by Dean Ing
“I have alignment,” Christopher reported. “Cycling the lock. It’s no-go.”
Without a word, Wes punched his single-point harness release and unplugged his headset, which automatically became a remote, though noisy, transceiver. He ignored the handrails, racing back toward the cargomaster’s bubble, then peering straight down through the open cargo hatch. “Chris,” he asked, “what’s the problem?”
“Can’t get a good video from this angle, Mr. Peel,” said Christopher, cycling the lock once more from his console.
Briefly, Delta One moved in a vagrant breeze and Wes, who did not have a safety line, grabbed for a rail. He could see Tom Schultheis with a headset, standing beside the van not fifty yards away, training binoculars on the problem. Dave Kaplan was sprinting toward the van. With a deep breath to steady his voice, Wes said, “Tom, can you see a fix?”
The engines were crooning now, holding the silvery shadow in place, letting it pivot into the wind as Schultheis stared through his binoculars. After a moment, the reply: “It’s those damned Teflon shims! If we had a humongous pair of vise-grips and a hammer, I could slide a couple of shims off.” “Teflon?” Wes knew the stuff was cheesy. “Why don’t I shinny down the strut and cut the got-damn’ thing off?” He knelt at the mouth of the cargo bay, holding out his pocket-knife.
“No ladders on those struts,” the cargomaster warned. “Negative, Mr. Peel,” in Rogan’s familiar drawl. “Sorry, but she’s my ship right now and,” everyone on Alpha channel heard his laugh, “I know how you tempt fate.”
A three-beat silence. Then, “It’s your helm,” Wes agreed. “But somebody can cut those shims loose.”
Kaplan offered the simplest solution. “Toss that knife of yours down, Wes,” he said, after using the binoculars. “I’ll carve the Teflon if you can lower the ship to me.”
It was Rogan’s view that, when hovering absolutely still, Delta One might drop catastrophically in vagrant air currents. He did not want to risk lowering that hopper nearer than ten feet from the ground. No problem, said Kaplan; ten feet would be fine, he’d been carrying Tom Schultheis on his shoulders for years.
And that is why one of Stanford’s best stress analysts strode into high grass with a knife-wielding Cal Tech designer riding his shoulders. Christopher, with caution worthy of a bank manager, jockeyed the hopper ever lower until Schultheis could place his free hand flat on its chassis, inserting the knife blade in the lock mechanism.
Rogan again: “I’m watching the grass for sudden winds. If a gust hits from starboard, we could have two men under fifty tons of sand. If I sing out, don’t wait to argue.”
Wes knelt at the mouth of the open hatch until the shims were removed, then hurried forward. He saw Rogan’s helmet twisting this way and that, his hands never still as the great craft responded to faint stirrings in the breeze. Then, as Schultheis trotted away from the hopper with a milk-white disk in one hand, he displayed it toward the cabin. He stabbed a finger hard, twice, toward the cargo hopper, and Wes’s video monitor recorded the strut’s pneumatic ram as it locked into place.
Through a dozen trials, the locks performed perfectly. Wes gave the high sign for resumption of the tests, and Delta One swung away toward the distant tracks. But with the familiar giddy sway of a banked aircraft, Wes saw something else and smiled. He had caught the flicker of a hand wave toward the cabin from Alma Schultheis, and saw Rogan lazily return it.
EIGHT
If snatching a fifty-ton load from a moving flatcar was a bold success, putting it back was a triumph. Delta One maneuvered more sluggishly with her cargo, which Jim Christopher briefly retracted into the hull for the cameras before lowering it again.
Sweeping into position above the train for the replacement maneuver, Rogan took his time settling lower, the struts extending their cargo with tender care. Wes, tempted to bark a warning, manfully held his silence as the cargo hopper lowered between the boxcars; for Delta One began to move ahead, threatening to slam the forward boxcar a mighty wallop with her suspended cargo. A glancing blow from this fifty-ton maul would have taken the roof off that boxcar like an ax decapitating a dollhouse. Rogan adjusted the pitch of his props, their buzz taking on a new note for a moment, and then a relieved Allington was reporting zero-zero again. The train was far down the track, Delta One holding position while Wes stared down on the diesel loco, before Allington reported that the flatcar’s special pincer grips were engaged. A moment later, one beat after Allington’s cry of “Up ship!” Wes again felt gravity sucking at his guts as Rogan pulled the craft into a steep climb.
Wes traded grins and hand slaps with his pilot, then heard Allington confirm that the tests were finished. Leveling off, watching the departure of the train and toying with the controls under Rogan’s tutelage, Wes determined that he would master this giant, for Delta One performed as much like a light aircraft as a dirigible. He’d been told to expect this performance. No one had warned him that the emotional experience might be as vast as Delta One herself.
Alpha channel crackled busily with a five-way conference to analyze that last-second “delta vee” velocity problem; for its size, the cargo hopper added tremendous drag to the airship. When that hopper dropped between boxcars, it no longer bulled its way through the air. Prescription: a brief thrust reversal by Rogan to keep the big delta from forging ahead.
Tom Schultheis dutifully took the blame. “I underestimated the aerodynamic drag of the load; an inflatable fairing will fix it. That’s what flight tests are for,” he sighed.
Wes, guiding the craft to hover within a stone’s throw of his staff on the ground, gave Rogan the helm again. “I’ve got to look over Allington’s data,” he explained to the pilot as he left the cabin. The truth was that Wes needed to put some distance from Delta One, because he was sorely tempted to loop her from sheer elation.
Swaying gently to the ground in the sling, Wes saw that someone had brought two bottles of champagne, which was already foaming in paper cups. Wes stretched mightily, accepting a cup from Kaplan, and raised the libation toward Rogan.
“We can do better than that,” said Alma. “Those men up there have earned some bubbly.”
“Later,” her brother replied. “Anyway, beer is Rogan’s drink.”
Alma Schultheis hefted a bottle and saw that perhaps two glasses remained. Cramming the plastic plug into the bottle, she thrust it into her big camera bag and turned to Wes. “Help me get into that sling,” she said to him, and strode into the grass to stand beneath the cabin, her skirt tucked between her knees.
From the set of her shoulders, Wes knew that her heart was set on it. Well, it’s no crazier than wanting to loop the brute, he reflected, and buckled Alma into the sling harness.
* * * *
Strapped into the sling, waving toward Wes whose expression was unreadable, Alma found herself rising quickly to a foam-lined hatchway, ten yards above the undulating grass. A tall, flight-suited man with broad shoulders stood with his legs braced apart at the hatch, snubbing the cable’s pendulum motion with a gloved hand. From her angle, his head was not in view and then she was busy reaching for aluminum handholds.
“Wait ’til the hatch cover is green,” the man instructed, “then unstrap and use the handrails.”
The hatch sighed shut and slender neon panels around the foam padding changed their glow from blood tint to the color of spring grass. Alma unstrapped her harness and turned to thank the man, who was turned half away from her. “Wes! How did you . . . ? I thought ...” She stood openmouthed, looking the man up and down.
“You thought I was Mr. Peel,” said the cargomaster with a soft basso laugh. “A lot of people do at first glance. I’m Jim Christopher,” he said, holding out his hand. “Call me Chris.”
Alma introduced herself, smiling with residual embarrassment. Straw-blond hair, mustache, big lean shoulders: the hallmarks of Wes Peel. When you described one, you described the other, yet all the details were different. Christopher’s nose was broad,
his forehead unscarred. Wes spoke in a light baritone, but Christopher’s voice reminded her of a good radio announcer - or of the Oakland Tribune’s Reese Masefield, one of Wes’s few close friends.
Followed by Christopher, she moved forward using handrails though her footing seemed as solid as the floor of a bank vault. At Christopher’s gesture, she chose the copilot’s seat. Glenn Rogan snapped his helmet visor up then, and Alma decided that his eyes might very well be lit by gieeh neon. “Welcome aboard,” he said with a frank, smiling appraisal.
He wore cowboy boots. His watchband, peeking from the sleeve of his flight suit, could have doubled as chain mail. He had sideburns like wool, a voice like Oklahoma sod in a mix-master, and he probably stomped to country-western music, and Alma Schultheis forgave him everything for those eyes, and for his mastery of this silver giant her menfolk had designed. “They said beer was your preference, but we’ll just have to make do,” she said, aware that she was blushing as she pulled die big bottle from her bag.
Rogan suggested that she harness up to be on the safe side, drinking from the bottle, handing it back to Christopher. He watched as Alma drank, and studied her face for a long moment. “You’re a Schultheis, all right. I never knew he had a little sister.”
“Big sister,” she corrected. In her business, Alma had grown adept at reading poker faces. This one, under its deep tan, was hiding a pair of deuces. “Is that a problem?”
“Guess not, if Tom hasn’t bitched to you about Glenn Rogan. That’s me,” he said, extending his hand with a flat meaningful look toward Jim Christopher.
Christopher took the hint. “My flight station’s aft for these tests,” he said with a half-salute, and headed back into the bowels of Delta One.
Alma shook hands gravely and gave Rogan her name, adding, “You’ll never believe I don’t do this all the time.”
“Never,” he agreed, then changed expression and swung his throat mike into position. He spoke with the men below for perhaps a minute before swinging the mike away again. “Mr. Peel says it’s time for you to go. I’ll have to punch this ol’ cow down the river a ways and then across the bay to the plant.”
“My father built Zeps, so I’ve been a helium-head groupie from the cradle, Mr. Rogan. Why can’t I ride with you?”
“ ’Cause it’s an experimental, that’s why.”
“That’s not the reason.”
He grinned. “Nope.”
“Give me that headset,” she demanded. In a moment, she had Wes Peel at the other end. She also had the Nikon around her neck and intended to use it for possible public relations flackery, she said, and listened a moment. Well, then she had stowed away, she said, and listened again. Then she insisted that, dammit, this was a ride to tell her father about and she did not intend to be cheated out of it by her little brother or, for that matter, the devil himself.
In the end, it was Glenn Rogan who heard Wes’s grudging permission. “If she’s made up her mind, that’s that,” Wes said, still too pleased with the morning’s triumph to deny her. “You filed two flight plans, right?”
“Right. Plan A if we had problems, down through Contra Costa County after dark. Plan B is across to Berkeley in broad-ass daylight, then down the bay so ever’body and his dog sees us. You still want me to open her up? Got us a passenger,” Rogan warned.
“Let’s just say all deliberate speed, since we’re running on Plan B.”
“Life is Plan B, Mr. Peel,” Rogan drawled with a wiggle of eyebrows that made Alma laugh, and then he palmed the throttles ganged at his right. The engine song was faint, muted from inside the cabin. Swinging the throat mike away, Rogan reached for the champagne bottle again as he nosed the great airship toward the southwest, her nose high to gain more lift. Alma judged that he had consumed a few swallows of the stuff at most, and after one more swig he waved the rest away.
Alma was aiming the Nikon past him, trying to compose a shot with the pilot and nearby mountain peaks, when he spoke again. “The way you talk to Peel, you and him go back a ways.”
“Ten years. I was three years out of Mizzou U. with a marketing job in San Francisco when I met Wes. We were what my fey, light-footed boss called ‘a number’ for a while. Long enough for me to start my own business in Oakland. With Wes’s help.” She turned toward him calmly. “Tom doesn’t know about the number, or the loan, which I paid back. I introduced him to Wes in ’eighty-nine. I would just as soon Tom never heard about, ah, the full connection. He’s . . . he’s my brother,” she said, the lift of her shoulders speaking volumes.
“But you’ve told me, and I’m a terrible blabbermouth.” She did not reply except for her steady gaze, with spots of color on her cheeks. Rogan saw the spots; nodded. “Real, upfront lady. I like it,” he said with a show of strong teeth.
“You like all ladies,” she accused, silently begging him to deny it.
“That’s been said - by folks who don’t know me. I look at all ladies, maybe. I like a few. And while we’re swappin’ secrets like strangers on a ship - which we are, by God! - let me tell you something, Alma. About your old ‘number’ with Peel? Tom Schultheis is good at math; he knows numbers he never talks about. There’s lots of numbers in this world. Tom got me this job, and that was a three-headscratch puzzler, I can tell you. If he’d thought it would ever put you and me, uh . . .”
“One and one?”
He laughed. “Yeah. Well, I’d still be liftin’ logs across the Tillamook bum for Cyclone Crane, I expect.”
Her jaw fell open, very slowly, her mouth forming a silent “ah” while old memories flashed past. “You were the ex-Marine.” He nodded, and she searched for subtle phrases before abandoning the effort. ‘ ‘Would you believe I don’t care? I love my brother. I don’t have to love every mistake he makes.” It was not necessary for her to identify Tom’s wife, Ellie, as one of those mistakes.
“Just remember, Miz Alma,” he grinned slyly, “your brother signs my checks. I like you, but we’d best make our number about this big.” His thumb and forefinger calipered a space the thickness of cardboard. At the moment, they were banking like a sailplane above San Francisco Bay while two private aircraft flew alongside, drinking in this awesome bird of passage. He nodded his head toward a nearby Cessna. “If that bozo gets in our wake, he’s gonna be sayin’ hello to his tail wheel. We don’t know just how fast ol’ Bossy here can head for the bam, and Peel wants me to switch her rump a little. Somethin’ for the late evening news. Don’t let the noise bother you.”
With that, he palmed the throttles forward to a detent and, with the surging soprano buzz muted by a helium-filled hull, the airship gained speed. Soon the rising note of windsong became steady. Alma did not know how fast a little Cessna could fly, but it was not keeping pace with Delta One as the silver giant fled southward over the bay.
Rogan looked across at Alma, laid his hand out, palm up. She took it without hesitation, feeling the vibrant hum of the man, frightened of it, drawn to it. She laughed aloud. “This is going to be a ride to remember,” she said. Especially if ours turns out to be an irrational number.
NINE
Being the first precept o/Farda: All precepts must be memorized, for memory is the sheath of the martyr’s essential weapons - joyous faith, joyous fury.
Director Hal Kroner knew that the fun part was over, now that he was back in Southern California. Now it would be party time, where the wheeling and dealing must be done after Sa-cajawea was edited and in the can. And partying required some highly illegal party favors, like it or not. He spent his first few days at home with the telephone, seldom glancing past his alarm-equipped fence toward the street. That is why he never counted the number of times that tan muscle car thrummed past.
Kroner had a connection or two in San Fernando, but instead, he drove the Mercedes northeast to his Antelope Valley supplier. He did not notice the sand-tinted Camaro that picked him up two blocks after the automatic gate slid shut on the electronically monitored acre he called home. A
fter months on a wild Mexican location, he enjoyed the drive up Route 14, a thoroughly domesticated canyon with a nice tame highway. He would certainly have noticed if that Camaro had followed him onto the dirt road near Agua Dulce, but the Camaro stopped at the sign near the highway. The sign was, perhaps, an omen: It said, DEAD END.
Being the ninth precept of Farda: The beetle knows only how to fly, but the spider knows how to hide and also to wait.
Kroner’s supplier, an actress in the old days, offered him a free toot but Kroner declined with a smile as he wrote out a four-figure check for her “consultation.” He rarely used the stuff anyhow, even the best Bolivian coke; but the select few guests for his home screening of the rough-edited film would expect nose-candy, and toot sweets they would get. Kroner walked back to his car, clapped his brightly banded Borsalino jauntily over his bald spot and listened as his black Mercedes convertible harrumphed in its throat. He dropped the wrap-pered, hollowed-out loaf of Malt-O-Bran containing the bag-gieful of powder on the seat beside him. Give us this day our daily jones, he thought. The things we do for popularity! There was a time when a black Merc ragtop was all it took to prove you don’t need the money you do need . . .
He was doing fifty on the narrow lane, considering a right turn toward the Angeles Forest Highway, before he saw the slight figure that stepped from bushes near the main road. For an instant, as long as it took him to hit his right-tum flasher, Hal Kroner thought of giving the kid a lift.