by Tom Miller
The Globe called for the Cup to be canceled. Addams put guards on the aerodrome and an extra one on me. The Corps sent three platoons of smokecarvers to see to security at the event itself. By Thursday morning they were setting up a command post in the middle of the landing field.
“Jesus,” Jake said, as she watched the corpswomen unrolling razor wire and the guards patrolling with rifles on their shoulders. “It’s supposed to be amateur athletics, not an invasion.”
• • •
Brock pulled me out of class that afternoon, handed me a map, and said to go immediately, tell no one. I collected my gear and flew twenty minutes west, to a remote marshy patch of land with a landing zone marked with branches and an R in red and white chalk.
Gertrude and Steven were waiting.
“We were up all night at Northwest Aero finishing it, but I think you’ll like it,” Steven said.
He’d hung a garment bag from a tree. I opened it and found a flimsy, iridescent piece of fabric on a hanger. No wool, no leather, no buckles. It looked like a pair of silk footie pajamas. The belly was mottled sky blue and gray, the back green spotted with tan. Camouflage.
“How do I—umm—do I . . .”
“I hope you’re not overly modest, we didn’t design it for anything to go under.”
Gertrude turned her back and I stripped. Even with Steven’s help, I struggled to shove my legs into place.
“Slow and steady pressure to— no, you’ve got it kinked! Pull back and—”
It fit like a second skin.
“How thick?” I asked.
“Two millimeters.”
The arms went easier, which just left a long open seam stretching from neck to waist.
“Snaps or pins or—”
“Self-sealing,” Steven said. “Pull it snug and press the edges together.”
No cap or helmet, rather an attached hood that covered my head and face, leaving only my eyes exposed.
I unlimbered my shoulders and the suit moved with me perfectly. I tried my chest thrust, hip snap, forward lean. No resistance at all.
“Straps for the sandbags?” I asked.
“The tabs on your chest and back. Also self-adhering.”
They had sandbags already filled, so I lifted one into place and pulled at the tab on my suit. It stretched like putty. I wrapped it around the sandbag and stuck the end to my suit. It stayed put.
Steven helped me to kit out with my full 180-pound load and sent me up to ten feet.
“Now cut your regulator and fall!” he said.
That sounded like a horrible idea, but I allowed my sigil to fade. I assumed a crouching position and tensed my body for the terrible jolt that was sure to come.
My knees bent as I hit, but then my legs went rigid as a ripple of force ran through the fabric, absorbing the shock. I straightened against the weight and found my knees were intact, ankles intact. I’d barely felt anything.
“Damn,” I said to Steven. “I love it. Have you ever flown with one?”
“Oh, I can’t hover,” Steven replied. “I don’t have the quanta.” He saw me frown at that. “At least I shouldn’t think . . . well, could you imagine trying to learn at my age?”
• • •
I spent the rest of the afternoon practicing landings and attaching bags. On Friday, I cut class and flew out to the camp. Up and down. Bags on and off. There was no time to waste—the Cup was the next morning.
Brock and Gertrude joined me.
“Nobody’s worked harder than you,” Brock said. “No one could. Try not to get caught up in all the big talk. Sixth place would be a win.”
“There are no guarantees,” said Gertrude. “The Corps invitations to the long-course medalists are only customary. You might win gold and they refuse you an invite. Or maybe they give you one for finishing last.”
Brock nodded. “For strategy: if you and another flier are trying to land on the same approach, cut below her. She’ll have to decide whether to go around or through you. When you land, run clear of the field as fast as you can. If you dawdle, an incoming flier could drop her belly bag on you—and you do not want to be hit by a bunch of twenty-pound sandbags.”
“Don’t worry overmuch about the leaders,” Gertrude counseled. “Macadoo will gain twenty-four seconds on you each leg in the air, Pitcairn nearly the same. You might win a little back with your flare and settle—Macadoo’s a short-courser, so she’s never had to land in competition before.”
“Stay clear of the ugliness,” Brock added. “They’re lucky nobody died in that collision last year. Detroit will be out for revenge and they’ll target Macadoo. Detroit’s number two flier will be their thug; she’ll attack at the second checkpoint, when she has a sandbag as a weapon. Sacramento’s number two will try to protect Macadoo. Pitcairn will move to stay above the carnage and win it.”
“Don’t rely on following the woman in front of you,” Gertrude advised. “Do your own navigation. They’re a bunch of fancy city fliers who can’t read a compass.”
Brock, who was a fancy city flier herself, gave her a dirty look.
“Fly well,” Brock said. “Fly for yourself. And know there’s a nine-year-old boy watching somewhere on the course and he’s going to see you and say ‘I could do that.’ ”
34
As a girl, I was so sickly that the slightest emotional upset sent my whole body into paroxysms of shaking. It was not until I learned to master my passions that I could fly with authority. I took to waking in the morning an hour before my sisters, and a thousand times before they rose, I practiced drawing my sigils.
Lt. Col. Yvette Rodgers, Life and Death on San Juan Hill, 1900
I MADE MY WAY down to the aerodrome at five the next morning and found the place transformed. The landing field had been fenced off and bleachers erected with space for ten thousand people. The other spectators would find vantage points along the river from which to watch—the Globe was predicting a hundred thousand in all. Addams’s guards were out in their red and black uniforms, patrolling the perimeter. They searched my bags and waved me through to the area reserved for the competitors. I’d expected to be the first to arrive, but Essie was already there, perched on Radcliffe’s bench, studying a map of Boston and its environs.
I sat beside her. We watched the sky lighten, but there was no proper sunrise. It was an eight out of eight overcast, with a soft gray ceiling at three thousand feet, heavy gusting wind, and intermittent rain. I’d worn snow pants and my parka over my skysuit; Essie had her winter coat and a kerchief over her head. I paged through Life and Death on San Juan Hill, tracing out the flight sigil over and over. The print was smudged to the point of illegibility in some parts, not that I needed to see the words.
“What are you reading?” Essie asked.
I showed her the cover of my battered old paperback. She gave me the only smile she would let slip all morning. “I must have read that a hundred times as a girl.”
“I read it a thousand,” I said.
Frieda and Tillie made their way up to our bench, hauling thin, twenty-foot-long cases with wheels on the end. I could only think of one thing that size. It was every flier’s dream.
“Are those wings?” I asked.
“Shh,” said Tillie. “Don’t ruin it.”
“It’s never worked,” I said. “Mary Fox tried a dozen times.”
“She used the wrong cross section,” Tillie said. “She tried to make them bird-shaped. Brock did it like an aeroplane wing. If we can get up to ten thousand feet, we can glide all day. This wind is going to be murder on the ascent, though.”
“After you’re done, can I—”
“It won’t fit you. Also, you’re the eighteenth person to ask today.”
The rest of our fliers trickled in and the other teams took their seats, too. You could see flashes of their skysuits—Radcliffe’s red and black, Sacramento’s orange, Detroit’s dark purple, Maria Trestor’s uniquely unfortunate shade of chartreuse. A few women st
retched or did calisthenics, but mostly we waited, huddled against the cold.
At seven the grandstand opened and within minutes it had filled. Danielle sat in the front row, flanked by a pair of guards. I couldn’t spot my mother and Vivian, who’d taken a red-eye transporter run in from Denver, or Angela, who’d flown up from New York, but they were somewhere in the seats.
Tens of thousands more spectators crowded onto the bridges and both shores of the Charles. We could see amateur hoverers streaking across the sky to the long-course landing fields, the list of which had just been released to the general public. (And surely they were packed a hundred deep around the twenty-mile checkpoint, where everyone was saying Detroit would make their run at Macadoo.)
At eight, Radcliffe’s band struck up “Hail, Columbia.” We rose and sang along. The Corps precision hovering squadron from Fort Putnam, which was supposed to do a ceremonial flyover at the end of the song, mistimed their approach and came blasting overhead in the middle of the second verse, detonating a series of blanks in a deafening salute.
“Shoddy formation flying,” sniffed Astrid after we’d regained our hearing. “They were bunched up on the left. We could have put together twelve girls who fly better than that, right, Jake?”
Jake didn’t answer. She and Francine were intent on preparing for the short course; they’d taken out a handheld anemometer to measure wind speed and were lost to the world as they watched it spinning wildly: thirty-one miles per hour, with gusts another twenty miles an hour above.
“You’ve got to wait for a lull,” Jake said to Francine. “Hold in the ready position. When the wind drops, signal and start as fast as you can.”
“Excuse me!” Francine snorted. “I watched my first one of these before you were born. Don’t tell me—”
Uncoachable, Professor Brock had called them, due to a surfeit of natural ability. The announcer called for short-coursers and they were led off to a separate holding pen.
I peered out at the course along the Charles. During the night, Brock and her fellow instructors had set up ten tall, flexible bamboo towers beside the river, keeping the exact configuration of the one-mile slalom course secret from the competitors. The other fliers were buzzing over it.
“That’s the most technical layout I’ve ever seen,” Astrid whispered to me. “Poor Jake. She’s gonna get creamed.”
As we watched the fliers take their warm-up runs, I could see the trick. The course appeared straightforward enough to lull a careless hoverer into a false sense of security, but then placed the fifth turn so tightly that if a flier didn’t start setting up two turns in advance, she was in trouble.
After a few minutes, the course was cleared and the event began in earnest. Each of the eight fliers would make three runs, with their fastest one determining their place. Francine, as the eldest hoverer competing, had the honor of opening the event. She flew all three passes cleanly, though several of her angles were less than ideal and she got blown sideways on her last run.
“Goddamn stupid tradition!” Francine hissed as she retook her seat with us. “That wind’s going to drop and whoever goes last will win.”
“It’s not going to drop,” sighed Tillie, who had taken over watching the wind gauge.
Both of Trestor’s women flew competently, as did a Detroiter. Then Sacramento’s number two—the long-courser who’d traded spots with Aileen Macadoo—stepped up. She wasn’t accustomed to slalom flying and struggled to come out of her turns cleanly. On her final attempt, she pushed too hard and slammed into the fifth pylon. It collapsed, as it was supposed to, but the impact stunned her. She veered out of control.
When something goes wrong in front of a hundred thousand philosophers, there’s a real danger that everyone will spring into action at once. But common sense won out; the crowd stayed on the ground and Brock, who was flying point, swooped in to grab the girl before her sigil died. The young woman, bruised but alive, waved to the crowd and the competition continued after only a brief delay to replace the damaged pylon.
Jake had the misfortune of going next. Her first run was unusually conservative. She looked skittish, making her turns too wide.
“Jake hit a tower really hard last year,” Astrid said. “She’s spooked.”
On her second pass, Jake opened up, accelerating hard, only to flinch at the pylon that the woman before her had hit and make a loose, two-dimensional turn. It cost her so much time that she simply aborted the run.
“You’re thinking too hard, darling,” Francine muttered. “Just fly.”
Jake waited in the starting block for the wind to drop before her final attempt. We were all sweating despite the temperature. Three minutes, then five.
The wind momentarily slowed. Jake’s hand shot up to signal her start.
It was classic Jake—the stretching launch as she flung herself into the air, the lithe, sinewy turns that sliced and dropped like a circus man juggling knives.
“Yes. Yes,” whispered Francine. “Don’t think.”
“Whoopsie,” muttered Astrid at the same moment.
And Astrid—who inclined toward the thinky end of the spectrum herself—had called it three seconds before it happened. Jake, flying so beautifully in the moment, wasn’t set up for the fifth pylon and passed it on the wrong side. We could hear her shriek of rage from eight hundred yards.
“Home field advantage my ass,” Jake spat as she rejoined us. The results, announced a half hour later, did little to cheer her: of the eight fliers, Francine had taken fifth, Jake seventh.
The tug-of-war seemed our best chance to win a spot on the podium—after all, there were three medals for four teams. Radcliffe faced Trestor first. Both sides clipped the rope into their harnesses, then, on the whistle, ascended to twenty feet. On the second whistle they turned and, with their backs to each other, heaved. The theoreticians were faster on the draw, but the Cliffes had more power and applied their advantage steadily, winning a convincing victory.
“Perfect,” Francine pronounced. “Astrid’s got them in fine form.”
Against Detroit and Sacramento, though, we were outclassed; the empirical heavyweights bulled their way through, towing our five behind them. Trestor suffered the same fate and, as expected, it was the two New England schools in the consolation round. The rematch began promisingly, with Astrid’s team exerting their extra power to good effect. Trestor tried to throw them off with a series of left and right jerks, but Astrid had prepared her teammates for just such a strategy—it only lost Trestor ground. Then one of their jerks caused a Cliffe to hang up on the rope. She freed herself, but for a few seconds it was five on four, which threw our other fliers into a panic. The Cliffes lost their composure and Trestor won an upset victory.
Astrid returned with her team, scowling. “That’s what I deserve for taking four freshmen,” she muttered.
Detroit out-pulled Sacramento to win it.
All the while Tillie and Frieda had been watching the wind gauge.
“That’s too fast,” Frieda said. “We said we wouldn’t use them if it was above twenty-five.”
“Do what you want,” Tillie said, “but I didn’t come this far to fly in the old style.”
Tillie uncased her wings. They were built from sheets of hammered steel, thin as a sword on the leading edge. Tillie bolted them to a metal harness that looked like a breastplate and buckled herself in.
The other endurance fliers were outfitted with similarly unusual equipage. Detroit’s women had long pikes that extended from their harnesses several feet past their heads (asymmetric bow wave disrupter, banned 1919–present), Sacramento’s had crests on the sides of their helmets that reached back to their shoulders (cheek canards, banned 1919–present), and Trestor’s had canteens, picnic baskets, and an extra three-inch piece of tubing on their regulators (vortex powder scavenger, banned 1919–present—and subsequently incorporated into every standard-issue commercial regulator). Frieda wore only her regular harness.
They launched
as a group and a fifty-mile-per-hour gust hit them in the opening seconds. Both of Sacramento’s women had their helmets blown right off and had to be assisted to the ground. Tillie’s wings flexed and bowed. Something cracked and fragments of metal came fluttering down.
“That can’t be good,” Astrid said.
But Tillie held her line and climbed through the clouds. The rest of the women headed southeasterly, riding the wind as best they could, each with a race official following to measure distance and carry the flier home when her powder ran out.
Frieda was the first to be brought back. She’d managed eight minutes in the air and fifteen miles covered—not terrible for a woman flying without technological assistance. “Tillie lost part of her stabilizer,” Frieda reported. “She’ll be able to glide, but she’ll have a hard time turning if she finds a thermal.”
“Does she have a chance to win?” Jake asked.
Frieda shook her head. “Detroit’s are going really fast on low settings. The girls from Trestor, though—I think they’re going to fly until next week.” (Only until the following morning, as it turned out. Tillie, nursing her damaged wings through the gusts, managed fourth place.)
But the long-coursers didn’t have time to contemplate the various new innovations. We were taken forward into the corral, issued our maps and compasses, and given five minutes to plot our route. Race officials issued us our bags and regulators, each of which had been carefully inspected. They might be willing to tolerate creativity in the endurance flight, but not the long course.
I shed my coat and snow pants. My body-hugging skysuit occasioned more than a few catcalls and otherwise enlightened commentary from the spectators.
“Jeeeesus—that one ain’t no lady!”
“Show us your skirts!”
“Who’s gonna carry you, sonny?”
Trestor College’s fliers were laughing and pointing, too.
“Radcliffe builds them uglier and uglier, don’t they?” one said to the other.
“Is it a she?” asked the second Trestorite. “It’s got to be a she. But you can see something under there.”