Franklin said, "Enough of this nonsense. We've got them and we're damn well going to use them till we get something better. They've shipped the Super Hudsons off to ... Colorado, I think they said, or maybe Utah. Someplace where they can do reconnaissance and not have to go up against anybody's varsity, anyway. We do. That's another reason we get the Wilburs—you men can do your job as pilots, and the observers you'll have with you can observe. Life's getting too complicated for one man to do both jobs up there at the same time."
But for a sigh, Moss remained quiet. Again, the squadron commander was probably right. Again, Moss found the truth unpalatable.
Lyman Baum said, "Other thing is, sir, I don't like trusting my neck to the observer. I'd rather have my own gun now instead of waiting to get one in the great by-and-by. Observers—"
He let that hang there. Most observers who were just observers and not pilot-observers like the members of the squadron were guys who had been through flight school and hadn't made it as pilots. That made everybody suspect there was something second-rate about them. If you knew darn well you were first-rate and you'd got used to being your own gunner, how were you going to shout "Hurrah!" at the idea of turning over the shooting to somebody you didn't figure could match you?
As if Baum's question had been a cue, a truck chugged up to the aerodrome and started disgorging men in khaki with overladen duffel bags and with flight badges that had only one wing, not a pilot's two. Captain Franklin nodded; he'd expected them. "Gentlemen, your observers," he said while the newcomers were still getting out. "Does anyone care to express any further ill-founded opinions?... No? Good."
Moss kicked at the dirt. The captain had a point. You couldn't condemn out of hand a man you'd never met. But Baum had a point, too. If a fellow was liable to be a lemon, did you really want to meet him?
Whether you did or not, you were going to. From a breast pocket, Franklin pulled out a sheet of stationery folded in quarters. Before he unfolded it, he waved the observers over to him. They came, some with their bags slung over a shoulder, some carrying them in front, some dragging them along the ground. "We have the following pairings," Franklin announced, unfolding the paper: "Pilot Baum and Observer van Zandt; Pilot Henderson and Observer Mattigan..." On and on he went, till he said, "Pilot Moss and Observer Stone."
"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Moss burst out amid laughter. "You did that on purpose, Captain, and don't try to tell me different."
"Well, that tells me who you are," the newly teamed observer said, stepping forward. "I'm Percy Stone." He let his duffel bag fall from his shoulder to the ground and stuck out his right hand.
"Jonathan Moss," Moss said, shaking it, and studied Captain Franklin's idea of a joke. Stone was a couple of years younger than he, he guessed, with a long, ruddy face, a brown Kaiser Bill mustache, and a disarming grin underneath it. He didn't look like a loser or a washout. "What did you do before the war started?" Moss asked him.
"I had a little photography studio in Ohio," Stone answered. "You?"
"I was studying the law," Moss said. He waved that aside, as he would have any question both irrelevant and immaterial, and stared at Percy Stone. Maybe Captain Franklin's idea of a joke had given him something a good deal better than your average One-Wing Wonder. "A photographer, were you? No wonder they turned you into an observer."
"No wonder at all," Stone agreed. "I wanted to be a pilot. They told me if I kept squawking about it they'd stick me in the infantry, and I could see how I liked that. You know what, Lieutenant Moss? I believed 'em."
"Good thing you did," Moss said. "I don't have any doubt the powers that be meant every bit of it." He kicked Stone's duffel bag, then picked it up himself. "Come on; let's get you settled in. Tomorrow, if the weather's decent, we'll get up there and you can take some pretty pictures of the enemy line. How does that sound?"
"Better than a poke in the eye with a carrot," Stone said, and both young men grinned. The observer waved toward the tents. "Lead on, Macduff!" It was a misquotation, but Moss wasn't about to ruffle any feathers by saying so.
As if the arrival of the observers had changed the squadron's luck, the weather, which had been cold and foggy and drizzly, turned something close to springlike the next morning. Of course, by the calendar spring was only a week and a half away, but, up till now, Ontario had shown no signs of paying attention to the calendar. As far as Moss could see, blizzards were liable to keep coming all the way through July.
The next morning, Percy Stone exclaimed with pleasure when he saw the camera he was to use. "Ah, one of the new models," he said. "They're the next thing to foolproof. In fact, they're the next thing to moronproof." He exclaimed again when he discovered the Wright in which he was to fly had a conical recess in which the camera would fit built into the fuselage floor in the observer's cockpit. "Someone was awake during the design work here."
Moss shrugged as he climbed into the forward cockpit. A groundcrew man spun the prop. The engine started to roar, seemingly right in his lap. He didn't like that. The slipstream blew the noise to him now, not away from him as it had in a Curtiss pusher. No help for it, though. This was the bus he had, so this was the bus he'd fly.
Fly he did, north and west. Every so often, Percy Stone would shout something at him. He caught perhaps one word in five. One of these days, somebody would have to figure out how to let pilot and observer talk back and forth and understand each other. That could be as important as perfecting the interrupter gear.
Endless hammering had finally let the Americans break out of the Niagara Peninsula. Threatened from west and east at the same time, the foe had evacuated the town of London, which had held so long and cost so many American lives. One fairly short push along the northern shore of Lake Ontario and Toronto would fall. That would bring the war in the north a long step closer to being won.
Under his flying goggles, Moss made a sour face. The limeys and Canucks, damn them, hadn't been idle while the U.S. soldiers pounded at their front door. They'd built a whole new series of lines behind the ones they'd had to abandon. Smash one and you found the next just as tough.
Moss was supposed to get Percy over the town of Berlin, south and west of Guelph, so the observer could photograph Canadian railheads and other targets for the U.S. artillery. Berlin was the name the town bore on his map, anyhow; the Canadians were calling it Empire these days. The region had been settled by Germans, a lot of whom, after the war broke out, had been resettled to Baffin Island and other such tropic climes lest they prove gladder to see Germany's American allies than the forces of the British Empire.
Both the USA and Germany had trumpeted the Canadians' inhumanity to the skies. The Canadians and the British defended themselves on the grounds of the exigencies of war. (Moss suspected the argument sold newspapers down in South America. Past that, he didn't see much point to it.)
Because the weather was so clear and fine, the Canadian landscape—what had been farming country, now chewed to pieces by the war, torn and gouged and tied down with barbed wire—lay neatly spread out below the Wright 17. And, because it was so clear and fine, the biplane and its flightmates were all too easily visible to the enemy troops down below.
Black puffs of smoke started appearing in the sky, all around Moss and Stone. Moss started stunting the aeroplane, changing course and speed at random intervals to confuse the antiaircraft gunners and throw off their aim. The gunnery—the hate, everybody on the receiving end called it—was more a nuisance than anything else, but you didn't want to think you'd stay lucky all the time.
A shell burst a scant handful of yards below the Wilbur, which bounced in the air. Percy Stone picked that moment to shout "Now!" over and over till Moss waved to show he understood. For the photographic run, the aeroplane had to fly level and straight.
Back there, the observer would be yanking the loading handle to bring the first photographic plate into position, then pulling a string every few seconds. Every time he did, the camera would expose
the plate then behind the lens. Sliding the loading handle forward and back again brought the exposed plate down into an empty changing box below and to the side of the camera body and slid a fresh one into place, ready for the next pull of the string. The camera held eighteen plates altogether.
Stone yelled something else. Moss couldn't make out the words, but he thought it was about time to go around and return to the aerodrome on a track parallel to the course they'd flown so far. When he did that, the observer stopped screaming, so he supposed he'd been right.
"Done!" Stone shouted at last, and Moss gave the Wright all the juice it had to get out of the antiaircraft fire and head for home.
The aeroplane rolled to a stop on the landing strip. Moss killed the engine. For a moment, silence seemed louder than the roar had. He needed a distinct effort of will not to shout as he said, "That wasn't so bad." After a reflective pause, he added, "Any run where they don't send their aeroplanes up after you is a pretty good one, as a matter of fact."
"Oh, I don't know," Percy Stone said. "I was sort of looking forward to the chance of shooting the tail right off my own bus." His grin was so disarming, it almost let Moss forget that that was one of the things that could happen when an observer got overeager.
Moss climbed out of the cockpit and jumped down to solid ground. Stone followed more slowly and more carefully; he had to remove the camera and the precious exposed plates from their mounting. Moss liked the precise way he did things. "This may work out pretty well," he said.
Percy Stone's grin got wider and more wicked. "Oh, darling," he breathed, "I didn't know you cared." Laughing, the two men headed off toward the photographic laboratory together.
Sylvia Enos stared at the new form the Coal Board clerk handed her. "Fill this out and bring it to Window C, over there, when you've finished it," the clerk droned, almost as mechanically as a gramophone record. Sylvia wondered how many times a day he said the exact same thing.
She wished Brigid Coneval weren't down with the grippe. But Mrs. Coneval was, which meant Sylvia had had to bring George, Jr., and Mary Jane with her to the Coal Board office of a Saturday afternoon. She was just glad the office stayed open on Saturday afternoons; if it hadn't, she would have had to try to get time off from work to fill out this new and hideous form.
She sat down in one of the hard chairs that filled the open area in front of the Coal Board office windows. George, Jr., sat down next to her. She plopped Mary Jane into the chair on the other side. "Be good, both of you, while I answer these questions," she said.
Every time she had to fill anything out, it was a race against the clock. The children would get into mischief; it was only a question of when. To delay the inevitable, she gave her son a lollipop and her daughter a bottle, then took out a fountain pen and bent over the sheet full of tiny type to find out what sort of information they wanted from her now.
COAL RATION ALLOTMENT REASSESSMENT EVALUATION SURVEY
report, the form said at the top. Sylvia sighed. It seemed to be a law—or perhaps a Coal Board policy—that every form had to be more complicated than the one it replaced. This one certainly lived up to the requirement.
She had no trouble filling out her own name or the address of the flat in which she and the children lived. Then the form asked for the names of all individuals residing at that address. That was all fine. But next it asked for the present status of each individual, and gave check-off boxes for military, civilian gainfully employed,
CIVILIAN UNEMPLOYED OTHER THAN STUDENT, STUDENT, and CHILD BELOW AGE 12.
None of those boxes fit her husband, and there was no other line on which to explain. Painful experience had taught her nothing caused more trouble than filling out a Coal Board form the wrong way. She glanced at her children. They both seemed occupied. "Wait here," she told them. "I have to go ask that man a question."
When she got to the front of the line again, the clerk who'd given her the form looked as delighted to see her as she was to see the landlord on the first of every month. "What seems to be your trouble?" he asked in a voice that said he knew she was bothering him on purpose.
She pointed to the check-off boxes. "What do I do about my husband here?" she asked. "He's a Confederate prisoner at—"
"Prisoners of war go under the Military heading," the clerk said, more exasperated than ever.
"But he's not a prisoner of war; he's a detainee," Sylvia said. "A commerce raider captured him when he was out on Georges Bank."
'Then he's a Civilian Gainfully—" The Coal Board clerk stopped. You couldn't say George Enos was gainfully employed, not when he was at a camp or wherever the Rebs kept their detainees down in North Carolina. But he wasn't unemployed, either. The clerk looked as if he hated Sylvia. He probably did, for breaking up the smooth monotony of his day. He turned and called, "Mr. Colfax, can you please come here for a moment?" Being his superior, Mr. Colfax rated politeness. Sylvia barely rated the time of day.
She turned to look back at her children. George, Jr., was teasing Mary Jane with the lollipop. She could have told him that was a mistake. Mary Jane grabbed the lollipop and stuffed it into her own mouth. George, Jr., started to scream.
"Excuse me," Sylvia said hastily. She took the lollipop away from Mary Jane, returned it to its rightful owner, swatted every available backside, and warned of measures yet more dire if the two of them didn't behave themselves. That done, she went back to the clerk. The next woman in line had come up to the window in the meanwhile, giving him an excuse to pretend she didn't exist. He seized on the excuse with alacrity.
But then Mr. Colfax, who wore not only pince-nez but a red vest to show he was someone above the common run of clerk, came out of whatever office he'd been given to prove he was above the common run of clerk. The window clerk proved willing to ignore the other woman at the window instead of Sylvia: as long as he was ignoring someone, he was happy.
Upon hearing of the ambiguity, Mr. Colfax chewed on his lower lip, which was red and meaty and made for such mastications. At last, he said, "Properly speaking, this man should not be included in the calculations, for no coal need be expended on cooking and heating water for him."
"It's not his fault he's not here," Sylvia protested. "He's a prisoner—"
"No, he is a detainee, as you yourself specified," the window clerk said, relishing his moment of petty triumph. "Fill out the form accordingly and take it to Window C. Thank you, Mr. Colfax." Mr. Colfax nodded and disappeared. Sylvia wished he were gone for good.
When she looked to her children again, Mary Jane was toddling over to take a good look at the brass cuspidor in one corner of the room. Its polished, gleaming surface was stained here and there— as was the floor around it—by the tobacco-brown spittle of men whose intentions were better than their aim. Sylvia let out a small shriek and, skirts flapping around her, managed to intercept Mary Jane just before her daughter got feet and hands in the disgusting stuff.
Gripping Mary Jane in one hand and the precious if annoying form in the other, she returned to the seat where George, Jr., waited placidly. "Why didn't you keep your sister from wandering off and getting into mischief?" she said. "You have to be my big boy till Papa gets home, you know."
"I'm sorry, Mama," he said, his face serious, his eyes big, looking so much like his father, Sylvia thought her heart would break. "I didn't see her go, I really didn't. I was looking at this bug I caught." He opened his hand. He was holding a cockroach. It jumped down and started to scurry across the floor toward any shelter it could find.
Sylvia lashed out with a foot. The cockroach crunched under the sole of her shoe. George, Jr., started to cry, but then discovered the remains of the cockroach were about as interesting as it had been alive. "Look at its guts sticking out!" he exclaimed, loudly and enthusiastically.
Heads turned, all through the Coal Board office. Sylvia felt herself flushing, and wished she could sink through the floor. "Don't play with them any more, do you hear me?" she told George, Jr. "Th
ey're dirty and nasty."
At last, she got the chance to finish filling out the form. It asked for things she didn't know, like the quality of the insulation in her flat, and for things she had a devil of a time figuring out, like the number of cubic feet the flat contained. Her education had stopped in the middle of the seventh grade, when it became obvious she needed a job more than schooling. She hadn't had to figure out the volume of anything since then, and hadn't expected to need to do it now.
At last, the dreadful task was done. By the time it was, Mary Jane was getting cranky. Sylvia carried her over to the line in front of Window C. "You stay here," she told George, Jr., "and no more bugs, not if you want to be able to sit down when we ride the trolley home." If we ever get a chance to go home, she thought wearily. But she'd got through to her son, who sat on both hands, as if to protect the area she'd threatened.
The line moved about as slowly as U.S. troops advancing on Big Lick, Virginia—Big Licking, the papers had taken to calling it. Some of the people must have made mistakes on their forms, because, faces set and angry, they had to go back to the previous window and get new copies to fill out. They had to stand in line again there, too.
When she finally reached him, the clerk who reigned supreme over Window C proved to be a fresh-faced young fellow who, for a miracle, seemed friendly and anxious to help. He smiled at Mary Jane, who stared back at him over the thumb she had in her mouth.
Then he glanced down at the coal ration form. "I don't see your husband listed here, ma'am," he said to Sylvia. "You're a widow?" He actually sounded sympathetic, which, from Sylvia's previous experience with Coal Board clerks, should have been more than enough to get him fired.
"No," she said, and explained what had happened to George.
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