Fred went inside after the dwarf, conscious of Marmora still following behind him. When his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he examined the launching apparatus, which he had only glanced at the previous time. The rail was an ordinary piece of railroad track leading out of the shed and down the sloping sand in the direction of the water. Mounted onto it, inside the shed, was a carriage consisting of a wooden frame with two small wheels mounted in tandem. These, he saw, were modified hubs from the wheels of a bicycle. On this carriage the flying machine simply rested and was held in place by its own weight. For landing there were skids shaped like the runners of a boy’s sled. After landing, of course, it would be impossible to take off again without the carriage. You would have to land near the shed and then in some way lift the whole contrivance back onto the carriage so it could be launched again, or rolled in backwards through the doors. However Fred wasn’t concerned with this problem at the moment.
He went back out into the sunlight, and Gambrinus followed him. They stood looking at the machine. Marmora paused just inside the door of the shed in her graceful dancer’s pose, her fingers touching a strut of the wing.
Fred said, “I believe you said fifty dollars?”
Gambrinus pushed back his beaver hat. It was hot and he was perspiring. “That’s right. It’s fifty dollars. That’s a great deal of money. But I’m a businessman and not a philanthropist. In addition to the cost of the machine, you wouldn’t believe the expenses I incurred in shipping it out from Ohio. Fifty dollars, young man, if you knew the capital I have invested in this enterprise and from which I must extract a profit, is a very modest fee.”
He took off his hat and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. Then he put the hat back on again.
“However,” he said, “on the other hand Marmora would like very much to fly in the machine. She has never flown. And if you were to take Marmora with you in the machine”—he got out the handkerchief and mopped his brow again—“some special arrangement might be made.”
“Special arrangement?”
“If you were to take Marmora with you,” said the dwarf, “then it would be gratis. There would not be any charge. For,” he said, “it makes all the difference whether the person who used the machine were just an ordinary customer, or someone who was a friend of Marmora. Such a person would not be a stranger but something like a relative, so to speak,” he went on, looking not directly at Fred but just past his left ear into the air. “Just as I don’t charge Marmora for the food which she eats at my table, so there would be no charge for the machine if the person flying it were, in a way, a member of the family.” Here he stopped, still perspiring, and they gazed together at the figure of Marmora standing in the gloom of the shed.
Fred was conscious for the first time of her odor. It was the aroma of some immature fruit ripening in the sunshine, with a tincture of perspiration because of the black jersey and tights; but it was not real sweat, only baby sweat. As the two men stared at her she shifted her feet and looked down at her slippers. She had not spoken, and she still wore her faint mysterious smile.
Fred saw now that it was possible for two persons, the operator and a passenger, to lie together on the broad wing with the engine next to them. He said nothing, and Gambrinus began vigorously tugging the flying machine on its carriage out into the sunshine. But he was unable to do this by himself. With Fred behind pushing, and Gambrinus ahead pulling, the great wings came out of the shadow into the air. Marmora, still demure, stood aside. When it got onto the sloping track the thing started rolling and was hard to stop. Gambrinus reached onto the wing for a wooden wedge and jammed it under the carriage.
Fred left the fifty-dollar bill where it was in his back pocket. He pulled himself up onto the wing, lay down on it, and adjusted the cradle to his body. He supported himself with his elbows. Just ahead of him, at the edge of the wing, was the rudder stick. A little to the left was the elevator control, a small metal bar mounted on a pivot. There was no throttle. The four-cylinder engine ran at full blast, and there was simply an interrupter on the magneto to shut it off. The only other control was a gas cock in the fuel line. This he turned to open position.
Marmora mounted up nimbly, without a word, and lay down next to him. There was a small space between Fred and the engine, not more than two feet wide, and she fitted neatly into it. Gambrinus, standing upright in his dogcart, himself turned one of the airscrews to start the Wright gas engine. The bicycle chains clanked, the engine gave a wheeze and a cough, and then it caught. After a bang or two it settled into a steady roar, shaking the wing under Fred’s body. There was another loud noise, a whir like a thousand birds’ wings beating. He glanced around at the left airscrew behind him; it had dissolved into a blur. There was a smell of oil and heated metal. Fred glanced at Gambrinus and nodded.
The dwarf bent down and nimbly pulled the wedge away from the carriage. At first almost nothing happened. The machine moved forward slowly, as though reluctantly. Gambrinus went round to the rear of the wing, carefully staying out of the way of the spinning airscrew, and pushed. Now the carriage started down the track. Gambrinus ran after it, still pushing at the back edge of the wing. His hat came off and tumbled over the sand. He gave a final lunge, fell behind, and stood panting to watch it.
Fred was not sure the thing was going to take to the air. It reached the end of the track, hesitated a little, and then bumped upward. He had no time to see what was happening to the carriage, and in any case it was hidden by the wing under him. He could see nothing but waves, and the canard elevator sticking out ahead of him. Cautiously he pulled back a little on the elevator lever, and the double vanes out in front tilted. The wing seemed to press upward against his chest. The horizon ahead disappeared, and he and the machine and Marmora were alone in the sky.
The thing gathered speed; there was a whistle of air through the baling wire that held the wings together. Fred’s sensations were curious. It was something like going very fast on a bicycle with the wind whistling past your ears—turning corners, soaring over rises—except that it was effortless, and that the two dimensions were converted to three. Yet oddly enough this did not make things more complex; instead in some way it made them simpler. You were no longer obliged to take account of the earth and the irregularities in its shape; you were freed from it and you could go any place you pleased, without bumping over potholes and with no danger of running off the road.
That is, provided you managed to steer it. Fred had not yet tried to turn the thing. All of itself—perhaps on account of the wind coming a little from one side—it was tilting to the right and the horizon was slowly circling. Through the effect of centrifugal force you had no sensation of turning or of tilting; it was the earth itself, the horizon underneath, that tilted and began rotating like a dish. This phenomenon was dreamlike and exhilarating, but it also constituted a great peril. For, if you lost any sensation of whether the machine was flat to the earth or tilted, you might turn completely over sideways, and then the thing would fall like a stone. And the earth itself, Fred saw, was the instrument that told you whether this was happening. Like some immense sundial or compass, it tilted, straightened, or rotated from horizon to horizon, and it was from this that you knew what you and your machine were doing. He moved the rudder stick cautiously to the right and at the same time shifted his body in the cradle to warp the wing ends. The horizon tilted and began rotating slowly to the left. He was getting the hang of it now. Rudder stick at center. Wing warp neutral. The horizon settled down and, after some reluctance, came to a stop. He smiled over his clenched teeth.
Ahead of him the horizontal canard elevators trembled in the rushing air. He was hardly conscious of noise, or he had become so accustomed to it that it seemed a sensation of his own body. Any conversation, of course, was impossible, and in any ease Marmora was not very talkative. He glanced at her. Her chin cupped in her small hands, she gazed straight ahead into the wind. The silky strands of her hair whipped back and flogged her bare s
houlders, but she hardly seemed to notice. Fred was still practicing turns. This too was much like steering a bicycle. He simply tilted the rudder stick and at the same time inclined the weight of his body in the direction he wanted to go, and the cradle fitted to his waist took care of the rest. When he turned to the right his side touched against Marmora’s small firm dancer’s body, and when he turned to the left he curved away from her. After that he worked out a way of circling always to the right, so that he could feel the slim form constantly pressed against his own.
Up to this time he hadn’t paid very much attention to the axial stability, or up and down orientation, of the machine. He had touched the elevator lever only once, to make the thing rise off the carriage. Now he perceived that although he was racing along at a good speed he was still at the same altitude he had reached with that first soar, perhaps fifty feet above the water. He cautiously pulled the lever back. The horizon ahead disappeared and at the same time the whistle of the wind in the wires sank down a note. Climbing made the thing slow down. Glancing to the side, he saw that he had doubled his altitude to a hundred feet, Encouraged by this, he climbed in little increments, still circling, until he had reached the height of a good-sized hill.
Now he could see everything. Visibility was not very good lying flat on his stomach in this way, but when he tilted and circled he could see first the coast stretching off to the south toward San Diego, then the empty sea with an island on the horizon, then the sandy Peninsula—the tents of the Great Pacific Traveling Exposition about halfway down it were a violet-purplish blot—and the northern coast leading off toward some hills in the distance. Still turning, the horizon revealed the valley stretching away toward the Sierra Madre, filled with the green mass of citrus groves, a town sticking up here and there. The Bay was below—pale green with veins of darker color where the water was deeper. Its shape was complex. It was like some illustration in a medical book, except that everything was in white and various shades of green.
He climbed a little higher. It was hard to say what his altitude was, but it might have been five hundred feet or more. The Bay ran off to the north, narrowed into a kind of a creek, and then widened again. Along it ran a high bluff, almost vertical. In the late afternoon sun the bluff cast a shadow out onto the Bay. Far below him white birds were visible against this shadow, turning in graceful curves. Now and then one would dip into the shadow and disappear, and then reemerge an instant later like a spirit out of the night. It was a scene of extraordinary beauty: the water a pale lucent green against the sand, the islands in the Bay dotted with an emerald moss, the shadow of the bluff and the white birds turning against it. Fred imagined dipping down himself to disappear into the dark shadow under the cliff and coming out again into the sunshine. But that was too risky.
He had no idea how long he had been in the air. He wasn’t tired; in fact the longer he went on flying the more energy seemed to pulse into his body from the wing vibrating under him. Or perhaps from the small tight body of Marmora touching his at the side. It was all part of a complex and powerful mélange of sensations: the whistling of the wind in the wires, the blatting of the unmuffled gas engine, the buzzing whir of the two airscrews spinning behind him.
So far he had climbed only cautiously and at a shallow angle. Now he experimented with climbing more steeply. Pointing straight ahead with the rudders, he pulled back more sharply on the elevator lever. The canards lifted as usual and the horizon disappeared. The note of the engine grew more labored. The wing pushed strongly against his chest. The whistling of the wind in the wires sank lower until he could hardly hear it at all. This was ominous. Just as a bicycle can only stay upright as long as it moves forward, so can a flying machine remain aloft only as long as the air continues to rush over its wings. The Wright seemed to hang poised by its nose for a second or two. Then it dropped, pointed almost directly at the Bay underneath.
There was a sickening swoop that made Fred’s stomach touch against his backbone. Luckily he had a good deal of altitude, three hundred feet or more. Some sandbars and a stretch of green water rushed up rapidly. He pulled back gradually on the elevator as the machine gained speed again. It wasn’t enough—the Bay was tilting back to the horizontal but still staggering up toward him at a dangerous speed. Clenching his teeth, he pulled back on the lever with all his strength. The wings with their wire supports groaned like a ship in a storm, and there was a sound of something snapping. Yet it held. Forty feet above the Bay, gaped at by a dumbfounded fisherman in a skiff, the machine came to the level, curved away to the right, and began gaining altitude again.
Fred now remembered about this phenomenon, which the Wright brothers had called a stall. Orville had all but broken his neck in this way, or perhaps it was Wilbur. Oddly enough it had not frightened him. He had been ready to die and in a part of his mind expecting to die, but it was all part of the same exhilarating and unreal, somehow transcendental quality of what was happening. He felt elated, in fact, in having accidentally encountered and mastered this most dangerous maneuver in flying. Just at that moment the engine stopped.
The sudden silence was shocking; it was like a great rush of angel wings. He had perhaps a hundred feet of altitude. He looked quickly around him. The fisherman in his skiff was a mile away. Ahead was the narrow neck of water, and then the Upper Bay with the cliff looming over it. If he held the controls just right, he found, the Wright would glide at only a slight downward angle. The only sound now was the hissing of the wind in the wires.
He glanced at Marmora; she was still placid, her chin in her hands, watching the pale green water rushing up toward them. The water wasn’t very deep, and also there were a number of flat mossy islands. Fred picked one of these, close under the cliff. For a moment it seemed to him that he couldn’t make the Wright go that far. But a breath of wind, coming from somewhere, lifted the wings a little. The edge of the island whirled by only a few feet underneath. What looked like moss from a higher altitude was now revealed as a thick tangle of reeds, water plants, and lilies. The bentcane skids brushed over this vegetation, the whole machine waggled, then it slid with a prolonged crackling noise through the reeds and came to a stop. The rudders behind tilted up and then settled to the level again. It was very quiet. In a curious philosophical mood, Fred reflected that he had not asked Gambrinus how long the machine ran before the fuel gave out.
He unstrapped himself from the cradle and clambered down into the reeds, then he helped Marmora down. He looked around him. They were on a flat island a hundred yards or so long, shaped like a large comma. The tail of the comma was only a mud flat that trailed away into the water, but the round head, where they were standing, was like a miniature South Sea island, or something out of Tom Sawyer. Growing on it was a tiny jungle, coming only to their waists. The chief plant was an odd-looking exotic reed with a kind of tassel on top; perhaps it was papyrus. There were ferns, vines, wild succulents, and water plants of all kinds. One of the more curious was a kind of wild tidewater narcissus that grew in those parts. The leaves were the same pale and lucent green as the shallow water of the Bay; they grew in a profuse tangle that formed a kind of arabesque floating on the water. The flowers were extraordinary. They resembled daffodils, except that their white purity had something odd, barbaric, innocent, and self-contained about it; they gave the impression that their cup-shaped coronas had not yet opened up and perhaps would never fully open up. Perhaps they opened up at night. They emitted an extraordinary fragrance: babylike and yet powerfully sensuous. They exactly resembled, in fact, Marmora herself.
He turned and found that they were in each other’s arms. They were like two children on a desert island; not fearful, simply inquisitive about this odd place in which they found themselves, and about each other. As though he were removing the petals from a flower he disrobed her. Then he did the same for himself, with her help. They lay down on the bed of narcissus.
Her lips were exactly what he had expected: a woman’s lips attached to a chi
ld. As for her breasts, the prophecy that they would be young apples was also exactly fulfilled. They were almost as hard, and they were exactly hemispherical, not sagging off at all to the sides through the effect of gravity. When touched at certain places her slim form gathered and contracted, like a sea anemone, or a flower that captured insects. With her legs extended straight and her feet together, she twinkled her toes like a dancer.
After some time, becoming aware of an intense and keen sensation of pleasure at the center of his own body, he realized that he had slipped into her without noticing the moment when it happened. Her thing, the place where Fred now found himself, was extraordinary. It was like a little fluted pipe, lithe and strong, yet one had to be careful not to damage it. Some time passed. Fred was aware of the shadow of the high cliff a hundred yards or so away, creeping gradually toward them. Then all at once there was a little ripple, as though a trout had broken in the water of their common minds. Fred almost cried out; it seemed to him that the odd white blossoms of the narcissus around him stretched and opened. The ripples gradually died away, widening in circles, as ripples will. After that, there was no point lying there thinking. Marmora was not a thinker, nor did she particularly induce thought in someone who was with her. Fred extricated himself and sat up.
The shadow of the cliff was only a few yards away. In a few moments it would reach them. An ungainly looking bird was plopping around in the shallow water nearby, lifting its feet to clamber over the narcissus. It was large, almost as big as Marmora, and it had an awkward jerkiness about the way it stabbed its beak into the mud searching for food. The thing gathered together in itself, in a kind of caricature, all the ungainliness of earthbound creatures and their endless and tedious search for sustenance. It was, as Fred recognized from his rudimentary knowledge of ornithology, a Blue Heron, a rather rare bird in this part of the world.
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