by Tom Miller
“Well done, Professor!” one of the more experienced women yelled. “Quick as ever.” The rescue flier yelled something back, but the wind took it.
The girl climbed out of the water covered in muck, gave us a curtsy, and went to stand with the Zeds.
I was last in line, but in the fifteen minutes I’d had to look over my gear, I still couldn’t figure out the regulator.
“Psst,” I said to the woman in front of me. She was a rail-thin, anxious-looking dishwater blonde. “Where’s the regulator lever?”
“What?” she whispered back.
“Where’s the lever?”
“What lever?”
“How do I set the regulator to four ounces per minute?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, looking at me skeptically. “It’s a double-dial system. Turn the outer one clockwise four clicks. The inner ring sets tenths.”
I turned the dial. A thin, steady stream of powder spilled out of the tip. I turned it off again. Less precise than the lever regulators I’d grown up using, but much more forgiving. No risk of bumping the lever with your thumb and becoming the first man to land on the moon.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re sure you’ve done this before?” the woman asked.
I flew my course without incident.
For a Two, we had to climb to one hundred feet, spin in a complete circle while stationary, then roll to forty-five degrees and make one banked turn in each direction. Two girls got to about twenty feet, decided they couldn’t go on, and put right back down. Another got snarled in her starboard turn and had to be righted by Professor Brock. A fourth lost her sigil entirely and started to fall. Brock had been staying very close to her; she reached out, caught the falling girl’s shoulder strap, and clipped onto her harness almost before we’d realized anything was wrong. She returned the girl to the ground to a warm round of applause. Brock smiled politely and climbed back to her station.
“She’s only smiling because she got to touch Jamie’s bosom,” whispered one of the jokers. “Brock’s the biggest Sapphist in the whole college.”
My own flight was uneventful, though my thigh straps rode up during my turns and stuck. I winced when I landed.
“How are your balls, Ace?” Jake yelled. She’d appeared out of nowhere, having skipped both of the qualifying rounds that were supposedly mandatory.
There were six fliers left. Rachael lined us back up.
“Is anyone here attempting to qualify as a Three?” she asked. No one answered. Someone at the end of the line cracked a joke that I couldn’t hear. A couple of the fliers tittered. Rachael reddened. “Is anyone attempting to qualify as a Three?” she snapped.
“I am,” I said. Someone down the line hissed.
“Very well,” Rachael said. “Those wishing to attain the grade of Three must undertake one of the following.”
We had the option of performing two approved aerobatic maneuvers; or, climbing to five thousand feet and returning to the ground in under a minute (which would require a difficult, diving descent); or, picking up a hundred-pound sack, lifting it to two hundred feet, and setting it down in a five-foot-by-five-foot landing zone. I’d essentially done the last one every day since I was ten, only with sacks not as nice as the ones supplied by the college.
“Ladies,” said the instructor. “I will not tolerate showboating. If you try something flashy, you will not receive a Three. Let’s set a good example for the younger women. You’re first.” She pointed to the nervous sophomore who’d showed me how to use my regulator.
“I’m first,” said Jake, and pushed off the ground. She came up hard to two hundred feet and did a beautiful inverted pike flip-spin—flying upside down and backward, kicking into a somersault and cartwheel at the same time, tumbling and whirling, before snapping back into perfectly controlled level flight. She followed that with a Rappaport loop in trois-point stance, a maneuver so complicated that my mother had once assured me it was impossible. On her landing, Jake bowed in midair and set down doing a handstand.
“Jacobi!” Rachael shouted. “Those were not approved maneuvers!”
“Then add them to your little list,” retorted Jake. “Let me spell it for you: it’s R-A-P-P—”
“Enough!” barked Rachael. She motioned for the next woman in line to proceed.
The next flier did a death spiral, leveled out, then did a second death spiral, pulling out inches above the ground to screams of terror from the Zeds and Rachael.
“That was only one maneuver!” objected Rachael, after she’d regained her voice.
“The regulations don’t say two different maneuvers,” the young woman said, “only two maneuvers.”
Rachael squinted at the paper and looked as if she would tear it in half. The third flier rigged the sandbag on an extra-long line, took it to altitude, and came hurtling down, hammering the bag into the ground right in the middle of the square so that it split open and sent up a shower of sand. The flier landed lightly next to it.
“It says I have to put the bag in the square, not that it has to be intact,” she said, before anyone could object. There was a delay as Rachael went into the building and wheeled out a fresh hundred-pound bag on a dolly.
The next woman rocketed up to five thousand feet and then disappeared. Was it possible we’d lost her in the sun? I scanned the sky but couldn’t find her.
Beside me Rachael was frantically doing the same. “Uh oh, uh oh!” she squawked.
“Uh oh, uh oh!” said someone standing behind me in the same parrot voice as before. It was the missing hoverer. Rachael went from sickly gray to bright red.
“The regulations say I have to be back on the ground in under a minute,” said the flier. “There’s nothing against transporting down.”
The instructor looked like she was ready to explode. “You,” she hissed, pointing at me. “Go.”
I thought I had it pretty well figured out: if you wanted to impress the other experts, you did something flashy. Rachael wasn’t really going to fail any of the experienced fliers—she just had to put on a good show in front of the new girls.
I ran a twenty-foot line from my back clips to the sandbag, then launched and climbed hard. I accelerated full-out in the horizontal plane before pulling back sharply, sending the bag shooting upward in an arc with me at the center somersaulting backward. I took the bag through one full orbit. Pendulum flip—I’d spent all of July practicing it. I flipped the bag a second time for good measure, then twisted out, brought my line back under control, and set it neatly in the landing square.
Rachael was white as chalk.
I sauntered over to Jake and the other experts. One looked more shocked than the next.
“That’s not something freshmen do,” Jake said. Not reproachful, exactly, but with a warning tone.
The last woman did a forward somersault followed by a reverse somersault, only she came straight down and landed quietly.
“Very nice,” said Rachael. “Now, Ones through Threes line up for the safety quiz. If you answer incorrectly you will automatically receive a rating of Zed.”
She had a list of questions that she read off the sheet as she moved down the line. Each of us answered one. They were simple and practical. Why do hoverers never wear metal buttons? (Spark hazards.) What amount of powder does a hoverer use per one hundred pounds of ground weight flying average high-efficiency? (Two ounces per minute.) When loading two passengers, where should the heavier one go and why? (On the back due to improved in-flight balance.) No one missed.
When she got to me, Rachael asked, “What would you do if your regulator tip jammed due to wet powder during a lengthy flight?”
“Switch to my secondary bag,” I said without hesitation. There were a few snorts up the line from people who knew the textbook answer. The examiner made a note on her clipboard.
“What would you do if you didn’t have a secondary?” she asked.
My mother had taught me the answer to that one, too
: “Then I wouldn’t fly cross-country.” Rachael made another note.
“That concludes today’s assessment,” she said. “I will now assign you a grade from Zed to Three. Stand together according to grade, please.” She went down the line giving each woman a rank. Despite her threats about showboating, the experts all got Threes. Then Rachael stopped in front of me. She looked at me with contempt, straight in the face.
“Zed,” she spat.
The water around my eyeballs went hot. I damned myself for not having been on my best behavior. One thing to do a reckless maneuver if you were a woman, but quite another if you were the solitary man. I tried to steady myself. If I broke down in front of everyone, I could only imagine what they would say.
A couple of Zeds whispered and shook their heads.
“Three!” shouted Jake.
I swallowed and tried to keep my face a flat mask.
The other Threes shouted “Three” as well.
Rachael smiled icily. “Zed,” she repeated. She turned to Professor Brock, who had landed behind her, for confirmation. Brock—stout, broad-shouldered, double-chinned, and topped by a mess of thinning hair—shook her head and held up three fingers. I’d never seen someone more beautiful.
“Three,” Rachael said, seething.
Still dazed, I walked over toward the women who’d qualified as experts ahead of me. They’d all lit up Cuban cigars. The biggest, the stolid blonde who’d smashed the sandbag, was nearly as tall as me. She held the cigar box tucked under her arm.
“The correct answer,” she said, “is pump the manual discharge valve on your regulator three times to clear the jam and land immediately.”
“The correct answer,” said the girl next to her, who had high cheekbones and straight black hair like the Salish Indians I’d known in Billings, “is skip the hundred-dollar regulator and fly in the old style.”
“The correct answer,” said a middle-aged redhead who was missing several teeth and looked like she’d recently had her nose broken, “is curse out that bastard of a nozzle until its jaw drops and it opens back up.”
“The correct answer,” said Jake, “is that Rachael didn’t get her Three until the fifth try and only an idiot would hire her as an examiner. And might I add that the correct question is whether bold Mr. Weekes gets a cigar.”
“Hey von Viking,” said the redhead, “do men get to smoke?”
The big one shrugged. “Do you smoke?”
I didn’t. I debated whether I’d cause myself greater embarrassment declining or taking one and smoking it badly.
“We’ve never let freshmen smoke,” Jake supplied. “And Astrid, might I observe that the point of the cigars is that they’re supposed to get nicer over the course of the year. Setting the bar with a forty-dollar box makes life hard for the rest of us.”
“Astrid can afford it,” said the black-haired girl. “She’ll go home and pump the manual discharge valve on dear old Liam and he’ll give her whatever she wants.”
“Yes,” said Astrid, “but I’ll have to pump it more than three times to clear it.”
That got a raucous laugh from the other women and a tentative one from me.
It took us a moment to notice that one more girl had joined us—the polite, conservative flier. She looked terrified.
“Essie!” shrieked Jake, running to hug the new girl. “Congratulations.” Essie hugged her back stiffly.
Astrid trimmed a cigar, lit it, and handed it to Essie, who took a tiny puff and spat out a mouthful of smoke. Jake drew deeply on her own cigar and blew a series of smoke rings. Essie tried to do the same, but ended in a fit of coughing.
“Honey, stop,” said Jake, taking the cigar away. “You’re turning green.”
The Zeds, Ones, and Twos were each led inside the aerodrome in turn. Jake and company recollected which of the novices they had coached and in what areas they needed further work. After a couple of attempts to get a word in edgewise, Essie fell silent. I was pleased to see that her color was coming back, but she was looking at me with unsettling intensity.
“I thought you were going to crash when you did that flip—all of us did. But you were really good,” Essie said, as if such a thing ought to be impossible.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m the fifth best hoverer in my family.”
“Why did you learn that trick?” she asked me. “It’s not very pretty and I can’t imagine it has any practical use.”
“Drogue landing,” I said at the same time as the woman holding the box of cigars.
“And demolition,” I said.
“And it’s good practice if you ever have to fly a stringer,” the big woman said. It would seem we flew much in the same style. She smiled kindly and shook my hand. “I’m Astrid van Dyke.”
“You mean Astrid Bonner,” the redhead cut in.
Astrid punched her in the shoulder, not gently. “I’m not taking his name. We’ve talked about this.”
It was as motley a group as I could have asked for. Astrid had come from a village in central Pennsylvania as a four-year Contingency student—take a Bachelor of Empirical Philosophy degree and then do four years of service. She was getting married in the spring.
The redhead’s name was Francine Dubois. She hailed from Lowell, Massachusetts, a tough mill town where she’d worked as the municipal equivalent of a county philosopher. Thirty-five years old, divorced, with two children back home in the care of their grandmother. She’d come as a four-year Contingency, too, the oldest in the class of 1918. She was largely self-taught in her book learning, but had a vicious intelligence when she decided a subject was worth the bother.
The lean, dark-haired woman was Tillie Blackroot, another Contingency, out of Oklahoma City. Five-eighths Cherokee and a fourth-generation flier. Her family was the sort that painted their address on their roof rather than beside the door, operating on the assumption that visitors were more likely to drop out of the sky than come by foot. She had the tightest, most efficient lines of anyone I’d ever met and could blaze past even Jake on a long enough straight line.
And the polite nonsmoker was Essie Stewart, a sophomore from the staid Boston neighborhood of Back Bay.
“Essie isn’t Contingency, but we like her anyway,” said Tillie.
“Couldn’t fly at all until we got hold of her,” said Francine.
Rachael called the Threes into the aerodrome. There was a locker room down the hall in one direction; in the other was a large classroom lined with pegboard panels on which were hung all manner of tackle, lines, and harnesses. Straight ahead was a counter with a storeroom behind, filled with hundreds of barrels, boxes, and sacks. In the middle of the counter was the sort of bell you’d ring at a hotel to summon the desk clerk.
Rachael recorded each of our names in a logbook, then printed them on certification cards and signed her name. Professor Brock stood next to her and countersigned each. When she came to me, Brock tried to put on a serious face.
“Weekes, is it?” said Brock. “You almost decapitated me with your flip.”
“Almost,” I said politely.
Brock shook her head, suppressing a smile. “You may fit in too well here. All I ask is that you warn me next time before you try to give me a stroke.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll warn you right now: I want to join R&E.”
“And I want a pretty French maid to cook me dinner,” Brock answered. She signed the card and pushed it across the table.
“I’m not joking,” I said.
“Oh Mother of God,” Brock said. “Do you have any idea how difficult it would be—”
Brock was cut short by the sound of Jake furiously ringing the bell on the counter beside us and crying out, “Quartermaster! Quartermaster! Where’s the damn quartermaster of the day?”
Rachael slammed the logbook shut and took the bell away. “You know very well I’m in charge of supplies today. What do you want?”
“Six forty-pound powder bags,” said Jake.
“That
’s not reasonable!”
“I don’t have to be reasonable, I just have to sign for it!” retorted Jake. “Besides, I’m saving you paperwork by ordering all of them myself.”
“You haven’t even filed a flight plan!”
“Bring me the powder and I’ll file.”
Rachael weighed out measures of sand and corn powder on the spring scales in the storeroom, then dumped the powder into a large hand-cranked mixer, which combined them with a set of rotating paddles and discharged the mixture into a bag. It was work I’d done thousands of times and knew to be physically taxing and unpleasant under the best of circumstances. By the time Rachael had heaved the sixth forty-pound sack onto the counter I almost felt sorry for her.
“Miss Jacobi, I need a flight plan before I hand any of this over,” she insisted, indicating a clipboard holding a stack of forms.
“Improvisatory aerobatics,” said Jake, writing the same on the topmost form.
“That’s not a flight plan! I need anticipated range, accompanying fliers, estimated time of return—”
“It means I’ll fly where I like, with whom I like, and come back when I damn well please,” said Jake. She tossed the form over the counter, handed the clipboard to Francine, and helped herself to one of the forty-pounders.
“Same for me,” said Francine, scrawling on another form. “I can’t spell it, but ‘improvisatory aerobatics.’ ” Astrid and Tillie agreed heartily. Essie agreed meekly then filled in the rest of the information. I wrote “improvisatory aerobatics” like the rest.
“Just stop a moment and I’ll show you how,” said Rachael. “You won’t last a minute around here if you don’t pay attention to paperwork. Besides, you’re not really interested in aerobatics, are you?”
“I am now,” I said. I took the sixth bag off the counter and left her fuming in my wake.
• • •
The morning having turned warm and Jake being in the mood for a swim, she settled on Sagamore Beach as our destination. We launched and formed a loose line abreast. It was a beautiful day for hovering, calm and mild, with the sun off our left shoulders. Jake set her speed at two hundred miles an hour, which was quite a relaxed pace for everyone except me. I flew full-out, head down, streamlining as tightly as I could, but fell farther and farther behind. Jake took pity on me and backed off the group to half speed.