“They stay mostly on their own side of the lines,” he said to Deveraux. “All right. When I go up, I don’t want you to have any planes on that side. I want to be sure any planes I find over there are theirs, not yours. I’ll be going too fast to look at ’em close.”
“You ask more than is possible, or even wise,” Deveraux said. Breeze ruffled grass on the field. The Frenchman’s scarf flapped and fluttered. “It is necessary always to have patrols in all sectors to protect our reconnaissance aeroplanes. If we do not patrol, the reconnaissance aeroplanes would be attacked. They could not do their missions. Perhaps it would be possible to remove patrols from one sector for a few hours—one in which none of our observation missions will be flying. Is not that as much as you shall need?”
“Not quite,” Farman said. “I don’t think you’ve thought it all the way through. You cover the front between the Swiss border and the Vosges Mountains. Right?”
“There are several escadrilles with which we share that duty.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s not important except they’ll have to be warned off, too. What I’m asking now is, how many miles of front are you covering? Fifty? Seventy-five?”
“It is fifty kilometers,” Deveraux said.
“All right. I’ll be flying at about mach 2. At that speed, I can cover that much distance in three minutes. It takes me twenty miles just to get turned around. I can patrol the whole front, all by myself. You don’t need to have anybody else out there.” Deveraux’s face wore a scowlish mask. “So fast? I must assume you do not exaggerate, M’sieu
“At sixty thousand feet, I could do it twice that fast,” Farman said. “But I’m going to cruise at forty. Air’s too thick for full-power flying that low down. I’d bum like a meteor.”
“Of course, M’sieu.”
Farman couldn’t be sure if Deveraux believed him or not.
“But I must say, it would seem you have not considered all the necessities,” the Frenchman went on. “Even if you are able to patrol all the sectors, that would be true only should you not find a Boche patrol. Then you would move to attack it, and voila, you would be engaged in combat, M’sieu. You would cease to patrol. And it is not uncommon for the Boche to have four or five flights in the air at one time. Who would be protecting our observation missions while you are fighting?”
“I don’t even want any observation flights on that side of the lines while I’m flying,” Farman said. “Because I’m going to wipe that sky clean like a blackboard. If you have observation planes over there, they might get it, too. So you don’t need to have any patrols out to protect ’em. Anyway, it won’t take me more than five minutes from the time I’ve spotted a flight until I’ve launched rockets, and then I’ll be free to go back on patrol. That’s not much more than if I’d took time out for a smoke.”
They heard, then, very faint but growing, the sound of aircraft motors. Deveraux turned to search the eastward sky for the approaching planes. “And have you thought, M’sieu, what the Boche would be doing while you are shooting these rockets of yours? Bruno Keyserling and his men are aviators of consummate skill. They would not fly calmly, doing nothing, while you attack them. And even should your rockets each find a target, that would still be only one of their aeroplanes for each rocket. You have, I believe you said, only six.”
“They won’t even see me coming, I’ll jump ’em so fast,” Farman said. “They won’t have time to do anything but look surprised. And one of my rockets can …” He made a wipe-out gesture. “Look. All I’m asking—keep your planes on this side of the lines for a couple of hours. With only ten thousand gallons, I won’t be able to stay out even that long. Am I asking too much? Two hours?”
The returning planes were in sight now. There were three of them, strung out, the one in the rear far behind the other two, losing altitude, regaining it, losing it again. Farman didn’t know how many had gone out on that particular patrol—he hadn’t been paying much attention to such things—but it was rare for a patrol of only three planes to go out. There would be some empty chairs in the mess, this evening.
The first plane came in to land. Its lower wing was shredded close to the fuselage—loose fabric fluttered like tom flags—and the landing gear wheel on that side wobbled oddly. As it touched down, the whole gear collapsed. The wing dipped—caught the ground—and flung the machine into a tangle of broken struts, tail high in the air. Men ran across the field. Farman caught a glimpse of the pilot’s arm, waving for help. A thin black thread of smoke began to rise. A moment later it was a fierce inferno. No one could get near it. There wasn’t a sign of the man. The second plane landed and taxied across the grass unheeded.
Deveraux turned to Farman again. “No, M’sieu,” he said. “You do not ask too much. It is we, who ask too much of men.”
Farman boosted Pika-Don from the field while dawn was still a growing light in the east and all the land was gray. She lifted sluggishly; well, the gunk he was feeding her was a poor substitute for her usual diet. He took her to eight thousand feet before converting to lateral flight. She was down to four before she cracked the barrier and down to three and a half before she bottomed out and started to climb. The machmeter moved past 1.25. He raised Pika-Don’s nose and drove her at the sky.
She broke into sunlight at twenty thousand feet. The sun was gold and the air was as clean as clear ice. Somewhere in the darkness below two armies faced each other as they’d faced each other for four years. At forty thousand feet he leveled off and began his loiter pattern—a slim-waisted figure-eight course, looping first to the south, then to the north—overflying the German lines from the Swiss border to the Vosges Mountains. He watched the airspace viewscope for the pip that would be German aircraft.
Almost always, on good flying days, the Germans sent up patrols a few minutes before sunrise, to intercept the reconnaissance planes the French almost always sent over on good flying days. Bruno Keyserling would be leading one of those patrols. Farman watched particularly the area surrounding the German airfield. The Germans would climb quickly to fighting altitude; as soon as their altitude and motiondissociated them from the ground, Pika-Don‘s radars would pick them out. He watched the scope, followed his loiter pattern, and waited for the German planes to appear.
Two circuits later, he was still up there. The scope showed the shaded contours of the land, but that was all. Not one German plane—no planes at all, even though the whole escadrille had flown out ahead of him to watch the fight he’d promised. He had fuel enough for six or eight more circuits—it was going faster than he’d counted on—before there’d be only enough to get him back to the field.
And more weeks of filtering kerosine? Not if he could help it. He made two more circuits—still nothing. He put Pika-Don‘s needle prow downward. If they wouldn’t come up and fight, he’d go after them. He checked the German field’s position on the map scope. He could fly down straight to the end of its runway, and he had six rockets. One would be enough. Two would destroy it utterly.
He was down below twenty thousand feet when he saw the airplanes. They were flying on a northerly course, as he was, patrolling above the German lines in a Junck’s row formation—each plane above, behind, and to the side of the one below it; an upright, diagonal line. A quick glance at the radar scope: not a hint of those planes.
Nuts with the airfield. Not with those planes over there. Flying where they were, using that formation, they had to be Germans. Farman pulled out of this attack dive, immelmanned into a corkscrew turn that would take him back and place him behind their formation. He lost sight of them in that maneuver, but the map scope showed him where they had to be; they didn’t have the speed to move far while he was getting into position.
Behind them now, he turned again and drove toward them. Still nothing on the airspace scope, but he knew where they were. He tried the target-tracking radar—the one in the middle of the instrument panel. They didn’t show there, either.
But he knew where they were, and
in another moment he saw them again. Little black specks, like gnats, only gnats didn’t fly in formation. And one rocket anywhere near them …
Still they didn’t show on the target-tracking scope. It would have to be an eyeball launch, then. He primed the proximity detonators on rockets one and six. There still wasn’t a sign they’d seen him. They didn’t even seem to move against the sky.
He launched the rockets at four miles. The distance was a guess—without help from his radars, a guess was all he could do—but the German planes were still only specks.
It didn’t matter. The rockets were built to heat-seek a target from ten times that distance. He felt the shock as the rockets struck from their sheaths even as he sent Pika-Don screaming straight up, engines suddenly at full thrust, and over on her back, and a half-roll, and he was at forty-five thousand feet. Rockets one and six sketched their ionized tracks on the airspace scope, all the way to the edge.
The edge was somewhere beyond the crest of the Vosges Mountains. Farman couldn’t understand it. He’d sent those rockets straight as bullets into that formation, proximities primed and warheads armed. They should have climbed right up those Germans’ tailpipes and fireballed and wiped those planes from the sky like tinder touched by flame. It hadn’t happened.
He brought Pika-Don around. On the map scope he found again the position where the German planes had been. They still didn’t show on the airspace view—what could possibly be wrong with the radar—but they’d still be close to where he’d seen them last, and he still had four rockets left. On the airspace scope, the tracks of rocketsone and six ended in tiny sparks as their propellants exhausted and their automatic destructs melted them to vapor. He turned Pika-Don’s nose down. He armed the warheads, primed the proximities. This time he wouldn’t miss.
He saw the German planes from ten miles away. He launched rockets two and five from a distance of five miles. Two seconds later, he launched three and four and turned away in a high-G immelmann. His G-suit seized him like a hand—squeezed, relaxed, and squeezed again as he threw Pika-Don into a long, circling curve. The airspace scope flickered, re-oriented itself. His four rockets traced bright streaks across its face.
Explode! he thought. Explode!
They didn’t. They traced their paths out to the scope’s edge. Their destruct mechanisms turned them to vapor. Ahead of him now, again, he could see the disorganized swarm of the jagdstaffel. He hadn’t touched one of them. And they still didn’t show on the airspace scope.
Farman swore with self-directed disgust. He should have thought of it. Those planes were invisible to radar. They didn’t have enough metal to make a decent tin can, so his radar equipment rejected the signals they reflected as static. For the same reason, the proximities hadn’t worked. The rockets could have passed right through the formation—probably had—without being triggered. As far as the proximities were concerned, they’d flown through empty air. He might as well have tried to shoot down the moon.
He turned west, back to base. He located the field with the map scope. He had enough fuel to get there, and some to spare. A thought trickled through his mind about the dinosaurs—how their bodies had been perfectly adapted to the world they lived in, and when the world changed their bodies hadn’t been able to adjust to the changes. So they died.
Pika-Don was like that—a flying Tyrannosaurus rex whose world now provided only insects for food.
“Yeh. We saw the whole action,” Blake said. He sat with his back against the hangar wall, a wine bottle close to his hand. The sun was bright and the fields were green. A light breeze stirred.
The escadrille had come back a half hour after Farman landed. Farman had hesitated, but then went out to face Deveraux. He wasn’t eager for the confrontation.
Deveraux was philosophically gentle. “You have seen now, M’sieu, the rockets you carried were not an adequate armament for combat situations. Now, if you will show our mechanics where you think it would be best to mount the machine guns they …”
“Pika-Don flies faster than bullets,” Farman said. He kicked at a ridge of dirt between wheel ruts. The dirt was hard, but it broke on the third try. “I even heard of a guy that got ahead of his own bullets and shot himself down. And his plane was a lot slower than mine.” He shook his head—looked back toward where Pika-Don crouched low to the ground, sleek and sinister-looking, totally useless. “Might as well let her rot there.”
He kicked the loosened clod off into the grass.
About eleven o’clock, Blake got a bottle of wine from Henri. It was plain peasant’s wine, but that was all right. They sat in the narrow noontide shade of a hangar and worked on it.
“You’ve got to get in close before you shoot,” Blake said. “I don’t know where you learned combat, but it didn’t look like you learned much. You flew at their formation so fast they wouldn’t of seen you until you broke right through ’em, but you shot those rockets from a couple of miles away. You can’t hit anything at that kind of range.”
“I thought I could,” Farman said. “And with the kind of warheads they had, it’s a good idea to be a few miles away when they go off.”
“You don’t think you’re funning me with that, do you?” Blake said. He sat up straight—looked at Farman. “Nothing scatters shrapnel that wide.”
Farman helped himself from the bottle. “My rockets would have done more than just scatter shrapnel, if they’d gone off.”
“Not much good if you’ve got to shoot ’em from so far off you can’t hit the target,” Blake said.
It was no use trying again to explain target-seeking missiles. Anyway, they hadn’t worked. He’d finally figured that out, too. Their heat-seeking elements had been designed to track on a hot jet’s exhaust, or the meteor-flame of a ballistic warhead. All the German planes were putting out was the feeble warmth of piston engine. That wasn’t enough. If he was going to do any good in this war, it wasn’t going to be with Pika-Don. “Harry, I want you to check me out on your plane.”
“Huh?”
“My plane’s useless. She hasn’t any teeth left,” Farman said. “If I’m going to do any more fighting, it’s going to be in a plane like yours. I’ve got more flying hours than all of you put together, but I don’t have any cockpit time in your—” He almost called them box kites. “I want you to show me how it flies.”
Blake shrugged. “One plane’s pretty much like another. They’ve all got their tricks—like these Nieuports: you don’t want to do much diving in them; takes the fabric off the top wings every time. But aside from that the only way you get the feel is by flying ’em.”
They walked out to Blake’s Nieuport. It looked about as airworthy as a model T Ford. Farman had a little trouble climbing up until Blake showed him the footholds. It was cramped in the cockpit, and the wicker seat was hard. Blake stood on a packing crate and leaned over the coaming.
Farman put his hand on the stick. That was what it was—an erect rod sticking up between his knees. He’d never seen one like it before. He tried moving it, and it moved with the smoothness of a spoon in a gluepot. “Do you have to fight it like this all the time?” he asked.
“Takes some getting used to,” Blake said. “It’s easier when she’s flying, though.” Farman turned his attention to the instruments. They were a haphazard assortment of circular dials, unevenly distributed, and except for one big dial straight in front of him there wasn’t any apparent priority of position given to the more important ones—whichever ones they were. They were all identified, the words lettered across their faces, but the words were French.
“That’s the oil pressure,” Blake said, tapping the glass in front of a dial. “And that’s RPM, and that’s fuel mixture.”
“Oil pressure. Is that important?”
Blake looked at him strangely. “You say you’ve been flying—how long? And you don’t know oil pressure?”
“I’ve never flown a piston engine craft,” Farman said. “Pika-Don has a different kind. Is it importan
t?”
“Your engine doesn’t work too good without it.”
“And—fuel mixture, did you say?” Farman asked, putting his finger to the dial Blake had indicated. He was careful not to ask if it was important, though he wasn’t sure what difference it made. Mixed with what, he wondered to himself.
“Right,” Blake said. “And this here’s your compass—don’t trust it too far—and that’s the altimeter, and here’s the gas gauge.”
At least those were instruments Farman understood. But he frowned at the altimeter. “Is that the highest this can fly?”
“Those are meters, not feet,” Blake said. “This crate can go up as high as I can breathe. Sixteen … eighteen thousand feet.” He pointed into the cockpit again. “This here’s the switch, and that’s the throttle, and that’s the mixture control.”
Farman touched them, one by one, trying to get their feel. His hand encountered a small plumb bob dangling from a cord. “That’s a funny good-luck charm,” he said.
Blake laughed. “Yeh, it’s good luck all right. Without it I could be flying upside down and not know it.”
“Don’t you have a tum-and-bank indicator?” Farman wondered.
“Mister—that is my tum-and-bank indicator.”
“Oh,” Farman said, feeling foolish. But how could he have known.
“And these here,” Blake went on, unnoticing, “that one tightens the flying wires, and that one the landing wires.”
“What kind of wires?”
“Some wires you want tight when you’re flying, and some others when you’re coming in to land. If you don’t, you stand a good chance of coming apart at the wrong time.”
War and Peace Page 24
