Canopy cover removed, fuel checked, preflight inspection done. There was dust on the wings.
I should hire someone to dust the airplanes, I thought, and snorted in disgust. What a lazy fop I have become-hire somebody to dust my airplanes!
I used to be intimate with one airplane, now there's a tin harem; I'm the sheikh come to visit now and then. The Twin Cessna, the Widgeon, the Meyers, the Moth, the Rapide, the Lake amphibian, the Pitts Special . . . once a month, if then, do I start their engines. Only the T-33 had recent time in its logbook, flying back from California.
Careful, Richard, I thought. To be distant from the airplane one flies is not to invite longevity.
I slid into the baby-jet's cockpit, stared at an instrument panel turned unfamiliar with time.
Used to be, I spent every day with the Fleet, crawled upside-down in the cockpit reaching hay off the floor, streaked my sleeves with oil cleaning the engine and setting the valves just so, tightening cylinder hold-down bolts. Today, I'm as intimate with my many airplanes as I am with my many women.
What would Leslie think about that, she who values everything? Weren't we intimate, she and I? I wish she were here.
"Tailpipe clear!" I called the warning from habit, and pressed the start switch.
The igniters fired TSIK! TSIK! TSIK!, and at last a rumble of jet fuel lighting off in burner cans. Tailpipe temperature swept up its gauge, engine rpm turned round on its tiny dial.
So much is habit. Once we learn an airplane, our hands and eyes know how to make it run long after our minds have forgotten. Had someone stood at the cockpit and asked how to start the engine, I couldn't have said . . . only after my hands finished the starting sequence could I have explained what they had done.
The rough perfume of burning jetfuel sifted into the cockpit ... memories of a thousand other flights sifted along with it. Continuity. This day is part of a lifetime spent mostly flying.
You know another meaning for flying, Richard? Escaping.
Running away. What am I escaping, and what am I finding, these days?
I taxied to the runway, saw a few cars stop at the airport fence to watch. There wasn't much for them to see. The jet was so small that without the airshow smoke system on, it would be out of sight before it reached the far end of the runway.
Takeoff is critical, remember. Lightly on the control stick, Richard, feather lightly. Accelerate to 85 knots, then lift the nosewheel one inch and let the airplane fly itself off. Force it off and you are dead.
Pointed down the white runway centerline, canopy closed and locked, I pressed full throttle and the little machine crept forward. With its tiny engine, the jet gathered speed about as fast as an Indian oxcart. Halfway down the runway it was moving, but still asleep ... 60 knots was far too slow to fly. A long time later we were going 85 knots, wide open, and most of the runway was behind us.
I eased the nosewheel off the concrete, and a few seconds later we were airborne, barely, low and sluggish, off the end of the runway, straining to clear the trees.
Wheels up.
Mossy branches flashed ten feet below. Airspeed up to 100 knots, 120 knots, 150 knots and at last the machine woke up and I began to relax in the cockpit. At 180 the little thing would do anything I wanted it to do. All it needed was airspeed and free sky and it was a delight.
How important was flying to me! It stood for all I loved. Flight seems magic, but it's a learned, practiced skill with a learnable lovable partner. Principles to know, laws to fol-
low, disciplines that lead, curiously enough, to freedom. So much like music, is flying! Leslie would love it.
Away off airways to the north a line of cumulus built toward thunderstorms. Ten minutes and we were skating on their smooth-dome tops, off the edge into thin air, two miles down to the wilderness.
When I was a kid I'd hide in the weeds and watch clouds, see another me perched way up high on just such an edge as this, waving a flag to the boy in the grass, shouting HI DICKIE! and never being heard for the height. Tears in his eyes, he wanted so much to live one minute on a cloud.
The jet turned at the notion, climbed, then shot toward the cloudtop, an Austrian down a ski-jump. We plunged our wings briefly into the hard mist, pulled up and rolled. Sure enough, dwindling behind us, a curling white flag of cloud to mark the jump. Hi Dickie! I thought, louder than a shout. Hi Dickie crosstime to the kid on the ground thirty years before. Hold your passion for the sky, kiddo, and I promise: what you love will find a way to sweep you up from the earth, high into its joyful scary answers for every question you can ask.
A level rocket, we were, cloudscape changing highspeed around us.
Did he hear?
Do I remember hearing then the promise I just this minute gave the kid watching from the grass of a different year? Maybe. Not the words, but the dead-sure knowing that I would someday fly.
We slowed, rolled inverted, plunged straight down for a long way. What a thought! What if we could talk between us, from one time to another, Richard-now encouraging Dickie-then, touching not in words but in way-deep
rememberings of adventures yet to be. Like psychic radio, transmitting wishes, hearing intuitions.
How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes with the us-we-will-become! How much could we say to us-we-were!
Smoothly smoothly, with the gentlest touch of one finger on the control stick, the little airplane eased out of its dive. At redline airspeed one does nothing sudden with an aircraft, lest it become a puff of separate parts stopped mid-flight, fluttering here and there into swamps.
Lower clouds shot past like bursts of peaceful flak; a lonely road flicked below and was gone.
Such an experiment that would be! To say hello to all the other Richards flown out ahead of me in time, to find a way to listen to what they'd say! And the alternate me's in alternate futures, the ones who made different decisions along the way, who turned left at corners I turned right, what would they have to tell me? Is their life better or not? How would they change it, knowing what they know now? And none of this, I thought, is to mention the Richards in other lifetimes, in the far futures and the far pasts of the Now. If we all live Now, why can't we communicate?
By the time the airport was in sight, the little jet had forgiven me my neglects and we were friends again. It was harder to forgive myself, but so it usually is.
We slowed and entered the landing pattern, that same pattern that I had seen the day I got off the bus and walked to the airport. Can I see him now, walking there with his bedroll and news he was a millionaire? What do I have to say to him? Oh, my, what do I have to say!
As easy to land as it was tricky to take off, the BD-5 hushed down final approach, touched its miniature wheels
to the ground, rolled long and straight to the last taxiway. Then primly she turned and in a minute we were back at the hangar, engine-fire off, turbine spinning slower and slower and stopped at last.
I patted her canopy-bow and thanked her for the flight, the custom of any pilot who's flown longer than he or she thinks they've deserved.
The other airplanes watched enviously. They wanted to fly, too; needed to fly. Here the poor Widgeon, oil leaking from the nose-case of her right engine. The seal had dried from being still for so long.
Could I listen to airplane's futures, as well as my own? Had I practiced and known her future then, I would not have felt sad. She would become a television-star airplane, opening each episode of a wildly popular TV series, flying to a beautiful island, landing on the water, taxiing to dock sparkling and pretty, no oil leaks anywhere. And she couldn't have that future without the present she lived right now, dusty in my hangar after flying her few hundred hours with me.
So was there some future ahead for me that could not possibly happen without my first having lived this free lonely present.
I climbed the stairs back to the house, absorbed in the possibility of contact with the other aspects of me, Richards-before and Richar
ds-yet-to-be, the I's of other lifetimes, other planets, other hypnotic space-times.
Would any of them have looked for a soulmate? Would any of them have found her?
Intuition-the future/past always-me-whispered back, that moment on the stairs:
twenty-three
I. OPENED the cupboard, took out a soup-can and some noodles, planned me a fine Italian lunch in a minute. May not have been quite Italian. But hot and nourishing of the kind of inquiring I had to do.
Look around you this moment, Richard. What you see, is it the kind of life you most wish to have?
It's awfully lonely, I thought, putting the soup in a pan on the stove, forgetting to turn on the fire. I miss Leslie.
There was a rattling of armor, and I sighed.
Don't worry, I thought, don't bother; I know what you are going to say, I cannot fault your logic. Togetherness is drab destruction. I do not miss Leslie, I suppose. I miss what she represents for me at this time.
The warrior left.
There came another idea in its place, a thought altogether
kind: The opposite of loneliness, Richard, it's not togetherness. It is intimacy.
The word floated loose, a silver bubble cut free from the floor of a dark sea.
That!
Is what I miss!
My many-bodied perfect woman is as warm as ice in the freezer. She's communication without caring; she's sex without love; she's friendship without commitment.
Just as she can't hurt or be hurt, so is she incapable of loving or being loved. She is incapable of intimacy. And intimacy . . . might that be as important to me as freedom itself? Is that why I stayed seven weeks with Leslie, when three days were too much to spend with any other woman?
I left the soup cold on the stove, found a chair and sat, knees pulled under my chin, looking out the window over the lake. The cumulus were full cumulonimbus now, blocking sunlight. Florida in summertime, you can set your clock by the thunderstorms.
Twenty minutes later I stared into a wall of rain, barely noticing.
I had somehow talked today with Dickie, so far in my past; somehow I had gotten a message through to him. How can I get in touch with a future Richard? What does he know about intimacy? Has he learned love?
Surely the other aspects of who we are, they must be closer friends than anyone . . . who can be closer to us than ourselves in other bodies, ourselves in spirit-forms? If we're each of us spun about an inner golden thread, which strand is it in me that runs to all the others?
I went heavier and heavier, sinking down into the chair and at the same time rising above it. What a curious feeling,
I thought. Do not fight it, do not move, do not think. Let it take you where it will. It would help so much, to meet . . .
I stepped from a bridge of quiet silver light into a huge arena, empty seats curving away in semicircles, vacant aisles like spokes raying out from centerstage. Not on the stage but near it, a single figure sat, chin on knees. I must have made some sound, for he looked up, smiled, unfolded, waved hi.
"Not only punctual," he said, "you're early!"
I couldn 't see the face clearly, but the man was about my height, dressed in what looked like a snowmobile suit, a black one-piece nylon coverall, bright yellow and orange across the chest and down the sleeves. Zippered pockets, zippered leather boots. Familiar.
"Sure enough," I told him back, casual as could be. "Doesn't look like the show will be starting for a bit." What was this place?
He laughed. "The show is started. Just now got its wheels up. Do you mind if we get out of here?"
"Fine with me," I said.
On the grass of the park outside the arena was a spidery little aircraft that might have weighed two hundred pounds with its pockets full. It had a high wing covered in orange and yellow nylon, tall bright rudders at each wingtip, same-painted canard elevator perched on aluminum tubes ahead of the seats, a small pusher engine mounted behind. I knew a lot of airplanes, but never had I seen anything like this.
It wasn 't a snowmobile suit he was wearing, it was a flight suit, to match his airplane.
"Left seat, if you want." How courteous, how trusting of him, to offer me the pilot's place!
"I'll take the right," I said, and threaded my way into the passenger-spot. A snug fit, because everything about the airplane was small.
"Whatever. You can fly it from either side. Standard controls, but you see you've got no rudder pedals. It's all in the stick. Sensitive elevator, that canard. Pretend it's as sensitive as a helicopter cyclic stick, and you 'II have it down."
He called the propeller clear, reached to an overhead handle, pulled once and the engine was running, quiet as an electric fan. He turned to me. "Ready?"
"Go," I said.
He pushed forward on a throttle smaller than the baby jet's, and with no more sound than a softly rising breeze, the machine lunged ahead. In fifty feet it was airborne, tilted back, climbing like a big-engine uphill racer. Ground fell away, a wide green floor cut loose from us, falling clear a thousand feet per minute. He touched the control stick forward, eased the throttle back till the fan whisked quietly behind us in the wind. He took his hands off the controls, motioned that I could fly the airplane. "You've got it."
"Thank you."
It was like flying a parachute, except we weren 't dropping out of the sky. We were moving perhaps thirty miles per hour, judging by the wind, in a little delight of a machine more eight-dollar lawn-chair than airplane. Without walls or floor, it was so open-cockpit that biplanes were locked tombs, compared. I turned the
airplane, and climbed. It was as sensitive as he had warned.
"Can we shut the engine down? Can we soar this thing like a sailplane?"
"Sure." He touched a switch on the throttle and the engine stopped. We glided noiseless through what must have been rising air . . . there was no altitude loss that I could measure.
"What a perfect little airplane! This is lovely! How do I get one of these for my own?"
He looked at me strangely. "Haven't you guessed, Richard?"
"No."
"Do you know who I am?"
"Sort of." I felt a brush affright.
"Just for the fun of it," he said, "walk through the wall between what you know and what you dare to say. Do that, and tell me whose airplane this is and who you 're flying with."
I tilted the control stick to the right, and the airplane banked smoothly, turned toward a cumulus at the top of its thermal. It was second nature, engine off, to look for lift even though the featherweight machine wasn't losing height.
"If I had to guess, I would say that this airplane is mine from the future, and you're the fellow that I'm going to be." I dared not look at him.
"Not bad," he said. "I'd guess the same."
"You 'd guess? Don't you know?"
"It gets complicated if you think about it much. I'm one of your futures, you're one of my pasts. I think you're the Richard Bach in the midst of the money-
storm, aren't you? The new celebrity author? Nine airplanes, isn't it, and a flawless idea you've designed for a perfect woman? You're straight-arrow faithful to her, and still she leaves you cold?"
We touched the lift of a thermal with the right wing, and I banked steeply into it.
"Don't wrap it too tight," he said. "It's got such a small turning radius anyway, just a little bank will keep you in the lift."
"OK." This joy of an airplane would be mine! And he would be me. What things he must know!
"Look," I said, "I've got some questions. How far in my future are you? Twenty years?"
"More like five. Seems like fifty. I could save you forty-nine if you'd listen. There's the difference between us. I've got the answers you need, but there's not a prayer you'll listen before you get yourself flattened by the Great Steamroller of Experience."
My heart sank. "You think I'm scared of what you'll say, you're sure I won't hear you?"
"Will you?"
"Who can
I trust more than you?" I said. "Of course I'll listen!"
"Listen you might; act you won't. We get to meet now because we're both curious, but I doubt you'll let me help."
"I will!"
"You won't," he said. "It's like this airplane. In your time, it doesn't have a name, it hasn't been invented yet. When it is invented, it'll be called an ultralight, and it's going to revolutionize sport aviation. But you're not going to buy this machine finished, Richard, or hire anybody to
build it for you. You're going to build it yourself: piece by piece, Step One, Step Two, Step Three. Same with your answers, exactly the same. You can't buy them finished, you won't take them if I give them to you free, if I tell you word for word what they are."
I knew he was wrong. "You've forgotten," I said, "how fast I learn! Give me an answer and watch what I do with it!"
He tapped the control stick, a signal that he wanted to fly our kite for a while. We had gained a thousand feet in the thermal, nearly to cloudbase. Fields meadows forests hills rivers away down below us, lime and rolling velvet. No roads. Softfuffling whisper, the gentlest of winds about us while we glided upward.
With the calm smile of a gambler calling a bluff: "You want to find your soulmate?"
"Yes! Since always, you know that!"
"Your armor," he said. "It shields you from any woman who would destroy you, sure enough. But unless you let it go, it will shield you as well from the only one who can love you, nourish you, save you from your own protection. There is one perfect woman for you. She is singular, not plural The answer you're looking for is to give up your Freedom and your Independence and to marry Leslie Parrish."
It was well he had taken the controls before telling me.
"You're saying . . . WHAT?" I choked on the thought. "You . . . You're saying . . . MARRY? I cannot possibly . . . Do you know what I think about marriage? Don't you know I say in lectures that after War and
Organized Religion, Marriage brings more unhapp . . . you think I don't believe that? Give up my FREEDOM!! My INDEPENDENCE? You are telling me that my answer is to GET MARRIED? Are you ... I mean . . . WHAT?"