Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

by James Van Pelt

  And he remembered, too, riding away, back to the village, triumphant. A warrior among thousands, a warrior to make his ancestors and sons proud.

  On Saturday, Salas walked across the parking lot toward the students. They’d parked their cars near the school, and were now in the graveled overflow parking, far from the building. He heard someone laugh, and they chattered among themselves.

  Mrs. Hatcher and Mrs. Leanny, both wearing overalls, were helping the students arrange display boards on the ground. When he reached the crowd’s edge, he could see the boards laid out in grids, like city streets, complete with small structures glued to their surface.

  “Hi, Mr. Salas,” said Theodore Remmick. He wore a ball cap backwards, clearing all the hair from his face. “I’m not going to bring it into the school.” He held up the propane torch from earlier in the week. “I’m the fire marshall.”

  “What’s the project?” Salas said.

  “We need your equipment at the south end, Sean,” said Mrs. Hatcher. “When we’re ready, start the generator and fan. Theodore will tell you when. Careful you don’t step on West 18th.”

  “I saw so little,” said the girl Salas had sat behind his first day in Hatcher’s class. Today she wore a bikini top and cutoff jeans. “So much smoke. It choked me.” She rubbed her throat unconsciously. “I didn’t picture the scope…” She waved at the miniature city.

  She stepped to the side, and now Salas could see the entire display.

  Mrs. Leanny joined him. “Each board represents a half mile, so it’s 12 boards long and 3 boards wide. There’s 34 kids in the class. Two boards short. Hatcher and I got to do one too.”

  Theodore Remmick crouched at the south end, then fired up his torch. A couple kids pointed cell phone cameras. “It’s near 9:00 a.m., Sunday, October 10 in a city of 335,000 people. In two days, 100,00 will be homeless. The fire starts in the O’Leary’s barn.” He let the flame wash over a tiny building, which caught fire immediately. Several students gasped.

  “I saw the fire coming,” said a boy holding a camera, but he stopped filming. His hand fell to his side, and his focus drifted. “I was walking home from church with my daughter. At Beach and DeKoven, I smelled burning wood. Smoke rushed up the street. We ran and ran to the Polk Street Bridge to cross the river.”

  Tiny flames blackened the board’s end, crisping the miniscule buildings. The students had labeled the streets. Salas recognized them from the lists in Hatcher’s classroom: DeKoven, Meagher, Catherine, Barber. The Chicago River, a blue ribbon, meandered the diorama’s length. He saw the bridge at Polk Street.

  “Turn on the fan,” said Theodore Remmick.

  Salas stepped back. The students leaned forward intensely. Talk ceased. Someone sobbed. The box fan pushed the fire across the display. In a few minutes, six scale miles caught fire and burned. Stores, offices, warehouses, homes, bridges, schools and hospitals. When the fire reached the far end, Theodore intoned, “On Monday evening, the winds died. Cut the wind, Sean.” The fan rattled to a stop. “And it began to rain.”

  Students pulled out squirt guns. They were silent at first, and the water streams hissed when they hit the board, but soon they laughed as they put out the fire, squirting each other just as often as soaking the burned city.

  “I want to know more about fire fighting,” said a girl. “What did they learn from this?”

  “Did they change the fire codes?” said another.

  “How long did it take them to rebuild?”

  “Did the mayor get blamed?”

  “Did other cities have fires?”

  “How much did it cost?”

  When Salas left, they were still talking, asking questions, eager to learn. Eager to share what they knew.

  Mrs. Hatcher didn’t give a lecture. She hardly spoke, Salas thought in wonder. She never taught at all, but it was the best lesson he’d ever seen.

  On Monday, Salas handed his recommendations to Principal Wahr. The bald-headed man studied the one-page report silently. Salas let his gaze wander around the room. Organizational charts covered the walls: arrows pointing to boxes, boxes containing names, names associated to duties. It all seemed impersonal. Standards. Goals. Wahr had framed the school’s mission: “To lead all students to reach their individual potential by rigorously pursuing and evaluating achievement of high academic and ethical standards in a disciplined, nurturing environment.”

  Wahr cleared his throat. “This plan cuts your position. You cut your own job.”

  Salas took a deep breath. “Coach Persigo turned in his retirement papers. Leanny is willing to do the extra work to save a teaching slot, and I think it’s time I went back to the classroom. P.E. is where I belong.”

  Wahr looked baffled. “What about Hatcher? What are your recommendations?”

  “You said your son will be going to school here next year, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I need to keep an eye on him. Hates school right now.”

  Salas tried to picture Principal Wahr’s boy. Maybe Wahr’s son resembled Salas when he was in school. Maybe he acted indifferent and lazy, just as Salas had.

  “Put him in Hatcher’s U.S. History class.”

  “Really.” The disbelief reverberated in Wahr’s voice. “She’ll lecture him into a coma.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Salas remembered the day’s end at Greasy Grass. A desperate people, for a moment, triumphed, but it was a “last stand” for both sides, a proof you fight even when the campaign looks lost. He closed his eyes to see an image that had returned to him since he’d sat in Hatcher’s room. The sun set on a swell in the land they would later call Custer Hill. A growing dusk, filled with velvety shade covered the grass and brush until the details disappeared. No bodies visible now. No dead horses. No broken lances. No battle remnants. Just the stars and the rolling hills and a treeless horizon. The wind pressed his back. A coyote yipped in the distance, and the village dogs yapped in return.

  He had lost friends, warriors all, but the enemy had lost many more. They would sing songs about today. They would tell stories to the childrens’ childrens’ children so no one would forget. The victory at Greasy Grass would join the great tales told back to back, the unbroken voice of people speaking.

  It had become history.

  What happened in Hatcher’s room? Hypnotism, magic, time travel?

  Salas rubbed the goosebumps off his arms and faced Principal Wahr.

  “You won’t be sorry your son is in Hatcher’s class,” he said. “She’s exemplary.”

  FAR FROM THE EMERALD ISLE

  Dragging a pack full of equipment behind her, Anise Delaney crawled her way between the slick inner wall of The Redeemer and the rough textured outer shell. Not only was she tall, but her shoulders were broad. A rugby player’s build wasn’t the best choice for this errand. She envied Sierra’s slight figure who was following. Anise’s back scraped against the metal again, and she opened her mouth in exclamation, but bit the sound short. Something moved in the claustrophobic darkness just beyond her headlamp. She held her breath until it moved closer into the light. It was just a maintenance bot scuttling away on its regular rounds.

  She relaxed and said over her shoulder, “By all my calculations, we should be dead.” Her light illuminated the squeezed path before her like a broad but very low mineshaft. The air smelled stale and metallic. She thought about gremlins, dwarves and tommyknockers. And leprechauns. Her grandmother had a few stories about them. This would be the kind of place they would like, walking unseen below the ark-ship crew’s world, causing trouble. She grinned at the idea, but only for an instant; the interior of the gray hull absorbed light, accepted no shadows, and it hurt her hands to crawl on it. Next time I’ll bring gloves and knee pads, she thought.

  Sierra, a few feet back, grunted in acknowledgment. “But we’re not dead. That doesn’t mean there was anything extraordinary.”

  Anise checked a monitor mounted on her wrist. They were close to where her cal
culations said there should be an impact crack. “There you go again. I told you from the beginning that they made a mistake when they crewed these ships. We’re homogeneous. All this scientific expertise creates blind spots. We assume everything has a rational explanation and that’s not sensible. Sucks the wonder out of living. Weird things have happened on this ship. Strange sounds behind the walls. Tools moved. Meals missing. Remember when Yatmaso lost his glasses? Couldn’t find them for a week, and there they were, in the middle of his desk. ” She scooted forward ten more feet. Naturally the stressed area would be exactly between two of the access panels. “It’s like that rainbow on the day we took off. I see it as a sign, and when I point it out to you, you give me a lecture on light and refraction. They made sure there was racial and ethnic diversity, but not much diversity of thought. We don’t even have an acupuncturist on board.”

  “You’d want to be stuck with needles for a headache? The problem is that you’re homesick, Irish girl.”

  “It’s not homesickness. It’s just that everything is so… so… planned. Even our genetics. When we get to Zeta Riticula, the computer will control our breeding, screen our genes, manipulate them to fit the environment, twitch and tweak us to keep us healthy. It has mission control. God knows what all it’s up to. We’re letting the computer make autonomous decisions. I just think that being human means accepting a bit more chance in our lives and staying open to wonder.”

  Sierra said, “Chance and wonder gave us the mutagen and drove us off Earth. Besides, I like what the computer is doing. Did you have some of the new tomatoes for lunch? The botanist said that not only are they more resistant to disease, but it takes half the water to grow. That’s what happens when you give a computer some decision making capabilities and a lot of time to work with. Those old people invented gods because they needed to explain how their worlds worked. We engineered ours. How much farther? This is tearing up my hands and knees.”

  “I think we’re there.” Anise checked the monitor again. The numbers confirmed they were on the site, but to her eye the surface appeared uniform and undamaged. She dragged her pack to where she could reach it, then pulled out a hull diagnostic device, a sophisticated tester for metal integrity. She was homesick. When they’d started the flight a year earlier (by their time—the Caretaker crew was awake only two weeks of every hundred years, while the ship had been traveling for 2,600 years), homesickness was an easily disregarded triviality. Anise thought now about the hills south of Letterkenny in Donegal where she’d grown up. No more wind off Trawbreaga Bay and Lough Swilly carrying a hint of salt and far away, North Atlantic storms. No more heather-covered hills.

  Sierra said, “The maintenance bots have been all over this section, and they didn’t report anything.”

  “I know, but I’ve got to see for myself.” Anise connected the two thumb-sized transmitters a yard apart on the hull, then pressed the diagnostic device’s trigger, sending a low-level radiation pulse through the hull, which tested whole for three feet before reaching a complicated series of cracks that lead all the way to the outer surface and the vacuum of space. Beyond that the device didn’t measure, but Anise could imagine the light years of emptiness. Light years from Earth and Ireland. Light years from Zeta Riticula. She tried to remember what the morning mist felt like on her last hike to the ancient circular fortress, Grianan of Aileach, where she stood atop the thousands of years old wall waiting for the weather to break. On a clear day she could see the Swilly estuary, the Inishowen peninsula and much of Derry, but the fog never broke. The cool, damp stones were slick under her fingers. She’d heard a noise behind her, a quick, light laugh. No one stood in the fortress’s circular sward. The tops of the wall in both directions were empty. It didn’t take much to believe that there was more to the world than appeared when she was by herself in a land filled with so many stories.

  “Nothing close here.” She moved six feet and replanted the sensors.

  “Which is just what the computer reported. Why can’t you admit that the hull performed the way it was designed? In the event of a collision, force is supposed to be transmitted laterally. That way a speck can’t poke all the way through.”

  “When we’re going at a quarter of the speed of light, a ‘speck’ packs one hell of a lot of kinetic energy, and this was much more than a dust mote. The numbers say it was about the size of a marble. The ship should have shattered like a porcelain egg.” She read the results again. The cracks radiated to within a foot of the inner surface.

  “I don’t get why you’re looking for a break in the hull when there clearly isn’t one. We’d be freeze-dried and vacuum-packed if there was. Do you hear a breeze? I don’t hear a breeze. The hull held. The outside squads will resurface the ship, and we’ll be back in the sleep pods before you know it.”

  Anise scooted farther forward. “Well, if the numbers tell me that we should be busted, and we’re not, I’d like to know why.”

  “For once the ship exceeded the design specs.”

  Anise saw the crack before her monitor reported it to her. The inside surface of the hull had a grain to it, representing the millions of interwoven carbon-metal threads that gave the ship its unprecedented durability, but it needed that strength if it was going to survive the 4,000 year-long trip to Zeta Riticula intact, and deliver its crew of mostly slumbering Caretakers and frozen embryos and colonization gear to the distant planet. Her head lamp showed the break, a long, crooked line across the rough texture. The monitor confirmed it: the series of fissures emanating from the collision led all the way to here, hundreds of yards from the impact spot on the hull’s exterior.

  At first it was just a hairline; then, it widened to as much as a fingernail in thickness, four feet long. Anise scrinched forward, directing her light onto the hull.

  Sierra inhaled sharply. “God! You were right, but it can’t be continuous. Not to the surface.”

  Anise didn’t answer. The monitor told her the story. The line was a part of a ten foot thick system of fractures. She pressed her finger against the crack, then looked at the raised mark it left on her skin. “We should be dead.”

  Sierra offered, “The bots…”

  “Were knocked out. Two hours without power while the ship rerouted energy and woke us up. Besides, they weld hull breaks. No weld here.” She unsnapped a knife from her tool belt, then poked the end into the crack. It was hard to see, since the gap was so narrow, but it didn’t appear to be more than a half inch deep. The knife stopped. She jabbed it in again. There was a little give, not like metal against metal. More like digging into wood. Carefully, she rocked the knife point back and forth. When she brought it out, a white residue coated the end.

  “What is it?” asked Sierra.

  “We need to get back to the lab.” Anise scraped the residue into an envelope and sealed it.

  At the end of her work shift, Crew Chief Yatmaso paused at Anise’s station. His hair was uncombed, and tiredness bruised the skin beneath his eyes. “Sierra says you found a crack in the hull, a real crack?”

  “It’s sealed, but that’s not what’s—”

  “Thank goodness for that. The repair squads are working in gangs to refurbish the exterior. With some effort, we should be sleeping again in a few days, but it’s thrown off everyone’s schedule. There’s a committee deciding if the next crew should be awakened early, or if we should keep them on cycle. It’s an extra seventeen years before the next maintenance that way, but then we’d be back to normal. Plus, we’ve got to worry if there’s another stone like the last one in front of us. We shouldn’t have hit anything.”

  Anise pushed a notebook at him. “Can you look at my numbers?”

  He took the notebook in one hand and rubbed his eyebrows with the other. “Couldn’t you show me these on your computer? Your handwriting is terrible.”

  She crossed her arms. “I get different numbers on the computer.”

  The crew chief handed her the notebook. “Then you made a mistake.”
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  “The crack in the interior wasn’t welded.”

  “It wasn’t leaking either. It just means the maintenance-bots missed it. The system was under a lot of stress those first hours after the collision.”

  Before she could even give him a disgusted look, he left. She leaned back in her chair, the notebook in her lap. Above her monitor was a digital display from home: a long, green hill, sun-streaked and cloud-shadowed. In the foreground stood a whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof. During the summer she used to explore the hills, heather and clover and dew-damp moss in the air, sometimes taking an entire afternoon to climb one, her thighs burning. Folks called Ireland the Emerald Isle, and they were right. The more she thought about it, the greener it became. The month before the flight she’d spent seaside at Bundoran in south Donegal, where cliffs bracketed the beach on either side. Waves had carved the stone into fantastic lavender-blue formations, but behind them the hills rose, green on green.

  It takes a long time to say goodbye to a country, and she didn’t realize she was, really realize she was until it was too late.

  She flicked her monitor to the analysis of the white residue she’d found in the crack. She’d asked the computer to identify it and run a match. It was plastic, the same kind that formed almost everything on the ship that wasn’t metal. How did plastic end up blocking a crack that could have been disastrous to their mission? What saved the ship during the two hours when the maintenance bots were down?

  After a few key clicks, the time line for the collision came up. At zero hundred hours, a marble-sized rock hit The Redeemer. Power supplies to the bots and most of the ship’s key systems, including the computer, were interrupted. Automatic routines independent of the computer kicked in, warming a Caretaker crew and searching for alternate paths around the system breaks. An hour and fifty minutes later, the computer regained ship control. The bots started moving, and ten minutes after that, the crew began to awaken to klaxons and emergency lights.