Interzone #266 - September-October 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  I tell this to Sam sometimes but I don’t know if he hears me.

  ***

  I couldn’t fly the B50 the second time Sam went up. I was still drunk from the night before and I made sure Hobday knew it so he wouldn’t let me fly when usually I’d have just flushed my system with an oxygen mask. He gave me an earful but nothing I wasn’t expecting and it was a far better option than carrying my friend into a dark he dreaded but wouldn’t resist. By then Sam had told me all about the first flight. He shouldn’t have, but we’d been drinking then as well. Seems the Arrow brings that out in people. The night before that second flight I’d gone round to talk to him but he and Sandy were having a bad one. He phoned later but only said a few words. He was drunk, and by then I’d emptied most of a good bottle I had at home as well. Neither of us made much sense.

  So, Pres and Cramshaw took Bessie up and I was ordered to drink coffee because they’d use me on the ground instead.

  Last I saw of Sam, the Sam I knew and hoped to see again, he was pulling on the strange flight suit he had to wear. He was doing it in the coffee room.

  “Tom—” he said.

  “Don’t.”

  “I have to.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Not for them. For me. I have to see. I need to know if any of what I saw up there was real. You understand that?”

  I held a cup to him, offering coffee, but he shook his head and pointed to the crotch of his suit. “You see a bag to piss in?”

  It was the standard suit in much of its design, but it crinkled and shone like silver paper and there was piping coiled up and down his limbs. Narrow tributary wires sprouted from this to wrap his arms and legs. It was like his veins were visible on the outside. Over his chest he wore a mesh of golden filaments.

  “Hurts my eyes to look at you,” I said, shielding my face in an awkward salute against each flash and dazzle of his suit as he moved. I’d meant it as a joke because of how shiny he was, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth I realised it was the same as something he’d said the week before. He realised it, too.

  “You get a good breakfast in you?” I asked him, just to change the subject.

  Sam smiled and nodded.

  “Because you need to keep those blood sugars up.”

  “Yes, mom.”

  I tried to smile back at him but I couldn’t do it. “Don’t,” I said again.

  He kind of growled at that and left me holding coffee while he went to do a man’s duty for his country.

  He’d left the helmet on the counter. We didn’t fly with helmets back then, not crash helmets anyway. Just the leather ones like those used in the war. Not that this looked much like what you’d call a crash helmet either. In fact, it looked dangerously fragile. It was a sphere but flat on one end, like an upside down fishbowl if you could make such a thing out of mirrors. I’d seen it before but Sam had been wearing it then. This time I could touch it. I picked it up and peered through it without putting it on but saw only the kitchen. Outside, through the window, I saw the rest of the base and some of the runway. Everything looked normal. Of course it did, what did I expect? I set the helmet back down, carefully, when I should have smashed it to pieces.

  I could’ve waited for Sam to come back for it but there was no need to speak to him again. I had nothing to say he hadn’t heard or would listen to. I stirred milk and sugar into my coffee and left.

  I had a bad feeling, a very bad feeling, and I should have tried harder. I should have said something better than don’t. Something like goodbye. Who knows, maybe that would have done it. I did wave, but by then he was underneath a canopy I couldn’t see through, the men around it twisting bolts tight and slapping the fuselage for luck when they were done. I raised my hand without knowing if he saw me, and then the Arrow was getting towed to where Bessie waited for her unwanted passenger.

  Cramshaw was leaning against the landing gear. He looked around him, didn’t see Hobday, and said, “Hey Berry, you wanna take her up?” Cramshaw was a good kid. Youngest we had, with a mop of red hair and freckles that made him look more like a farm boy than a pilot. Standing next to Bessie he looked like her kid brother. He died in ’53 testing the X-2 but right then, standing in the sun beside the B50 and the Arrow, he probably thought he was going to fly forever. “I know you two go way back,” he said. He meant the B50 but I thought of Sam.

  “No, that’s all right. I don’t much want to fly today.”

  He gave a broad smile as if I’d made a joke, shrugged, and asked if I’d be going to Ratty’s later. It was a pointless question, we always went to Ratty’s later, especially after a test, but I answered yes anyway and tried to massage the hangover from my head. Tried not to think of my last conversation with Sam.

  ***

  Ratty’s was the best beer joint off base. It’s gone now, sort of, turned into a restaurant called The Grill, but back then it was just a bar with good music and plenty of girls to look at. Sam used to tell me to find one worth sticking with and whenever I saw him and Sandra together I thought he had a good point, but in the meantime… Well, Maisie and her friends were in, distracting everyone with the way their skirts moved around their legs as they danced. Sam didn’t even glance at them. He had other things on his mind.

  “It was dark,” he said. “I mean, pitch. And that messes with your mind, let me tell you, soaring through blue sky one minute and the next minute black. And not like night time, either. Black like your eyes are closed. No stars. Nothing.”

  That was what Sam told me about going sideways. I wish he’d left it at that. He’d talked about the Arrow once already – the speed, the way it handled, all of that – but now the boys were embarrassing themselves over by the jukebox and the empty glasses had mounted up so Sam started talking about it all over again, only differently.

  “You remember I said it went sideways? At the barbeque?”

  Kennedy seemed to be having some luck with a pretty brunette. Meanwhile, her pretty friends were listening to everything Bull had to say. One of them touched his arm a lot. There was a pretty blonde who kept glancing over at me and Sam. They were all so pretty.

  “Tom?”

  “Yeah, I remember.” I let the girl go. “Was I right? Does it roll?”

  “It spins, but it never changes direction while it’s doing that. In fact, it’s slow making any kind of turn. But that’s not what it means, the sideways stuff.”

  “Well, what does it mean then?”

  He leant in close. “It’s got this fixture on its nose, right? Remember that? The metal rod?”

  “I remember.”

  “It makes lightning.”

  I smiled, brought my glass up only to see it was empty, and set it down again. “Lightning.”

  “Yeah. It fires these pulses of light—” he opened and closed a fist at me “—kind of like a flashlight only a hundred times more powerful. Perfectly straight bursts of light.” He performed a fast sequence of those hand-flashes and then sort of danced his fingers back at himself. “And then the Arrow is washed with lightning. Bright white lines crackling all over, and then they shoot forward from the nose, from the…the lightning stick, let’s call it that, because the other name won’t make any sense—”

  “Because so far all of this is just—”

  “—and this electrical discharge, it creates a tunnel of low-density air for the Arrow to fly through. To reduce drag. It tears the electrons out of the air molecules to make an ionised channel for the Arrow.”

  I didn’t know if it was the beer, but this bit was beginning to make a sort of sense to me.

  “Mach three, Finn. Three”

  I stared at him a moment, then repeated, “Three.”

  “Yeah.”

  You have to remember, this was 1951. The Bell X-2 wouldn’t break Mach 3 for another five years. It wasn’t so long ago people thought the sound barrier was exactly that, a barrier, and that even Mach 1 couldn’t be done.

  “But you told the boys—”<
br />
  “Three, Finn. At least.”

  “At least?”

  “Hard to tell for sure because after that the readings went a bit…strange.”

  “Well that’s it, then. Dodgy data.”

  He batted that away with his hand. “It doesn’t matter anyway because after that it went sideways and speed wasn’t important anymore.”

  Saying speed wasn’t important, a test pilot saying speed wasn’t important, was like the navy saying they didn’t care if their ships floated or not.

  “Mach three, and then those bursts of light became one long beam of it and then…”

  “And then?”

  He was quiet for a moment. Bar noise filled the gap; music, conversation, laughter. I wondered if this was all building up to some sort of joke but Sam wasn’t the joking kind. So I waited until he finally spoke.

  “And then sideways,” he said.

  I don’t think he meant it to be dramatic. ‘Sideways’ didn’t follow some metaphorical drum roll, we’d been talking about it the whole time. It’s just that he had been remembering, gone from Ratty’s to sit in the Arrow once more, and then part of him remembered he was meant to be talking so he said, ‘and then sideways’, before returning to his moments in the dark. I waited for him to come back again until somewhere a glass smashed and a woman shrieked and that noise, or its combination, brought Sam back with a shudder.

  “Except it’s not really sideways,” he said. “It’s still forwards. Sideways was just how they explained it to me, like overtaking when the traffic ahead is slow.”

  “You changed lanes.”

  “I don’t know that I did anything,” he said. “And I don’t know where I went.”

  He had vanished from radar for a while – the big boys were very happy with their new toy – but he returned when he was near the base, bringing the Arrow down without incident.

  “The way they explained it, the simple way, they took two pieces of paper and put one across the other like an x. On the bottom piece, at one end, they wrote ‘base’ and at the other end, on the same piece, ‘base’ and then they drew a line connecting them. My route, right? The line went right across the top piece of paper, which they took away to show me that a long line had become two short ones with a big gap in the middle. A start and an end, with nothing in between. That piece of paper, the removed piece, that was the sideways. It was like I ducked out of the sky for a while, then came back.”

  “Okay, where did you go? You stray off course?”

  “I don’t know where, I told you. But it was dark. Instantly dark.”

  “Have you told them this? You passed out, buddy. Hypoxia. Pulling more gees than—”

  “I didn’t pass out, Tom. There was light, and then lightning, and then I was somewhere else. It was so still. She moved so easy. Not that I moved much – couldn’t deviate from the flight path – but I tried it some and there was no struggle. I had full control. No thermal barrier to worry about, no aerodynamic friction, best I could tell. No pitching, no buffeting. She was gliding.”

  At high speed the centre of pressure shifts, you’ve got aeroelasticity factors with the fins, you’re not stable, and you struggle with control. Sam was telling me something that shouldn’t be true, not at Mach 3. If that’s what it was.

  He looked at me and I swear his eyes had that wet look of tears in them.

  “What is it?”

  He held my hand. It felt strange, that kind of contact, but there was no getting away from it, especially when he put his other hand on top of both of ours. He kept his eyes on me. I’d never noticed until then how blue those eyes could be. Sandra must have loved them. I’d seen intensity in them before, but not like this. Not shining. “You have to take care of them for me if anything ever—”

  Here I pulled my hand away. Snatched it back, in fact.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not saying it.”

  “Finn—”

  “Don’t you say it, neither. You’re just drunk.”

  “Tom—”

  “Of course I will, okay, you don’t even need to ask so don’t, and you don’t need to ask because it’ll never happen that way anyway. You’re the luckiest son of a bitch I know.”

  He nodded. Just once, quick, accepting what I said. My agreement, I think. Probably not the lucky SOB bit, considering what came next.

  “I have to tell you more.”

  I rubbed my face as if I could wipe away the cloud of alcohol I was stuck in. “All right.”

  “It was dark,” he said. “I mean pitch. And that messes with your mind…”

  Shortly after that, he messed with mine by telling me what he saw there.

  ***

  Sandy used to have terrible anxiety dreams. Nightmares. Long before anything ever happened to Sam she’d dream of looking out the window to see one of us, usually me, in full dress uniform coming up the path to deliver bad news, only in the dream they, me, whoever it was, never made it to the end of the path. They just seemed to keep walking and never reaching her, so she never knew what had happened, only that something had. First she felt fear and then frustration, all tinged with a sadness so deep she seemed to fill up with it, ready to burst, “Like I’m waiting to become that expression, ‘burst into tears’,” she explained to me once. “I’m entirely water waiting to be released, and as the dream goes on the pressure builds and I never know what’s happened to him, what’s happened to my Sam.”

  In another dream she’s hanging the washing out and hears a thunderclap, “Like the zoom and boom, only I feel it under my feet.” When she looks up in this dream she sees a plume of black smoke rising from the horizon, angled with the wind. In the dream she always thinks Sam’s back, and then gathers in his washing again, leaving the rest on the line. She’s always so calm. She says that one scares her the most.

  She still has them occasionally, these dreams. Still tells me about them from time to time. If it’s a really bad one, she’ll call me in the middle of the night. Sometimes it’s not Sam in the dream but me. Sometimes it’s both of us, or we blur together so that sometimes we’re one and sometimes the other yet somehow both at the same time. She told me once, during one of these phone calls, about how Sam looked at her differently after the first time he flew the Arrow. How he used to look at her, and her pregnant belly, and seem suddenly frightened. He never talked about it, not to her, but she knew there’d been something wrong with that flight. Something that scared him.

  I used to have a few bad dreams when I still flew. Mostly they were about being in a cockpit I couldn’t eject from and the plane would spin and spin and all the time fall towards the ground and I’d wake just as I crunched. Since giving up my wings, I’ve had worse. Sometimes Sam’s in them. Sometimes, those things he told me about are with him. Or on him. Part of him. I don’t tell Sandy about those ones.

  Just lately I’ve been having the cockpit dream again. It’s not about flying anymore, though. It’s about this cancer. Not that it was ever about flying anyway, I suppose. Occasionally Sam will be a co-pilot, even when there’s no room for one. Dreams are like that, aren’t they. He’ll be there, by my side, telling me what to do, only I can’t hear him. There’s no voice. His mouth just opens and closes, blinking at me.

  ***

  “He’s still coming in too fast.”

  Hobday looked at me as if I could do something about it. “Sir,” I said.

  A line of us watched, me the only one using binoculars, waiting for one of the drogues to deploy, but it never happened. And then the angle changed. There was a sudden and severe drop as the Arrow nosed over.

  “He’s coming in too steep.”

  I was reminded of last year, Hendry passing out at high altitude. A connection problem with a hose in his oxygen system and hypoxia took care of the rest: Hendry crunched nose-first and left only pieces to bury.

  Hobday turned to issue orders but the fire truck was already starting up. He yelled anyway to hurry them along. Medics followed, speeding down the
runway behind it, but if Sam continued on the trajectory he was on he was going to hit the runway early and wrong and so fast he’d only need the fire truck.

  “Pull up, Sam,” I said. “Come on. Get it back.”

  Had there been radio contact, this would have been where Sam declared emergency. No pilot liked to do it, and some would rather crash – some did – but with Sam it would have been different. If he couldn’t handle it then it couldn’t be handled. A lot of pilots thought that way, but with Sam it was true and he knew it in a modest way we all admired. But there was no radio contact, and a cynical part of me now wonders if they anticipated problems they’d rather not hear about, whereas any problem reported after the plane had come down wasn’t really a serious problem at all.

  This was. Anybody could see that. And with the binoculars, I knew it better than anyone. It made me glad Sam didn’t have a radio.

  “Oh no. Oh Christ, no.”

  “Captain,” Hobday warned.

  I brought the binoculars down. I didn’t want to see. I even started to back away from the crowd gathered around the welcome wagons, as if I might turn and flee into the desert. Everybody was looking up but they did it with the naked eye. I wanted to tell them what I could see but although my mouth was open I couldn’t get it to do anything else.

  “Come on,” said Hobday. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me towards his jeep. Shoved me at the passenger side. I managed, “No,” but by then I was already sitting down and buckling in, a couple of the others jumping in behind me. “No,” I said again anyway, watching as the Arrow came in at the ground. Then it lifted, more suddenly than I’d have thought possible. An overcompensation that set it spinning, a tossed silver stick flashing sunlight back at us in a Morse code of distress anyone could read. Inertia coupling, I thought – the X-3 Stilleto had shown us how bad that could be, and later it would nearly kill Yeager – but really, I knew different. It seemed to disappear and reappear, showing us long side then rear, so narrow it was barely there except for the cross of its four wings. The kind of tumble that only got worse as you tried to correct it, all aerodynamics gone. When it struck the ground it did it sideways. The flimsy wings broke away as it rolled but first they steered the Arrow like it was a rolled skittle pin, digging chunks out of the runway before it was thrown back up into the air, cartwheeling across the ground in clouds of dirt and dust before finally breaking apart into fiery pieces that screamed flames.