’d of killed him, given the chance. That’s what we’re supposed to do—him and us, both. Nothing personal at all. I’ve got to admit I wasn’t expecting him, though. They don’t often come this side of the lines. But…”He made a rueful grimace. “He’s a tough one to outguess.”
“He?”
Blake stopped gnawing, frowned. “You know who it was, don’t you?”
The idea of knowing an enemy’s name after such a brief acquaintance was completely strange to Farman. He couldn’t even think it. His mouth made motions, but no words came out.
“Bruno Keyserling,” Blake said. “He’s the only man with an aeroplane painted that way.”
“I’m going to get him,” Farman said.
“Easier said than done,” Blake said. His mouth turned grim. “You’ll have to sharpen up your gunnery quite a bit, if you’re going to make good on that.”
“I’m going to get him,” Farman repeated, knuckles white on the table.
The next day it rained. Thick, wet, gray clouds crouched low to the ground and poured down torrents. All patrols were canceled, and the fliers sat in the shack behind the hangars, drinking and listening to the storm as it pelted the shingles. At first light, when he woke and heard the rain, Farman had borrowed a slicker and gone out to Pika-Don. She was all right. He’d left her buttoned up tight, and the rain was doing her no harm.
Blake was still the only man Farman could talk with, except for Deveraux. None of the other fliers had more than a smattering of English. When they left the mess hall after a drab lunch, instead of returning to the drinking shack, Blake led him to one of the hangars. There, in a back comer, were stacked wooden boxes of ammunition and others full of the bentmetal sections of disintegrating-link machine-gun belts. Blake showed Farman how to assemble the links and how to check both the links and the cartridges for manufacturing defects. He handed Farman a gauge into which a properly shaped cartridge should fit perfectly, and they spent the next several hours inspecting cartridges and assembling belts of ammunition. It was tedious work. Each cartridge looked just like the one before it. The imperfections were small.
“Do you always do this yourself?” Farman inspected his grimy hands, his split cuticles. He wasn’t accustomed to this kind of work.
“Every chance I get,” Blake said. “There’re enough reasons for a gun to jam without bad ammunition being one of ’em. When you’re up there with Keyserling’s circus flying rings around you, all you’ve got are your guns and your engine and your wings, and if any of those go, you go. And it’s a long way down.”
Farman said nothing for a while. Rain drummed on the roof. Now and then came the clang of tools being used in another part of the hangar. “How come you’re here?” he asked finally. “What’s in it for you?”
Blake’s busy hands paused. He looked at Farman. “Say that again, slower.”
“This here’s a French squadron. You’re an American. What are you doing here?” Blake snorted—not quite a chuckle. “Fighting Germans.”
Farman wondered if Blake was making fun of him. He tried again. “Sure—but why with a bunch of Frenchmen?”
Blake inspected a cartridge, fitted it into the belt. He picked up another. “Didn’t care to transfer,” he said. “Could have, when they started bringing U.S. squadrons over. But I like the plane I’ve got. If I transferred, they’d give me a plane the Fr
ench don’t want and the British don’t want, because that’s all the American squadrons are getting. Well, I don’t want ’em, either.” He dropped a cartridge in the reject pile.
“I didn’t mean that,” Farman said. “You joined before America got into the war—right?”
“Came over in ’16.”
“All right. That’s what I mean. Why help France?” He couldn’t understand why an American would do anything to help the personal kingdom of le grand Charles. “You weren’t involved,” he said. “Why?”
Blake went on inspecting cartridges. “Depends what you mean, involved. I figure I am. Everyone is. The Germans started this war. If we can show the world it doesn’t pay to start a war, then there won’t be any more. I want that. This is going to be the last war the human race will ever have.”
Farman went back to inspecting cartridges. “Don’t get your hopes too high,” he said. It was as near as he could bring himself to telling Blake how doomed his optimism was. The rain made thunder on the roof like the march of armies.
Late in the afternoon, two days later, three lorries sputtered into the supply area behind the hangars. They brought fuel for the escadrille, but also, crowded among the drums of gasoline, were twenty hundred-liter barrels of kerosine which were carefully put aside and trucked down to the mess hall’s kitchen and then—when the error was discovered—had to be reloaded and trucked back up to the hangars again.
Farman had managed to rig a crude filtration system for the kerosine. The stuff they cooked with was full of junk. He’d scrounged sheets of silk, and enlisted a crew of mechanics to scrub empty petrol drums until their innards gleamed like the insides of dairy cans. He even managed to test the rig with a bucket of kerosine cadged from the kitchens. The process was glacially slow, and the end product neither looked nor smelled any different from the stuff he started with. But when he tried it in one of Pika-Don‘s engines, the engine had started and—at low RPM—had delivered thrust and had functioned as it should until the tank was sucked dry. More important, when he inspected, none of the injectors had fouled.
He started the filtering process, and stayed with it through the night and all the next day. He had a mechanic to help him, but he had no confidence in the mechanic’s understanding of how vital fuel quality was to an engine. It wasn’t a thing an airplane mechanic of this time could be expected to know. Deveraux came around once, inspected the raw material and sniffed the filtered product, and went away again, having said nothing.
Once, between missions, Blake came and sat to watch. Farman showed him the sludge the filters had taken out of the kerosine. Blake scowled. “It’s still kerosine,” he said. “You can’t fly an aeroplane on kerosine any more than you can feed it birdseed. I don’t know what you really want it for, but don’t expect me to believe it’s for flying.”
Farman shrugged. “I’ll take Pika-Don up tomorrow morning. You can tell me what you think tomorrow afternoon. Fair enough?”
“Maybe,” Blake said.
“You think I’m a cushmaker, don’t you.”
“Possible. What’s a cushmaker?”
Blake hadn’t heard the story. Maybe it hadn’t been invented yet. Farman explained it—the ultra-shaggy joke about the cushmaker who, obliged by an admiral to demonstrate his specialty, after commandeering a battleship and tons of elaborate equipment, and after arduous technological efforts, finally dropped a white-hot sphere of steel amid the ice floes of the Antarctic Ocean, where it went kussh.
Blake went away, then. “I’ll say this. If you’re pulling a deal, you’re a cool one.” He shook his head. “I just don’t know about you.”
Morning brought high, ragged clouds. They’d make no trouble for the demonstration flight. Farman waited beside Pika-Don while Blake took off and slowly climbed to ten thousand feet, circling over the field the whole time. “I think we are ready, M’sieu,” Deveraux said, fingering his trim moustache.
Farman turned to his plane. “Better make everybody stand back,” he said. Turbine scream wasn’t gentle to unprotected ears. He climbed up on the packing crate—pulled himself up Pika-Don’s sloped side and dropped into the cockpit. Looking back, he saw the onlookers had retreated about twenty-five feet. He had quite an audience. He grinned. They’d back off a lot farther when he got the engines going.
He got the cockpit hatch down. He checked the seal; it was tight. He went through the pre-ignition cockpit check. He began the engine start-up cycle, felt the momentary vibration and saw the twitch of instruments coming alive. Engine One caught, ragged for an instant, then steady as the tachometer wound around like a clock gone wild. Its scream of power drilled through the cockpit’s insulation. Farman started Engine Two, then Engine Three. He brought them up to standby idle. They burned smooth.
Good enough. He didn’t have fuel to waste on all the pre-takeoff operations; some were necessary, some not. He did all the necessary ones, turned the jets into the lift vents, and brought them up to full power. By that time, Pika-Don was already off the ground. She bobbled momentarily in the light breeze, and rose like a kite on a string. The sprawling fuselage surface prevented him from looking down at the airfield; it didn’t matter. They’d be watching, all right—and probably holding shriek-filled ears. He grinned at the trembling instruments in front of him. He wished he could see their eyes, their open mouths. You’d think they’d never seen a plane fly before.
He took Pika-Don up to ten thousand feet. Hovering, he tried to find the image of Blake’s Nieuport on the airspace view scope. It didn’t show. For a worried moment, Farman wondered if something had gone wrong and Blake had gone down. Then the Nieuport flew past him on the left, a little above. It turned to pass in front of him. He could see Blake’s goggled face turned toward him.
Even then, there wasn’t an image on the radar. Farman swore. Something was wrong with the equipment.
No time to fiddle with the dials now, though. Pika-Don was guzzling the kerosine like a sewer. He converted to lateral flight. As always, it was like the floor dropping out from under him. He moved all three throttles forward, felt the thrust against his back. For a frightened instant, he saw Blake had turned back—was coming straight at him, head-on. He’d warned Blake not to get ahead of him like that. But Pika-Don was dropping fast. At speeds less than mach 0.5 she had the glide capability of a bowling ball. She slashed underneath the Nieuport with a hundred feet to spare. The altimeter began to unwind, faster and faster. The horizon lifted on the forward view scope like a saucer’s rim.
He watched the machmeter. It was edging up. He could feel the drive of the engines, full thrust now, exciting him like they always did, hurling him across the sky. The altimeter steadied, began to rise again. He tipped Pika-Don‘s prow upward and cracked the barrier in a rocketing fifty-degree climb. Blake’s Nieuport was nowhere in sight.
At forty thousand he cut the engines back, leveled off, and started down. He had to search hard for the airfield; without the map scope he couldn’t have found it. It was just another green field in a countryside of green fields. At five thousand feet he converted back to vertical thrust and let Pika-Don drop to a landing—quickly for most of the distance to save fuel, with a heavy retarding burst in the last thousand feet. He hovered a moment two hundred feet up, picked out a landing spot, and put down. According to the gauges, less than thirty seconds’ fuel was left in the tanks.
He dropped to the ground without waiting for a packing crate to be brought. He stood and looked around in disbelief. There was hardly a man in sight, and none of the escadrille’s planes remained on the field. He saw them, finally, small specks flying off eastward. He walked back to the hangars, perplexed. Was that all the impression he’d made? He grabbed the first man he found—a mechanic. “What happened?”
The mechanic grinned and made gestures and gabbled in French. Farman shook him and asked again—or tried to—in pidgin French. All he got was more of the same jabber and some gestures in the general direction of the front lines. “I know they w
ent that way,” Farman growled and flung the man away. He stalked back to the shack behind the hangars and asked Henri for a Scotch. He drank it, waited five minutes, and had another. He was deep into his fourth when the men came back.
They trooped into the shack, and Henri set a row of glasses on the counter and went down the line with the brandy bottle. As soon as a glass had been filled, a hand snatched it away. Blake came to Farman’s table, a brimful glass in his hand, sat down.
“Howard,” he said, “I don’t know how that thing of yours works. I don’t even know if you can call it an aeroplane. But I’ve got to admit you got it off the ground, and the only thing I ever saw go past me faster was a bullet. Now, if you’ll just tell me one thing …”
“Anything you want to know,” Farman said, abruptly raised from dejection to smugness.
“How can you fly when you don’t have the wind on your face?”
Farman started to laugh, but Blake wasn’t even smiling. To him, it wasn’t an old joke. He was serious.
With effort, Farman controlled his amusement. “I don’t need the wind. In fact, if the window broke, I’d probably be killed. I’ve got instruments that tell me everything I need to know.”
He could see the skeptical expression shaping itself on Blake’s face. He started to get up, not quite steady because of the Scotches he’d downed. “Come on. I’ll show you the cockpit.”
Blake waved him down. “I saw the cockpit. You’ve got so many things in there you don’t have time to look outside. I don’t know if I’d call it flying. You might as well be sitting at a desk.”
Sometimes, Farman had thought the same thought. But all those instruments were necessary to fly a thing like Pika-Don. He wondered if he’d have taken up flying if he’d known it would be like that. “Or maybe a submarine?” he asked, not entirely sarcastic. “The thing is, did I fly circles around you, or didn’t I?”
War and Peace Page 22
