by Richard Bach
Starter Switch—START
and the welcome twisting blue-smoke thunder.
He took off watching the weather ahead on his route eastward, white clouds and some dark ones, wondering if he should have filed an instrument flight plan into what was ahead.
Instrument flight rules, though, don't allow quite the mental autopilot, the room for reflection on one's journey that visual flight rules do. He had chosen VFR, staying clear of clouds, because it was more fluid, more fun than instrument rules, which is precision flying by the numbers when you can't see outside.
Charles Lindbergh didn't have to fly charted airways from New York to Paris in 1929, he thought. Lindbergh made his own airways.
He leveled at a comfortable middle altitude, fivethousand five, smooth eagle-path S-turns around the clouds, hay-quilt farmland below, sky-quilt heaven above. Room to climb, room to glide, room to weave east between Mississippi cotton-puffs.
Somebody had to decide to become that person, he thought. It wasn't automatic welded has-to-be. Lindbergh when he started flying was the same unknown as every other student pilot in aviation. He had to decide, choice by choice, to become the man who changed the world with his airplane.
Oil pressure's good, oil temperature, fuel pressure. Exhaust gas temp, fuel flow, engine revolutions, manifold pressure.
Lindbergh had to take every step, attitude-choicedesire thousands of times over, to herd ten trillion imagons first into the likeness of five hundred dollars cash, hammer that next into the shape of a surplus Curtiss Jenny biplane, bend that into a life barnstorming, flight instructing, carrying mail, wondering, as he flew, whether the way across the Atlantic Ocean first time would be alone, in a small airplane instead of a big one.
Suggestions you can do this, suggestions you can't, he had to choose which, weed some, nourish others. When he picked you-can, he had to see the future in his mind (exhilaron clouds swirling, blossoming outward): a plane would need to be built, something like the M-2 mail plane from Claude Ryan, for instance, but with just one seat, all the rest not mail but fuel (excytons exploding)!
He must have thought it out in the air, barnstorming, his inner co-pilot flying stunts and passengers: let's say a hundred miles per hour, that'd be thirty-five hours to reach Paris; thirty-five hours flying at, say, twelve gallons per hour would be . . . four-twenty, say five hundred gallons of fuel. At six pounds per gallon, that's three thousand pounds of fuel. Have to locate the fuel on the center of gravity so the airplane stays in balance, full tanks or empty. A flying gas tank, it would have to be. It's possible, it's possible . . .
Could Lindbergh hear the hiss and crackle of conceptons over the roar of his engine?
Same time he was getting serious about the airplane, he was also gambling he might become that Charles Lindbergh lost at sea in a crazy attempt to fly a single-engine airplane, a monoplane, mind you, when everybody knows you need a multi-engine biplane for any such trip. To Paris on one engine—madman, that's who he was, and now there's one less Charles what'shis-name in the air.
To keep from becoming the Lindbergh of that future, the air mail pilot must have thought, my airplane will need a reliable engine, perhaps the new Wright Whirlwind . . .
Choice by choice, ideas became imajons became lines on paper became welded steel tubing covered in fabric became Spirit of Saint Louis.
Time to climb, Jamie Forbes decided, as the clouds stormed up into walls ahead.
Mixture full rich, propeller full increase, throttle full open. So went Jamie Forbes’ day, thoughtful, and a climb to twelve-thousand five before he topped the clouds, lowered his dark-tint helmet visor against the bright.
Somebody had to decide to become the Charles Lindbergh who accepted his own suggestions, hypnotized himself to do what he wanted to do and by the way make history. The somebody who made that decision, of all the people in the world, was the guy inside Charles Lindbergh's mind.
What suggestions am I choosing to accept, Jamie thought, what have I decided to change? Who have I decided to be?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Off to the south, cloud tops built up way high, twenty-five thousand feet, he guessed.
I can climb another five thousand if I have to, he thought. If there's breaks in the clouds, I can spiral down beneath cloudbase. And I can file instruments if I need to.
He'd set a backup flight plan the night before. One radio call and he could go not anywhere he pleased but “As filed,” by agreement with the air traffic control center: he'd fly centerline along the airways to Marianna, Florida, through the clouds instead of around them, in case the sky got stuffed with fog.
That was Plan B. Meanwhile he cruised along at twelve-five in clear air, dodging cloud tops.
Blacksmyth the Great de-hypnotized himself right out of a body. I don't want that. I like the game too much right here; I like my life instructing, flying airplanes.
And when Sam un-mortalized himself from one consensus belief, didn't he just appear again in another, some suggestion of the Afterlife Games?
Whole new sets of opportunities, then, to accept or decline—free to believe we're spirit now, not subject to mortal limits, laws that were unbreakable an hour ago.
The convictions of others don't affect my life, he thought, until they're my convictions, too.
Soon as we're convinced we're spirit, we float through walls, invulnerable to beliefs of accident storm disease age war. We can't be buried, shot, drowned, crushed, blown up, tortured, poisoned, drugged, chained, broken, suffocated, run over, infected, trapped, lashed, electrocuted, jailed, torn, beaten, hanged, burned, guillotined, starved, operated on manipulated or messed with by any person or agency or government on Earth or galaxy or universe or law of spacetime.
Here's the downside: the minute spirits don't accept our suggestions, they can't use our playground. Drift through it, of course they can. Use it as mortals do, for schooling? Not Allowed.
What Sam did, what spirits do, is believe themselves graduated from spacetime, reflecting on the values they learned and the lessons they missed, last lifetime.
I'll make that choice when I get there, the pilot thought. For now, there's easier things to learn.
The altimeter's not real, for instance, that suggestion-of-an-instrument pointing twelve-thousand six. The altimeter's my belief in my assumptions, manifest as a disk of what looks like tin and glass, white pointers against a blackground. It isn't what it seems. It's my own imajons, polished to look like an altimeter.
The instrument's not real, not the cockpit, not the airplane, not my body, not the planet, nor the whole physical universe. Suggestions. Shifting clouds of thought-particles, following the trail of what I choose to think is so.
What is real?
He laughed at himself, two miles in the air. Till yesterday he was happy just to survive as a working flight instructor. Suggestions and hypnoses and particles of thought that turn the world solid as rock-particles turn stone, that was for philosophers dusting ivory towers with feather-brooms.
Now I'm thinking rock is hypnotized suggestions and wondering that if rock isn't real, what is?
What did you do to me, Blacksmyth? Things go along nice and normal for fifty years then you meet some innocent suggestion—the world isn't what you think it is—and WHOCK everything changes!
Over the nose, up ahead, he could see the clouds breaking from solid undercast to broken. Holes in the layer. Good.
That's right, he thought, everything changes. Live with it.
He eased the nose down, airspeed turning up from 185 knots to 200.
What's real is what doesn't change. Don't have to be a spaceship designer to know that; you can be a simple airplane pilot. If something was real but isn't now, then it isn't real anymore, and the question circles back, “What is real and stays real forever?”
He banked the airplane around a cloud top, rolling mist hissing by the wingtip.
Something's real. God, whatever God is. Love?
Don't need
to know what's forever this minute; I'll find that out someday.
What matters now? If I don't have to de-hypnotize myself off the planet, Sam Black style, I can re-hypnotize me, instead. I can choose which trance I want to live. Long term, I can suggest myself into any heaven or hell I want to believe, right here on Earth.
Fuel state, one hour forty remaining. Clouds scattered to broken, Marianna airport's made. He trimmed the nose down, airspeed sliding up to 210.
What's that going to be, he wondered, what do I want to live? It's going to be a safe landing at the end of this flight, one more hop to home, and then . . .
And then what?
Long silence, in his mind.
Anything I want, whatever I imajon would be fun to live.
What's best, happiest?
I pretty well have it now. Great marriage, good students to teach, airplanes to fly, surviving pretty well. There's heaven enough.
So after all this change, all of a sudden I think I know how the world works, what's the change in me?
He raised his helmet visor, looked in the mirror on the canopy bow and saw himself there, not much different from this morning.
Knowing is the change. Somebody spends his life on the ground, one day he goes to flight school, comes out a licensed pilot. What's different? He can't tell, looking in a mirror, but now he has the ability to perform what he used to call miracles.
So do I, thought Jamie Forbes. So do I.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He bought a sandwich at the Marianna airport, and a pint of milk. After the airplane was fueled, truck driven away, he sat on the ground under the wing and unwrapped the sandwich.
I know how it works. I can change whatever seems to be whenever I want to change it. What shall I change, what suggestions shall I give myself, shall I accept, take them for truth in my trance and watch the world shift around me?
He opened the Jacksonville sectional chart, colored pattern-green low elevations and empty-blue Gulf of Mexico. He took the pen from his sleeve pocket, poised it over the blue.
If I were hypnotizing me, he thought, what suggestions would I want to see come true around me? He wrote, neat printed letters, on the map:
Everything that happens around me shall work out for the good of all concerned.
People shall be as kind to me as I am to them.
Coincidence shall lead me to others who bring lessons for me to learn, and for whom I have lessons to give, as well.
I shall not lack for whatever I need to become the person I choose to be.
I shall remember that I created this world, that I can change and improve it by my own suggestion whenever I wish.
Time and again shall I see confirmation that my world is changing just as I've planned it to change, and I'll find changes better than I've imagined.
Answers to every question shall come to me in some clear way including quick and unexpected, and from within.
He lifted the pen, read what he had written. Sure enough, he thought, not a bad start. If I were my hypnotist, I'd like me to make those suggestions.
Then he did a strange thing. He closed his eyes and imagined an advanced spirit there with him that moment, under the wing of the airplane.
“Is there anything,” he whispered, “you'd care to add?”
As though the pen had come to life in his hand and was writing by itself, in larger, bolder strokes than his own:
I am a perfect expression of perfect Life, here and now.
Every day I am learning more of my true nature and of the power I've been given over the world of appearances.
I am deeply grateful, on my journey, for the parenting and guidance of my highest self.
Then it was still. While the pen moved, he felt as though he were standing in a science museum close by some giant van de Graaf generator, electrics coursing through his body, his hair tingling. When the words stopped, the energy faded.
Whoa, he thought, what was that? He laughed at himself. That's the answer to, Is there anything you'd care to add?
Unaware, for it was deep in his subconscious, the response: Answers exist before you ask your question. If slow is necessary, please make that clear in your request.
He unfolded from under the wing, the world feeling not quite the same as it had a minute ago. He did not catch the significance of the strange word parenting, he did not remember to thank whoever it was that had done the writing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Airborne southbound from Marianna, the afternoon thunderstorms were lighting off in earnest. His airborne GPS showed tops to 42,000 feet, pools of crimson warnings splashed along the course ahead.
Jamie Forbes forgot about suggestions for a while. Hypnotized or not, when flying small airplanes one doesn't mess with thunderstorms, and the monsters had his attention.
Unable to climb high enough to clear the tops, he chose a thousand feet for his altitude, moving fast, the little airplane weaving between dark columns of rain.
Heavy drops spattered then pounded the aircraft, pressure-washing wings and windshield clean and bright while he turned back toward clear air.
No instrument flying today, he thought. It's a fine little GPS, but fly on instruments near thunderstorms, let the display screen pick this time to go dark . . . that would not be fun.
Why is it that airplane instruments almost never fail on nice days when you don't need them? It isn't that you can count on 'em to fail when the weather's awful, just that it happens often enough that you want to be ready, you've got to have backups.
He was running low on backups, just now. This far along, wide forests of scrub pine below, the way back to Marianna closed in curtains of silver chainmail from the clouds. Not all of it violent, but here and there visibility down to a mile—legal to fly but not safe in a fast airplane.
He reached the map from the floor, found his position. Nearest airport six miles southwest. He looked that direction, saw the place smothered in buckshot rain.
Having tried landing in the middle of a thunderstorm as a young pilot, he had declined the suggestion ever to try again.
Next nearest airport is Cross City, fifteen miles southeast, sky broken to overcast, thunderstorm closing from the west. He turned that direction, having abandoned his straight-line course for zigzags from airport to airport, a frog on lily pads.
When all the airports ahead go down in storms, he had decided, I'll land at the last one open, wait on the ground till the wild moves on. That time would be now.
Ten miles from Cross City he saw the storm, approximately as black as midnight. You'll make it if you're fast.
He pushed the engine to full power, lowered the nose and the little airplane leaped ahead, airspeed winding toward 190.
He said it aloud in the cockpit, unsmiling: “My highest self is cutting this one a little fine . . .”
Eighty seconds later he saw the runways at Cross City, a wall of water like a thousand-foot tidal wave thundering in from the west. Beneath it, lightning glittered and forked in the dark.
“Cross City traffic, Beech Three Four Charlie is one mile northeast initial for a three-sixty overhead Runway Two One Cross City traffic permitting.”
Traffic permitting. As if there'd be any traffic landing just now. Somebody'd have to be crazy, to be in the pattern with the storm seconds from strike.
Uh-oh, he thought, that's me!
The '34 flashed down the runway a hundred feet up flying just this side of 200 knots.
Throttle to idle, pitch up and turn to downwind, airspeed falling with the climb, gear handle Down, flap lever Down, dump the nose and steep turn to final, the end of the runway whirling softly up to meet him, going gray in rain. A few seconds after Wheels-Down showed in the landing gear position indicators, tires splashed on wet pavement.
One minute later, taxiing to the parking ramp, Jamie Forbes became a goldfish in an air-bowl, cloudburst roaring torrents on the canopy so he couldn't tell the engine was running except the propeller still turned. Fart
her than that he couldn't see.
He braked to stop on the taxiway, deluge roaring unchecked, carefully folded his map as lightning bolted near, thunder jolting the airplane on its wheels.
At the edge of the chart, in bold letters:
I am deeply grateful, on my journey, for the parenting and guidance of my highest self.
Safe in the midst of violence was the first he noticed parenting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Thanks to the Southeast Horseperson's Convention in Gainesville, every motel in Cross City was sold out. Each clerk was polite (People shall be as kind to me as I am to them), each told him there was no room, no suite, no broom closet, no doghouse available till Monday.
He decided that he'd unroll his survival blanket under the wing tonight, pray for dry, and press on south in the morning.
The dry didn't quite materialize, but the mosquitoes did. Not long after dark, they had hummed him from any idea of sleeping under the wing. He retreated to the cockpit, shut the canopy tight against the little beasts, stretched as much as he could by angling against the left side of the seat back, crowding both feet in the right rudder-pedal well.
He improved his time by reading the T-34 Pilot's Handbook yet again, by flashlight, 151 pages of absorbing text and photos. He managed thirty-three of them before the batteries dimmed and died.
Alone, cramped, hot, wet, dark; ten more hours till dawn. Is this what you get when you accept suggestions to change the world around you?
You didn't suggest a comfortable bed every night, something said. You suggested a different world, one that you'd imagine true. You have it. If what you meant was no challenge, you should have said so. If what you meant was no discomfort, you should have made a note of that.
He considered finding the spare flashlight batteries and adding I Shall Have No Discomfort to the list of suggestions. Alone and hot, cramped and wet and beginning to suffocate in the closed cockpit, he smiled as he thought about changing his list of autohypnotic suggestions.
I Shall Always Have Plenty of Fine Food to Eat, And Oh by the Way I Shall Sleep Late Every Morning and Never Have to Take the Trash Out or Pay Bills.