“Yair,” Shumann said. “I see.—Yes,” he thought, looking quietly at the queer empennage, the blunt short cylindrical body; “I guess Ord wasn’t so surprised, at that.” Then he heard the reporter speaking to someone and he turned and saw a squat man with a shrewd Cajun face above a scrupulously clean coverall.
“This is Mr Shumann,” the reporter said, saying in a tone of bright amazement: “You mean Matt never told you? We have bought that ship.” Shumann did not wait. For a moment he watched Marchand, the note in both hands, looking at it with that baffled immobility behind which the mind flicks and darts like a terrier inside a fence.
“Yair,” Shumann thought, without grimness, “he cant pass five thousand dollars anymore than I could. Not without warning, anyway.” He went on to the aeroplane, though once or twice he looked back and saw Marchand and the reporter, the Cajun still emanating that stubborn and slowly crystallising bewilderment while the reporter talked, flapped, before him with an illusion of being held together only by the clothes he wore; once he even heard the reporter:
“Sure, you could telephone to Feinman and catch him. But for God’s sake dont let anybody overhear how Matt stuck us for five thousand bucks for the damn crate. He promised he wouldn’t tell.” But there was no telephoning done apparently, because almost at once (or so it seemed to Shumann) the reporter and Marchand were beside him, the reporter quiet now, watching him now with that bright attention.
“Let’s get it out where we can look at it,” Shumann said. They rolled it out onto the apron, where it squatted again, seemed to. It had none of the waspwaisted trimness of the ones at the airport. It was blunt, a little thickbodied, almost sluggish looking; its lightness when moved by hand seemed curiously paradoxical. For a good minute the reporter and Marchand watched Shumann stand looking at it with thoughtful gravity. “All right,” he said at last. “Let’s wind her up.” Now the reporter spoke, leaning lightly and slightly just off balance like a ragged penstaff dropped pointfirst into the composition apron:
“Listen. You said last night maybe it was the distribution of the weight; you said how maybe if we could shift the weight somehow while it was in the air that maybe you could find——” Later (almost as soon as Shumann was out of sight the reporter and Marchand were in Marchand’s car on the road to the village, where the reporter hired a cab, scrambling into it even before he had asked the price and yelling out of his gaunt and glarefixed face, “Hell, no! Not New Valois! Feinman Airport!”) he lived and relived the blind timeless period during which he lay on his stomach in the barrel, clutching the two bodymembers, with nothing to see but Shumann’s feet on the rudderpedals and the movement of the aileron balancerod and nothing to feel but terrific motion—not speed and not progress—just blind furious motion like a sealed force trying to explode the monococque barrel in which he lay from the waist down on his stomach, leaving him clinging to the bodymembers in space; he was still thinking, “Jesus, maybe we are going to die and all it is is a taste like sour hot salt in your mouth” even while looking out the car window at the speeding marsh and swamp through which they skirted the city, thinking with a fierce and triumphant conviction of immortality, “We flew it! We flew it!” Now the airport, the forty miles accomplished before he knew it, what with his skull still cloudy with the light tagends of velocity and speed like the drifting feathers from a shot bird so that he had never become conscious of the sheer inertia of dimension, space, distance through which he had had to travel. He was thrusting the five dollar bill at the driver before the car began to turn into the plaza and he was out of it before it had stopped, running toward the hangar, probably not even aware that the first race was in progress. Wildfaced, gaunt and sunkeneyed from lack of sleep and from strain, his clothes ballooning about him, he ran into the hangar and on to where Jiggs stood at the workbench with a new bottle of polish and a new tin of paste open before him, shining the boots, working now with tedious and intent concern at the scar on the instep of the right one. “Did he—” the reporter cried.
“Yair, he landed it, all right,” Jiggs said. “He used all the field, though. Jesus, I thought for a while he was going to run out of airport before he even cut the gun; when he stopped you couldn’t have dropped a match between the prop and the seawall. They are all upstairs now, holding the caucus.”
“It’ll qualify itself!” the reporter cried. “I told him that. I may not know airplanes but I know sewage board Jews!”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Anyway, he wont have to make but two landings with it. And he’s already made one of them.”
“Two?” the reporter cried; now he glared at Jiggs with more than exultation: with ecstasy. “He’s already made two! We made one before he left Ord’s!”
“We?” Jiggs said. With the boot and the rag poised he blinked painfully at the reporter with the one good hot bright eye. “We?”
“Yair; him and me! He said how it was the weight, that maybe if we could just shift the weight somehow while it was in the air, and he said Are you afraid? and I said Hell yes. But not if you aint, because Matt gave me an hour once, or maybe if I had had more than an hour I wouldn’t have been. So Marchand helped us take the seat out and we rigged another one so there would be room under it for me and I slid back into the fuselage because it aint got any crossbracing, it’s mon—mon—”
“Monococque,” Jiggs said. “Jesus Christ, do you mean——”
“Yair. And him and Marchand rigged the seat again and he showed me where to hold on and I could just see his heels and that was all; I couldn’t tell; yair, after a while I knew we were flying but I couldn’t tell forward nor backward or anything because, Jesus, I just had one hour with Matt and then he cut the gun and then I could hear him, he said quiet, Jesus, we might have been standing on the ground; he said ‘Now slide back. Easy. But hold tight.’ And then I was hanging just by my hands; I wasn’t even touching the floor of it at all; Jesus, I was thinking ‘Well, here it is then; it will be tough about that race this afternoon’; I didn’t even know we were on the ground again until I found out it was him and Marchand lifting the seat out and Marchand saying ‘Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn’ and him looking at me and the bastard crate standing there quiet as one of them photographs on Grandlieu Street, and him looking at me and then he says, ‘Would you go up again?’ and I said ‘Yes. You want to go now?’ and he said, ‘Let’s get her on over to the field and qualify’.”
“Sweet Jesus Christ,” Jiggs said.
“Yair,” the reporter cried. “It was just weight distribution: him and Marchand rigged up a truck inner tube full of sand on a pulley so he can——And put the seat back and even if they see the end of the cable they wouldn’t——Because the only ship in it that can beat him is Ord and the purse aint but two thousand and Ord dont need it, he is only in it so New Valois folks can see him fly the Ninety-Two once and he aint going to beat that fifteen-thousand-dollar ship to death just to——”
“Here; here,” Jiggs said. “You’re going to blow all to pieces in a minute. Smoke a cigarette; aint you got some?” The reporter fumbled the cigarettes out at last, though it was Jiggs who took two from the pack and struck the match while the reporter stooped to it, trembling. The dazed spent wild look was still on his face but he was quieter now.
“So they were all out to meet him, were they?”
“Jesus, did they,” Jiggs said. “And Ord out in front; he recognised the ship as soon as it come in sight; Jesus, I bet he recognised it before Roger even recognised the airport, and by the time he landed you would have thought he was Lindbergh. And him sitting there in the cockpit and looking at them and Ord hollering at him and then they all come back up the apron like Roger was a kidnapper or something and went into the administration building and a minute later the microphone begun to holler for the inspector, what’s his—”
“Sales,” the reporter said. “It’s licensed; they cant stop him.”
“Sales can ground it, though,” Jiggs said.
“Yair
.” The reporter was already turning, moving. “But Sales aint nothing but a Federal officer; Feinman is a Jew and on the sewage board.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“What?” the reporter cried, glaring, gaunt, apparently having already rushed on and out of his precarious body so that only the shell glared back at Jiggs. “What? What’s he holding this meet for? What did he—do you think maybe he built this airport just for a smooth place for airplanes to land on?” He went on, not running yet but fast; as he hurried up the apron the aeroplanes overtook and passed him and banked around the field pylon and faded on; he did not even look at them. Then suddenly he saw her, leading the little boy by the hand, emerge from the crowd about the gate to intercept him, wearing now a clean linen dress under the trenchcoat, and a hat, the brown hat of the first evening. He stopped. His hand went into his pocket and into his face came the expression bright, quiet, almost smiling as she walked fast up to him, staring at him with pale and urgent intensity.
“What is it?” she said. “What is this you have got him into?” He looked down at her with that expression not yearning nor despair but profound tragic and serene like in the eyes of bird dogs.
“It’s all right,” he said. “My signature is on the note too. It will hold. I am going in right now to testify; that’s all that’s holding them; that’s all that Ord has to——” He drew out the nickel and gave it to the boy.
“What?” she said. “Note? Note? The ship, you idiot!”
“Oh.” He smiled down at her. “The ship. We flew it, tested it over there. We made a field hop before we—”
“We?”
“Yes. I went with him. I laid on the floor in the tail, so we could find out where the weight ought to be to pass the burble. That’s all it was. We have a sandbag rigged now on a cable so he can let it slide back. It’s all right.”
“All right?” she said. “Good God, what can you know about it? Did he say it was all right?”
“Yes. He said last night he could land it. I knew he could. And now he wont need to make but one more——” She stared at him, the eyes pale cold and urgent, at the face worn, dreamy, and peaceful in the soft bright sun; again the aeroplanes came in and snored on and away. Then he was interrupted; it was the amplifyer; all the amplifyers up and down the apron began to call his name, telling the stands, the field, the land and lake and air, that he was wanted in the superintendent’s office at once. “There it is,” he said. “Yair. I knew that the note would be the only thing that Ord could.……That was why I signed it too. And dont you worry; all I need to do is walk in and say Yes, that’s my signature. And dont you worry. He can fly it. He can fly anything. I used to think that Matt Ord was the best pilot alive, but now I——” The amplifyer began to repeat itself. It faced him; it seemed to stare straight at him while it roared his name deliberately as though he had to be summoned not out of the living world of population but evoked peremptory and repetitive out of the air itself; the one in the rotundra was just beginning again when he entered; the sound followed him through the door and across the anteroom, though beyond that it did not reach, not into the board room of yesterday where now Ord and Shumann alone occupied the hard chairs since they were ushered in a half hour ago and sat down and faced the men behind the table and Shumann saw Feinman for the first time, sitting not in the center but at one end of the table where the announcer had sat yesterday, his suit, double-breasted still, tan instead of gray beneath the bright splash of the carnation. He alone wore his hat; it appeared to be the smallest object about him; from beneath it his dark smooth face began at once to droop into folds of flesh which, constricted for the instant by his collar, swelled and rolled again beneath the tight creases of his coat. On the table one hand bearing a goldclamped ruby held a burning cigar. He did not even glance at Shumann and Ord; he was looking at Sales, the inspector—a square bald man with a blunt face which by ordinary would be quite pleasant, though not now—who was saying bluntly:
“Because I can ground it. I can forbid it to fly.”
“You mean, you can forbid anybody to fly it, dont you?” Feinman said.
“Put it that way if you want to,” Sales said.
“Let’s say, put it that way for the record,” another voice said—a young man, sleek, in horn rim glasses, sitting just back of Feinman. He was Feinman’s secretary; he spoke now with a kind of silken insolence, like the pampered intelligent hateridden eunuchmountebank of an eastern despot: “Colonel Feinman is, even before a public servant, a lawyer.”
“Yair; lawyer,” Feinman said. “Maybe country lawyer to Washington. Let me get this straight. You’re a government agent. All right. We have had our crops regimented and our fisheries regimented and even our money in the bank regimented. All right. I still dont see how they did it but they did, and so we are used to that. If he was trying to make his living out of the ground and Washington come in and regimented him, all right. We might not understand it any more than he did, but we would say all right. And if he was trying to make his living out of the river and the government come in and regimented him, we would say all right too. But do you mean to tell me that Washington can come in and regiment a man that’s trying to make his living out of the air? Is there a crop reduction in the air too?” They—the others about the table (three of them were reporters)—laughed. They laughed with a kind of sudden and loud relief, as though they had been waiting all the time to find out just how they were supposed to listen and now they knew. Only Sales and Shumann and Ord did not laugh; then they noticed that the secretary was not laughing either and that he was already speaking, seeming to slide his silken voice into the laughter and stop it as abruptly as a cocaine needle in a nerve:
“Yes. Colonel Feinman is lawyer enough (perhaps Mr Sales will add, country enough) to ask even a government official to show cause. As the colonel understands it, this airplane bears a license which Mr Sales approved himself. Is that true, Mr Sales?” For a moment Sales did not answer. He just looked at the secretary grimly.
“Because I dont believe it is safe to fly,” he said. “That’s the cause.”
“Ah,” the secretary said. “For a moment I almost expected Mr Sales to tell us that it would not fly; that it had perhaps walked over here from Blaisedell. Then all we would need to say would be ‘Good; we will not make it fly; we will just let it walk around the pylons during the race this afternoon’——” Now they did laugh, the three reporters scribbling furiously. But it was not for the secretary: it was for Feinman. The secretary seemed to know this; while he waited for it to subside his unsmiling insolent contempt touched them all face by face. Then he spoke to Sales again. “You admit that it is licensed, that you approved it yourself—meaning, I take it, that it is registered at Washington as being fit and capable of discharging the function of an airplane, which is to fly. Yet you later state that you will not permit it to fly because it is not capable of discharging the function for which you yourself admit having approved it—in simple language for us lawyers, that it cannot fly. Yet Mr Ord has just told us that he flew it in your presence. And Mr——” he glanced down; the pause was less than pause—“Shumann states that he flew it once at Blaisedell before witnesses, and we know that he flew it here because we saw him. We all know that Mr Ord is one of the best (we New Valoisians believe the best) pilots in the world, but dont you think it barely possible, barely I say, that the man who has flown it twice where Mr Ord has flown it but once.……Wouldn’t this almost lead one to think that Mr Ord has some other motive for not wanting this airplane to compete in this race——”
“Yair,” Feinman said. He turned to look at Ord. “What’s the matter? Aint this airport good enough for your ships? Or aint this race important enough for you? Or do you just think he might beat you? Aint you going to use the airplane you broke the record in? Then what are you afraid of?” Ord glared from face to face about the table, then at Feinman again.
“Why do you want this ship in there this afternoon? What
is it? I’d lend him the money, if that’s all it is.”
“Why?” Feinman said. “Aint we promised these folks out there—” he made a jerking sweep with the cigar—“a series of races? Aint they paying their money in here to see them? And aint it the more airplanes they will have to look at the better they will think they got for the money? And why should he want to borrow money from you when he can maybe earn it at his job where he wont have to pay it back or even the interest? Now, let’s settle this business.” He turned to Sales. “The ship is licensed, aint it?” After a moment Sales said,
“Yes.” Feinman turned to Ord.
“And it will fly, wont it?” Ord looked at him for a long moment too.
“Yes,” he said. Now Feinman turned to Shumann.
“Is it dangerous to fly?” he said.
“They all are,” Shumann said.
“Well, are you afraid to fly it?” Shumann looked at him. “Do you expect it to fall with you this afternoon?”
“If I did I wouldn’t take it up,” Shumann said. Suddenly Ord rose; he was looking at Sales.
“Mac,” he said, “this aint getting anywhere. I will ground the ship myself.” He turned to Shumann. “Listen, Roger——”
“On what grounds, Mr Ord?” the secretary said.
“Because it belongs to me. Is that grounds enough for you?”
“When an authorised agent of your corporation has accepted a legal monetary equivalent for it and surrendered the machine?”
“But they are not good for the note. I know that. I was a damn stickstraddler myself until I got a break. Why, damn it, one of the names on it is admitted to not be signed by the owner of it. And listen; yair; I dont even know whether Shumann did the actual signing; whoever signed it signed it before I saw it or even before Marchand saw it. See?” He glared at the secretary, who looked at him in turn with his veiled contemptuous glance.