“Oh.” Flying a Nieuport wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d thought. It would be like trying to ride horseback after driving cars all your life. “My plane doesn’t have wires.”
“What holds it together?” Blake asked.
Farman ignored him. He was thinking about driving a car, and some of his confidence came back. This Nieuport was a lot different from Pika-Don, but her engine wasn’t too much different from the one in his 1972 Chevy—more primitive, maybe, but it worked on the same principles. He could handle a gasoline engine all right.
“How do I start it?” he asked.
Half a minute later he was looking forward through the blur of a spinning propeller. He felt the blast of air on his face, and the stench of exhaust made him want to retch. The oil-pressure gauge worked up. He experimented with throttle settings and fuel-mixture adjustments, trying to learn something about how it handled. It occurred to him that his Chevy had two or three times the horsepower this thing had.
Blake handed him a helmet and goggles. Farman put them on. “Taxi her around a bit, until you get the feel,” Blake yelled through the engine’s blatting. Farman nodded, and Blake bent to pull the chocks from in front of the wheels; one side and then—slipping quickly underneath—the other. The Nieuport lurched forward even before Farman advanced the throttle. It bumped clumsily over the grass.
The thing had no brakes, so when he advanced the throttle again she hurtled forward, bumping and thumping across the field. The airspeed indicator began to show readings. The bumping got worse. He edged the throttle forward a little more. Except for the jouncing and that awful smell, it wasn’t much different from driving a car.
The tail came up. It startled him, and it was almost by reflex—seeing the horizon lift in front of him—that Farman pulled the stick back. The bumping stopped as if it were shut off. The engine’s sound changed, and airspeed began to slacken. The silly model T was airborne. He shoved the throttle forward and tried to level out. It shouldn’t have been flying at this speed—he’d driven his Chevy faster than this, and his Chevy was a lot more streamlined.
He was beyond the field’s edge now, with a rise of ground ahead of him. He tried to turn, but the Nieuport resisted. He pulled the stick back to clear the hill’s crest. The airspeed meter started to unwind. He got over the hill with a few yards to spare, but airspeed was falling back toward zero. He tried to level out again; it wasn’t easy to do without an artificial horizon on the instrument panel. The real horizon was rocking back and forth, up and down, and drifting sidewise. He tried turning the other way, and she turned easily but she also nosed down. He hauled back on the stick, swearing loudly. How any man could fly a crazy, contrary thing like this was more than he could understand.
The ground wheeled under him. The engine’s sound changed, became a snarl, then a sputter. Wildly, he looked for a place to put down, but there was nothing but orchard under him as far as he could see—which wasn’t far because the plane had nosed down again. A queasy, liquid feel began in his stomach, and the stench from the engine didn’t help it any.
The engine chose that moment to quit. For a long time—it couldn’t really have been more than a few seconds—the only sound was the whisper of air against the wings. Then the Nieuport stalled and plunged down among the trees. Branches snapped and the wings buckled. The Nieuport came to rest midway between the treetops and the ground. It dangled there, swaying a little in the gentle breeze. After a while, Farman thought to turn off the ignition, to reduce the danger of fire. After another while, he began to think about how to climb down.
He met Blake and half a dozen other men before he got out of the orchard. They went back to the Nieuport. Blake looked up at the wreck among the tree branches, made an angry noise that might have been a word, or it might not, and walked away.
Farman started to go after him, but then thought better of it. Another tree branch cracked and the Nieuport sagged a few feet closer to the ground. Farman looked up at the mess one more time, then turned away and followed Blake. It was a long walk back to the field.
Blake was given another Nieuport. The escadrille had several replacements ready—craft that had been sent down from an escadrille in the Somme region that had switched to Spads. The older Nieuports were still good enough for this less active section of the front. Blake spent the rest of the day and all the next with the mechanics, checking it out.
Farman spent the time poking around Pika-Don, trying to figure a way she could still be used. There was a space where a Vickers gun could be fitted if he took out the infrared sensor unit, but working out a trigger linkage was beyond him; every cubic inch inside Pika-Don was occupied by one or another piece of vital equipment.
And at mach 2 an orifice the size of a .30-caliber muzzle might be enough to blow the plane apart.
The only other thing he could think of was that the radars were powerful enough to fry a man dead, but it didn’t seem likely that Bruno Keyserling would hold still for the hour or two needed for the job.
He gave up. Pika-Don was useless. Reluctantly, he resigned himself to asking Deveraux for assignment to a flight school. It would mean swallowing a lot of pride, but if he was going to shoot Keyserling out of the sky, he’d have to learn how to fly a Nieuport.
When the escadrille came back from a patrol, he went out to talk with the Frenchman. Deveraux came toward him, helmet bunched in a still-gloved hand. “I am sorry, M’sieuhe said gravely. He laid his empty hand on Farman’s shoulder. “Your friend … your countryman …”
The patrol had run into a flock of Albatrosses, Keyserling in the lead. No one had seen Blake go down, but several planes had been seen falling, burning like meteors. When the dogfight broke off and the flight had reformed, Blake wasn’t with them.
Farman’s mind became like cold iron as he heard Deveraux recite the plain, inclusive facts. It shouldn’t have struck him so hard, but Blake was a man he’d known, a man he’d talked with. All the other men here, even Deveraux, were strangers.
“Did anyone see a parachute?”
“M’sieu, such things do not work,” Deveraux said. “We do not use them. They catch on the wires. For men in the balloons, perhaps such things can be used, but for us, our aeroplane is hit in its vitals, we go down.”
“You shouldn’t build ’em with so many wires, then.”
Deveraux’s reply was a Gallic shrug. “Perhaps not, M’sieu. But they are what hold our aeroplanes together.”
“The German planes, too?” Farman asked in a suddenly different voice.
“Of course, M’sieu.”
“Get me some kerosine,” Farman said.
“Paraffin? Of course, M’sieu. And if you will show the mechanics where to fasten the machine guns they …”
Farman shook his head. “I don’t need guns. Just get me the kerosine. I’ll do the rest. And when I’m done with ’em on this front, I’ll go up the line and clean out the rest of ’em.”
“Of course, M’sieuDeveraux said without irony.
Not that Farman cared. This time he’d do what he said he could do. He knew it. “Ten thousand gallons,” he said.
Mid-August came, and Pika-Don was fueled again. Reports and rumors had been coming down from other sectors of the front that American troops were somewhere in the fighting.
Pika-Don lifted into a sky as clean as polished glass. Later in the day there might be a scatter of cumulus tufts, but it was not yet midmorning. “It is not a good day for fighting,” Deveraux had said. “One can make use of the clouds.”
It would be a good day for observation planes, though, so the German patrols would be out. And, Farman thought savagely, there’d be fighting enough. He’d see to that.
Once he’d shifted to lateral flight, he didn’t try for altitude. Pika-Don would guzzle fuel faster at low levels, but he didn’t figure the mission to take long. The German field was less than thirty miles away. He fixed its location on the map scope and sent Pika-Don toward it at full thrust. Pika-Don began t
o gain altitude, but at ten thousand feet, with the machmeter moving up past 1.75, he leveled her off and turned her downward along a trajectory that would bring her to ground level just as he reached the German field.
It was almost perfectly calculated. He saw the field ahead of him. It was small—he’d seen pastures that were bigger—and he started to pull out of his descent. He passed over the field with just enough altitude to clear the trees on the far side. It took less than a second—the machmeter said 2.5, and skin temperature was going up fast. He took Pika-Don a few hundred feet up and brought her around—lined her up on the field with the map scope’s help—and brought her down again for another pass. This time she flew straight at the open mouth of a hangar in the middle of a row of hangars on the far side of the field.
He brought Pika-Don around one more time, but this time he stayed a thousand feet up, and kept off to one side of the field. He looked down and felt the satisfaction of a kid who’d just stomped an anthill. Wreckage was still flying through the air. He didn’t need rockets. He didn’t need machine guns. All he had to have was Pika-Don herself.
He turned her south toward the Swiss border. He’d seen only a few planes on the ground, which meant that most of them were out on patrol.
Heading south, he took Pika-Don up to eighteen thousand feet. On a day like this, with no clouds to hide in, the best altitude for a German patrol would be up close to the operational ceiling. Even if no altitude advantage could be gained, at least the advantage would not be lost to a higher-flying French patrol.
The map scope showed the Swiss border. Farman brought Pika-Don around. The front was not hard to find. It was a sinuous gash across the land, like a bloodless wound. He followed it north, staying to the German side. He watched the sky ahead of him.
He flew the course to the Vosges Mountains at mach 1.5, partly to save fuel and to minimize the skin temperature problem; flying this low, the air was a lot thicker than Pika-Don was built to fly in. His main reason, though, was that even at mach 1.5 he was flying through a lot of airspace. With no more sophisticated target-finding equipment than his own eyes, he could pass within a mile or less of a German patrol without seeing it. Flying as slowly as he could improved his chances.
The mountains rose ahead of him. They weren’t very high mountains; their crests lay well below him. He caught sight of the German patrol as he turned Pika-Don for another run south.
They were a few hundred yards higher than he was, and so small with distance he’d have thought they were birds except that birds didn’t fly this high, nor did they fly in a neatly stacked Junck’s row formation. They hung suspended in the sky, like fleck-marks on a window, and if it hadn’t been for their formation he wouldn’t have known their direction of flight. They were flying south, as he was now—patrolling the front, as he was.
And they were close—too close. If he turned toward them, they’d be inside the radius of his turn. He’d cross their path in front of them like a black cat, warning them. He mind-fixed their position on the map scope and turned away.
Come at them from eight o’clock, he decided. That would be the best angle. On the outward arc of his circle he took Pika-Don up to thirty thousand feet. Then, as Pika-Don started to come around for the approach, he started down, full thrust in all three engines. The machmeter climbed to 2.0, then 2.5. It edged toward 3.0, trembling. It would mean a heating problem in this soup-thick air, but it wouldn’t be for long.
The patrol was almost exactly where he’d seen it before. There hadn’t been time for it to go far. With only a small correction Pika-Don was driving down toward it like a lance, target-true. The insect-speck planes became recognizable shapes, then rapidly expanded. They ballooned to their full size in a flash and he was almost on top of them.
At the last instant, he moved the controls just enough to avoid collision—passed behind them so close he had a glimpse of round knobs bulging from the cockpits just behind the upper wings—pilots’ helmeted heads—and yes! at the bottom of the stack, leading the fight, the purple Albatross of Bruno Keyserling.
Then the whole flight was somewhere behind him. Farman reduced thrust and put Pika-Don into a steep climb, over on her back, and down again to level out into the airspace he’d flown through before.
It was all changed. The sky was full of junk, as if someone had emptied a barrel of trash. Fluttering wing sections, bashed fuselages, masses of twisted wreckage without any shape he could recognize. He saw a wingless fuselage falling a-tumble, like a crippled dragonfly. It was all purple, with bits of white on the shattered engine cowl. Got him!
And there wasn’t a whole plane left in the sky. They hadn’t been built to survive the impact of Pika-Don’s shock wave. Just like the hangars at their field which had exploded when he buzzed them.
He started to curve southward again. He’d tasted blood, wanted more. He’d hardly started the turn before a whump shook Pika-Don and the sky wheeled crazily and the engine function instruments erupted with a Christmas tree of red lights as if engine two had gobbled something that didn’t digest too well. (Part of an airplane? Part of a man?) Some of the lights flashed panic, others glared firmly at his eyes. The horizon outside was tipping up on edge, falling over, tipping up again. The controls felt numb in his hands.
Farman knew the drill. When a plane as hot as this one went bad, you got out if you could. At Mach 2 you could hit the ground in less than thirty seconds. He slapped the eject button—felt the rockets blast him upward. A moment later the instrument panel broke away and the seat’s firm pressure on his back and thighs was gone. He was tumbling like a wobbling top in midair, suddenly no longer enclosed in several million dollars’ worth of airplane. There was the teeth-cracking shock of his chute coming open, and abruptly the confusion of too many things happening too fast stopped. He looked all around for some sign of Pika-Don, but there wasn’t any.
He tugged at the shrouds to spill air from the chute and drift him westward toward the French lines. The wind was doing some of it, but not enough. A line of planes came toward him. He held his breath, thinking of a school of sharks nosing in toward a man cast overboard. But then he saw the French markings on their wings and sides. They were Nieuports, and the pilot of the leading plane waved. Farman waved back. The flight came on. It circled him once and then curved off. They stayed in sight, though, following him down. When flak bursts started to puff around him, they went down to strafe the German trenches.
He spilled another dollop of air from his chute. He was over the French lines now. He could see the men in the trenches looking up at him. He floated down toward them, closer and closer. Then, very abruptly, he was down—down among the trenches and barbed wire of the French Seventh Army. He sprawled in the greasy mud of a shell hole. The chute started to drag him, but it caught on a tangle of wire and deflated.
He got to his hands and knees, fumbling with the parachute harness. A bullet snapped past his ear. He flattened. The Nieuports dove on the German trenches again.
He struggled out of the harness and started to crawl in the direction of the nearest trench. It wasn’t far. He scraped the dirt with his belt buckle all the way. Bullets whipped past him like deadly mosquitoes. The soldiers in the trench reached out to pull him down.
They hugged him. They mobbed around him. There must have been thousands of men in that trench to celebrate the man who’d downed Bruno Keyserling. Someone pressed a cup of wine into his hands—a soldier in dirty clothes, with mud on his brow and a matted beard. Farman drank gratefully.
After a while, he sat down and just sat there, dead inside. He looked at the dirt wall a few inches from his eyes. The empty cup dangled from his hand. Pika-Don was gone, and nothing he could do would rebuild her. Suddenly, he was just an ordinary man. He couldn’t even fly any more. Pika-Don was the only plane in this age that he knew how to fly, and Pika-Don was gone.
He wasn’t aware of the passage of time, but only of the heat and dust and the smell of a trench that had been occupied t
oo long by unwashed men. He didn’t know what he was going to do. But after a time, the wine began to have its effect. A trickle of life came back into him.
Slowly, he got to his feet. The start of a smile quirked his mouth. On second thought, no, he wasn’t just an ordinary man.
The war would be over in a few months. Maybe he didn’t know what he’d do, but …
The soldier who’d given him the wine was standing a few feet away. Farman held himself crisply erect. It occurred to him the man probably didn’t know a word of English.
“How do I get back to America?” he asked, and grinned at the soldier’s incomprehension.
A man from the future ought to have some advantage over the natives!
Peace and internal order are closely linked, but they are not the same thing. A person or organization with the problem of maintaining either or both might attempt to solve it by considering it a job to be done and hiring professionals to do it. But there’s more than one very deep pitfall in that . . .
I
THE LANDING boat fell away from the orbiting warship, drifted to a safe distance and fired retros. When it entered the thin reaches of the planet’s upper atmosphere, scoops opened in the bows, drew in air until the stagnation temperature in the ramjet chambers was high enough for ignition. Engines lit with a roar of flame. Wings swung out slightly, enough to provide lift at hypersonic speeds, and the spaceplane turned, streaked over empty ocean toward the continental land mass two thousand kilometers away.
It circled over craggy mountains twelve kilometers high, dropped low over thickly forested plains, slowing until the craft posed no danger to the thin strip of inhabited lands along the ocean shores. The planet’s great ocean was joined to a nearly landlocked channel no more than five kilometers across at its widest point, and nearly all of the colonists lived near the junction of the waters. Hadley’s capital city nestled on a long peninsula at the mouth of that channel, the two natural harbors, one in the sea, the other in the ocean, giving the city the fitting name of Refuge.
War and Peace Page 25
