Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  That was a ridiculous attempt at compromise. Say something else, something that will let him call you and somehow give you the right to refuse. But there were no second chances with Billy. “Okay,” he said.

  He stood there for another moment, the smile not quite as confident, his eyes almost sad. A force more powerful than will or ideas flung Sarah against him. She crushed her lips against that unyielding mouth.

  Sobbing, she fumbled in her purse for her car keys. Billy found them for her. “See you around,” he said.

  FREEDOM FLIGHT

  “Will it work in Moosejaw?”

  Frank Buchanan’s shout made the fluorescent lights in the plasterboard ceiling vibrate. Sam Hardy, the designer in charge of the ailerons on the Talus, trudged out of Frank’s office looking as if he would be happy to impale himself on the nearest sharp object. Dick Stone did not know exactly what was wrong but he knew Frank was talking about Moosejaw, Canada, where the temperature was 40 below zero most of the winter. Ailerons had to work in that sort of weather—and in desert heat and equatorial humidity.

  It was 8 P.M. and no one in the design department—at least the part of the department surrounding Frank Buchanan’s office, where he kept his brightest people—showed any sign of going home. The designers called the area the Black Hole, after the infamous torture site in Calcutta. Some years later, when astronomers used the name for the mysterious time warps in space created by dead stars, the designers said both meanings were true.

  Dick sat in his office just beyond this fluorescent-lit arena tapping data into a new machine he had persuaded Adrian Van Ness to buy, a Miller McCann computer. People in the design department used it too. It saved them hours of slide rule computations. That was one among several reasons why Dick had moved his office out of the executive tower to the edge of the Black Hole.

  His main reason was his desire to learn as much as possible about the complications of creating a new plane. By now he knew a lot. He understood the perpetual struggle to anticipate problems like the weather in Moosejaw. He saw why there were so many designers needed to back up Frank Buchanan. He created the original concept of the plane. But every square inch of the creature had to be harmonized with the rest of it. A tail, a flap, a window, required hundreds of drawings by teams of men.

  Each day Frank held design conferences with the leaders of the teams. There was a standing rule that nothing on the plane could be changed if those whose work it affected had any objections. If the man in charge of the landing-wheel system wanted to extend the struts an inch or two for what seemed to him a very good reason, everyone concerned with that area of the plane had a vote—and it was frequently negative. The resulting brawls could be spectacular.

  That was only round one. When the engineering department began changing things, proclaiming this or that solution would not work, a firestorm of rage invariably swept the design department. The test pilots also had their say. Most of the time they complained about the cockpit, which was never designed to their complete satisfaction. Invariably, because Buzz McCall was a pilot, the engineering department backed them up.

  Day after day, Dick was appalled to see thousands of blueprints representing ten times that many man-hours dumped in wastebaskets. Wind-tunnel tests, using scale models, often forced rude reevaluations on everyone, designers and engineers. These were the “unknowns” that only became apparent once a plane was exposed to some of the stresses it faced in the sky. When the real thing began to fly, there were likely to be more shocks—“unk-unks”—the unknown unknowns that revealed hidden flaws in the design or unidentified forces in the sky.

  But no one in the Black Hole, even those who got the Moosejaw bellow several times a day, really complained. Frank Buchanan was working longer hours than men half his age. His enthusiasm for the Talus, his vision of a new kind of plane that would surpass in efficiency and safety everything now in the air, galvanized everyone.

  Dick’s telephone rang. “This is Kirk Willoughby,” a voice said. “Remember me? The company sawbones? You haven’t sent me that memo on the Honeycomb Club.”

  “I don’t get it. Are you working for Dr. Kinsey on the side?”

  “Just collecting opinions, pro and con. Believe it or not, some people think we ought to shut it down. They’re afraid to say it in public because Buzz McCall will call them pansies. I’m also worried about its effect on the women. A lot of people have been getting letters from someone who calls herself Califia. She sounds a bit homicidal to me. We’d have a hell of a mess if someone got murdered and the tabloids got their hands on the story. Can’t you see the headlines? Cost plus sex at Buchanan Aircraft.”

  Dick hung up and computed his latest cost projection on the Talus. It was so appalling, he decided not to show it to Frank Buchanan. It would only trigger another tirade on the futility of predicting costs on a radically new plane. At 10 P.M. Dick left the designers burning the midnight fluorescence in the Black Hole and drove down the boulevards to his one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan Beach.

  He had moved into the Villa Hermosa, a complex of three-story buildings a few blocks from the ocean. Most of the residents were airline pilots, stewardesses, and middle-level aircraft company executives. Almost all were single. Dick was amazed by the offhand way everyone slept around. Sexual liberation pervaded all branches of the aircraft business.

  As he drove through the warm California darkness, the cool sea wind caressing his face, Dick felt desire gathering in his belly, crowding his throat. Cassie Trainor would be waiting for him beside the pool tonight. For the past six months he had been sharing Cassie with Cliff Morris. That meant she agreed not to date anyone else from the Honeycomb Club.

  For the first three months Dick had liked it. Cassie just seemed to want to screw. That was all Dick wanted to do too. He did not want to think about it. He wanted to enjoy this strange new world of sexual freedom on its own terms. Cassie was tireless. If he wanted to do it two, three, four, five times a night she was perfectly agreeable. She was always ready for one more. “Come on, go for the record,” she would whisper mockingly. “Show up the Big Shot.”

  That was her nickname for Cliff. She had begun to talk about him and other members of the club. It broke Dick’s concentration on pure physical pleasure and made him think about the whole arrangement. He was not interested in going for records or showing up his friends. Some members apparently thrived on this sort of stuff.

  Dick changed to bathing trunks and found Cassie lounging beside the pool, the social center of the Villa Hermosa. She was listening to a TWA copilot describe his latest narrow escape trying to land in Pittsburgh or Chicago or Raleigh. “The fog was so goddamn thick the propellers sliced it like it was sausage meat. We had enough ice on the wings to throw a skating party—”

  “Wait’ll you see the Talus,” Dick said. “No worries about ice, ever again. We’ve got heating coils in the wings that melt it at the flip of a switch.”

  “Is that supposed to excite me?” Cassie drawled. She was wearing a blue lastex two-piece bathing suit. The bottom half was cut to the minimum, making her long tawny body resemble a Modigliani painting.

  “I thought heat excited you,” Dick said.

  “Just about anything excites Cassie,” said Sue, a Pan American stewardess who was currently sleeping with the copilot. She was a honey-blond with a hefty wide-waisted torso and good breasts.

  “What excites you?” Cassie said. “A full planeload of ginks lookin’ up your dress?”

  “No,” Sue said.

  “Then shut up about what excites me.”

  “Sorry,” Sue said.

  “Maybe you excite me,” Cassie said. “Maybe that’s where I’m goin’.”

  “Not tonight, I hope,” Dick said.

  She looked at him with surprising distaste. “No. Not tonight,” she said. He realized Cassie was drunk. It was not the first time she had showed up this way. But it was the first time booze had not put her in a good humor.

  “I think I’l
l take a swim,” Dick said. He did two laps in a lazy Australian crawl. “Come on in,” he called to Cassie.

  She was still working on Sue. “Why the hell don’t you get a job where you get paid for doin’ it?” she said. “That’s why you’re on the goddamn plane but they don’t pay you any real money for it.”

  “I think you ought to try diddling yourself for a change,” Sue said.

  With a lunge worthy of an offended tigress, Cassie raked Sue’s face with her nails. The stewardess screamed and fell into the pool. Cassie dove on top of her and held her head under the water. “Hey, you’re drowning her!” the bewildered copilot yelled and leaped on top of Cassie to rescue his girl. After a lot of thrashing he managed to pry her hands off Sue’s throat.

  “Get her out of here,” Sue screamed, clutching her bleeding face.

  Appalled, Dick led Cassie to his apartment. “What the hell is the matter?” he said.

  “Nothin’. Nothin’ for you to worry about,” Cassie said. She pulled off her bottom, slipped out of her top and stood there, hands on her hips, naked. “Let’s do it,” she said.

  “Wait a minute,” Dick said. “Wait a couple of minutes. I’m not exactly in the mood after seeing you practically commit murder.”

  “Ain’t that too damn bad. I thought you were a war hero. Forty-nine missions with the Big Shot? Why should you be bothered by a little friendly killin’? In case you’re interested, this is my forty-ninth mission for the Honeycomb Club. I’ve been keepin’ a record. Maybe you’ve noticed I’m kind of interested in records.”

  “I have noticed that,” Dick said. “But something’s gone wrong. You were flying high until tonight.”

  “How the hell would you know?”

  “I guess I wouldn’t. I thought you didn’t want to talk about anything.”

  “I don’t,” Cassie said. “Let’s fuck. I’m ready when you are.”

  It was the first time Dick had heard a woman say fuck. It only confirmed how disturbed, maybe crazy, Cassie was. “I’d like to know what’s wrong first.”

  “Nothin’!”

  “That’s obviously bullshit.”

  Cassie walked over to the window and stared down at the pool. “It’s a sort of anniversary. But I can handle it.”

  “What happened?”

  “I met somebody three years ago today. He broke my goddamn heart. That’s all. You don’t care. You’d rather have it without any heart. Isn’t that what all you bastards want? A nice smooth fuckin’ machine?”

  “I thought if you liked it and I liked it—”

  “What’s there to like? After the first couple of dozen times you start to feel dead down there. You start to feel death creepin’ up through your whole body. Pretty soon you actually want death to show this certain bastard what he’s done. You know he doesn’t care but that doesn’t matter. You think maybe it’ll make him care—and that’s all you want.”

  Cassie started trembling from head to foot. “Hey,” Dick said. “Hey.” He put his arms around her. “Hey, listen. It isn’t that bad. It can’t be that bad.”

  Cassie had crossed some sort of boundary. She had exceeded some sort of tolerance in her soul. For a moment he wondered if she was Califia, the woman who had sent threatening letters to half the executives at Buchanan. “Listen,” he said. “We don’t have to do it. Let’s just lie down and let me hold you for a while.”

  He led her into the bedroom, his arm around her waist. It was strange. He did not have an erection. Until tonight, he could not look at Cassie naked without getting aroused. Touching her stirred instant desire. Was it all in his head? Dick wondered. Was the other Cassie, the fucking machine with the blank smile and mocking eyes, an ultimate expression of male freedom? While this Cassie, a woman in pain, was something else?

  They lay down in the double bed, face to face, his arms around her. Gradually Cassie stopped trembling. But her tears continued for a long time, a silent bitter stream, eventually soaking the pillowcase. “Why did this guy break your heart?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Cassie said. “I don’t think anybody ever knows till it happens, do they?”

  “That’s the way it works in novels,” Dick said. “But in real life we usually get some warning signals and back off.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better? Tellin’ me it’s my fault?” Cassie said.

  “I don’t mean it that way. I’m trying to help you think about it. Look at it objectively.”

  “Just hold me. That helps more than anything.”

  They lay there, listening to laughter and shouts and splashing from the pool. Airline people lived on such crazy schedules, there were swimmers at all hours of the night. Often Dick was awakened at 3 A.M. by water polo contests between copilots and flight engineers, with stews cheering on the sidelines.

  “Are all Jews this nice to women?” Cassie said.

  “I don’t know. I sort of doubt it,” Dick said.

  “You’re the only one I’ve ever met this close. I never saw one in Noglichucky Hollow.”

  That was Cassie’s Tennessee birthplace. She often compared it to Al Capp’s Dogpatch. “Why did you leave that garden spot?” Dick asked.

  “The only man I cared about got killed in the Pacific. He was a strafer pilot. You ever heard of them?”

  “Sure.”

  “Bravest of brave. Not like you Eighth Air Force cowards bombin’ from twenty thousand feet.”

  “We had some worries at twenty thousand feet. Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts,” Dick said.

  “That’s why this other guy broke my heart. He was a strafer pilot too. I guess I thought I was sort of touching Joe. Then I found out all he wanted to do was fuck me silly. Jesus.”

  Dick held her a little tighter, trying to say he was sorry.

  “You don’t give a damn about all this. Why’re you listenin’?”

  “I like you.”

  “You mean you like to fuck me.”

  “I like to do that too. But I like you for other reasons.”

  “What are they?”

  “You’re honest. You say what you think.”

  “I don’t, most of the time. Tonight it all came out.”

  “That’s still worth a decoration. People aren’t brave all the time.”

  “I like you too, Dick.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you listened tonight.”

  Cassie began kissing him. Sad, gentle kisses at first, her tongue just touching his lips. Her hands roved his body with the same melancholy tempo. He let her make all the moves, sensing that she wanted to offer herself without immediate response from him. Soon her lips and her tongue began following her hands. She licked him like a cat, sighing, occasionally weeping.

  He began to swell. Desire throbbed in his chest. But it had a different timbre. There was an ambiguity in the center of it. Part of Cassie’s soul was reaching out to his soul in the California darkness. From simple screwing they had come to that perilous word, like. It was an unknown in the magical freedom of the air fraternity. Were there unknown unknowns waiting over the horizon, hidden in words like love?

  “Oh. Oh,” Cassie sighed as he entered her. “Oh Dick.”

  It was the first time she had used that name. Until tonight she called him Stone or when she was feeling wry, Mr. Stone. He liked it. He liked the tenderness, the sadness that was intertwined with the pleasure. He liked the sense of entering a new dimension with this woman. Was it another stage of California freedom or the beginning of its loss?

  “Oh now, Dick, now, come now,” Cassie whispered.

  It was the first time she had spoken to him about her desire. It was the first time he had thought about coming as something more than a physical release, a nice climax to the athletic performance. He came and came and Cassie melted in his arms. She cried out with a wild compound of pleasure and sadness and triumph. Had he somehow helped her to escape the hollow in which she had been trapped by war and grief? Dick did not know. He only felt a kind o
f awe at the unknown through which they were both moving.

  For a long time Cassie lay in his arms, silent except for deep, slow sighs. Then she said: “I don’t want to see the Big Shot anymore.”

  “So? Tell him. Isn’t that the way the Honeycomb works? You’re free to say no.

  “He won’t like it. Especially if I stay with you. He’ll hold it against you.”

  “Maybe you ought to get the hell out of that club,” Dick said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re too smart. You can’t not think about it.”

  Cassie chewed on that for a while. “Yes I can,” she said.

  Was he disappointed? Dick wondered. Or relieved? “Tell Cliff. I can handle him if he gets sore,” Dick said.

  “Good luck. Do you want to see me again, in spite of my persistence in whoriness?”

  Dick sensed he was being tested. “Yes,” he said. “If you feel the same way.”

  “Call me when you’re ready,” Cassie said.

  The next morning, after Cassie departed for her own apartment a few blocks from the Villa Hermosa, Dick wrote a memo for Dr. Kirk Willoughby.

  The first time I went to the Honeycomb Club I felt like some rich boys had invited me into their secret tree house. It was full of expensive toys you could not find anywhere else. They told me I could do anything I wanted with these toys. After all, a toy can’t feel anything. The other day a surprising thing happened. One of my toys started to cry. Now I’m not so sure I want to play at the Honeycomb Club any more.

  HOME TO ROOST

  Sarah Morris went through the routine of mothering her two daughters, assisted by fat, earnest Maria, her Mexican maid. But Maria, the children, the house, the sunbaked streets of south Los Angeles, remained unreal. Again and again she was with Billy McCall at 81,000 feet, on the edge of the unknowable.

  Perhaps the most curious thing was the disappearance of her rage against her husband. Was it some kind of ultimate sexual contentment? Or was it the satisfaction of revenge?

  She did not know the answer. She only knew she alternated between being curiously happy and desperately unhappy. The happiness seemed to seize her spasmodically, when she least expected it—when she was giving the baby a bath or reading a book to her older daughter. Happy. A voice seemed to whisper it from a distance, almost mockingly—but not quite. Billy?