Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  I was wrong, Tama said. Humiliated, Amanda whispered.

  Sarah glared at her husband, fighting despair. “I want to learn!” she said. “I’m going to learn! If you won’t teach me I’ll find someone else.”

  Cliff kissed her on the forehead as if she were a tired child. He put his arm around her and chucked her under the chin. “Okay,” he said. “You can take your first lesson on Charlie’s twenty-first birthday.”

  He was eluding her. The Starduster was taking him away from her in a new way. The collapse of the Talus had thrown him backward to the sullen playboy. Now he was moving ahead or beyond her, on a wave of pride, confidence, that she could not share, that she almost resented. Why couldn’t she rejoice in his renewed American optimism?

  I was wrong, Tama said. Humiliated, Amanda whispered. The words dislocated everything. “I’m going to fly someday. I really am!” she said.

  A week later, on another sunny Saturday after Cliff had gone to work, a cable arrived from England. FATHER KILLED IN CRASH. FUNERAL TOMORROW DON’T TRY TO COME. MOTHER. A transcontinental transatlantic phone call told her the rest of the story. Working overtime on the redesigned Comet, her father had spent the night before last at the factory, getting snatches of sleep on a cot in his office. Everyone else was doing the same thing, including the engineers who were installing new wing flaps. They had to disconnect the aileron controls to do this and in their exhaustion reattached them backwards.

  The next morning, her father and three members of his design team went up to test the flaps. A crosswind caused the plane to yaw. The pilot tried to compensate with the aileron. The wing responded in the wrong direction. He applied more pressure and the wing struck the ground. The plane cartwheeled across the airport into a line of trees, killing everyone aboard.

  I was wrong, Tama whispered. Sarah threw herself on the bed and wept for the rest of the day. She was still weeping when Cliff arrived around four o’clock. He had heard the news at Buchanan. He held her in his arms and told her how sorry he was. “You see what I mean about planes being dangerous?” he said.

  She wanted to scream insults at him. He was using this tragic accident to destroy her wish, her hope, for freedom. He was frightening her into being an inferior, a passenger, for the rest of her life. Humiliated, Amanda whispered. Would she end up like her, locked in an asylum?

  Somehow this justified more tears. She wept all night and into the next day. She realized her grief made no sense. She had never been close to her father. He was seldom home. But he had always been cheerful and affectionate with her, especially when she was little. He called her Lamby. It was a silly name from a game they used to play. She would sit in his lap and insist she was his lamby pie. He would pretend to eat her.

  Cliff was right about the danger of flying. There was a very good chance that she might kill herself trying to become Billy McCall’s equal. But that only seemed to justify more tears. She thought of Lamby and Billy and Tama’s letter and Amanda’s fate and wept and wept for a world hopelessly out of joint. Her father was dead, his jet plane in ruins, while the Starduster carried Cliff farther and farther away from her.

  Frank Buchanan came to dinner and tried to console her with memories of her father from their friendship in England before the first World War. He talked about going to Ezra Pound’s apartment in Kensington, where they gave an assembly of poets a lecture on aerodynamics. Her father had fallen in love with one of the poets. Frank intimated it was not a platonic attachment. That only made Sarah remember Tama’s suggestion that he probably had a secret love life. She burst into tears and fled to her bedroom.

  After a week of almost continuous weeping, Cliff became seriously alarmed and asked Dr. Kirk Willoughby to arrange a meeting with a psychiatrist. Dr. Eric Montague looked a lot like Willoughby. He was losing most of his hair. His skin was pink, his face round and bland. He gave Sarah pills that stopped the weeping but she remained intransigently gloomy. She declined to tell him why. She said it was none of his business.

  “You have to put your life in perspective, Mrs. Morris,” Dr. Montague said. He talked a lot about perspective. He seemed to think that was Sarah’s problem. He assured her getting the right perspective on her life would banish her depression. He urged her to tell him all her secrets. It was the only way to achieve perspective.

  I was wrong, Tama said. Humiliated, Amanda whispered. How could she trust any of these Americans, even ones with English names like Montague? She would tell him nothing. Especially about Billy McCall. She clutched that pain to her private heart with absolute ferocity. She would use the pills to defeat the gloom and become a dutiful mother and wife again. She would stick to her diet and remain as attractive as possible and every time she saw Billy McCall she would hope he was—what was the American phrase?—eating his heart out.

  Yes. She liked that. She had eaten her own traitor heart in defiance of him. She hoped in the end Billy would be an empty man, flying planes faster and faster and faster to nowhere.

  I was wrong, Tama said. Humiliated, Amanda whispered. From now on Sarah would be right, right, right. Nobly, sacrificially right in the name of private righteousness. No one would ever humiliate her again.

  SAVING THE QUEEN

  On the third floor of the Buena Vista mental hospital, Adrian Van Ness peered through the one-way mirror at his wife. Amanda strode up and down the small bare room shouting orders to an invisible army of Amazon warriors. “We must ride, my darlings. We must ride to revenge our beloved Tama!”

  She was naked as usual. She refused to wear clothes. The wounds she had inflicted on herself still scarred her throat and breast. With a sigh Adrian retreated to the office of the hospital’s director, a tall, owlish German named Farber. Amanda’s mother had died in this asylum. Willoughby had brought her here because he hoped Farber’s experience with the mother might give him some insights into Amanda’s breakdown. That was now a failed hope.

  “The prognosis remains the same?” Adrian said.

  “I’m afraid so,” Farber said.

  For a year, Amanda had alternated between periods of paranoid calm and episodes of manic frenzy. They had tried the new psychotropic drugs on her but they had had almost no effect, beyond calming her. The delusion that she was Queen Califia remained intact.

  “You both recommend the operation?” Adrian asked.

  “I have reservations, moral and medical,” Willoughby said. “For one thing, it’s irreversible.”

  “That’s part of its beauty, my dear fellow,” Dr. Farber said.

  “There are alternatives. Every month they announce a new drug,” Willoughby said.

  “But they don’t affect the delusion,” Farber said. “Whereas on this point the medical evidence is overwhelming in favor of our other alternative.”

  Willoughby said nothing about a third alternative but his eyes accused Adrian. Frank Buchanan had begged Adrian to let him take Amanda away with him and nurse her back to sanity. He vowed to devote the rest of his life to the task. Adrian demurred. He wanted Frank to devote the rest of his life to Buchanan Aircraft.

  “Will I be accused of—of mutilating her?” Adrian asked.

  “Of course not. It is still a medically respectable operation,” Farber said in his heavy German way. “It does not threaten the life or health of the patient. The recovery rate is above ninety-five percent.”

  “She won’t be a zombie, will she? I don’t want a zombie for a wife,” Adrian said.

  “Not if the operation is a success,” Farber said.

  They were talking about a prefrontal lobotomy. It was a very simple operation from a surgical point of view. Amanda would be anesthetized and a steel needle, about the size of a ten penny nail, would be pushed through the front of her brain. The delusion that was consuming her would vanish. If it worked, she would be a docile woman for the rest of her life, capable of happiness albeit on a reduced scale.

  The operation appealed to Adrian for several reasons. Victoria was coming home from Englan
d and he dreaded the idea of her seeing her mother in her violent Queen Califia state. A tranquilized Amanda, living at home with her husband and daughter, was immensely preferable to this madwoman in her cell.

  The operation appealed to Adrian even more as an act of power. Amanda had escaped him by her flight to madness. He liked the idea of recapturing her, even though it meant keeping her as his wife for the rest of their lives. Adrian’s profoundly conservative instincts had no quarrel with that idea. Perhaps most important, it put Amanda forever beyond Frank Buchanan’s reach.

  “Do it,” Adrian said.

  Willoughby grimaced, suggesting he still preferred Frank Buchanan’s option. Adrian found ironic satisfaction in the doctor’s pain. It was a preview of what Frank would feel. On the way back to the factory, Adrian tried to appease Willoughby with some news he knew the doctor would approve. “We’re closing the Honeycomb Club,” he said.

  For several years Willoughby had been telling Adrian the club was a mistake. He had documented numerous broken marriages and an unacceptably high rate of alcoholism among its members. Amanda’s homicidal diatribe had forced Adrian to accept his responsibility for it. “I expected a tantrum from Buzz McCall but he didn’t say a word,” Adrian said.

  “He hasn’t sobered up since Tama died,” Willoughby said.

  The next morning at Buchanan Aircraft, Adrian confronted another decision laden with future insomnia attacks: the design and production plans for the Starduster. It was a beautiful plane, of course, as beautiful as anything the company had ever built. But it was expensive. The SkyRanger, the pioneering all-metal plane that had saved the company in the 1930s, sold for fifty thousand dollars. The Starduster’s price tag was 3.8 million dollars. The development costs would be a minimum of twenty million dollars—and Frank Buchanan’s memorandum warned of unknowns in the turboprop engine that could significantly raise this figure.

  Adrian sat there, contemplating the design. The huge Allison engines seemed to dwarf the short wing. Was this another hot plane like the Scorpion, which was still killing a pilot a week in Germany? His chief designer assured him it was the opposite—a plane that any decent pilot could fly safely. The monster propellers—fourteen feet long—would sweep a tremendous airstream under the short wings. The wing itself was a completely new airfoil, remarkably low in drag-to-weight ratio.

  The net assets of Buchanan Aircraft—the value of its buildings, equipment, and property—were no more than thirty million. To build this plane, Adrian Van Ness would have to bet his company on his salesmen’s ability to sell it to the world’s airlines. That in turn depended on whether it could compete with the long-range jets that Boeing and Douglas were building.

  As Adrian sat there contemplating the plane that could destroy him, he saw Amanda, sedated, her skull shaved, on the operating table. Dr. Farber approached, his thyroid eyes glittering above his face mask. He saw the terror in Amanda’s eyes—and the rage.

  Adrian shuddered and almost became ill. But he continued to watch in fascination as the steel needle was pressed against Amanda’s temple, then slowly, steadily, tapped into the frontal lobe.

  It was over. He had become this woman’s master. His docile wife who would henceforth symbolize his mastery over all women—and most men.

  That morning in the spring of 1957, Adrian Van Ness could with some justification have been called insane. His mother’s death, Tama’s suicide, Amanda’s madness had catapulted him into a new spiritual dimension, a world of desperate, haunted need.

  Suddenly he saw how he could guarantee the Starduster’s success. He rushed up the two flights of stairs to the glass-walled executive dining room. Frank Buchanan and his designers were in their usual huddle around the bar, Buzz McCall and his engineers disdainfully drinking before the opposite windows. Cliff Morris, Dick Stone, and others were in smaller groups. Everyone turned to the door as Adrian entered, their eyes bright with anticipation.

  Adrian walked over to Buzz McCall, the man who had told him he had no guts because he canceled the Talus. “How are things going with the SkyMaster program?” This was another generation of big transports they were building for the Air Force.

  “Couldn’t be better. We’re two months ahead of schedule.”

  “Good. We’re going to need half your engineers for the Starduster.”

  “Are you changing the design?”

  Adrian shook his head. “We’re going to have the most elaborate preflight testing program in the history of aviation. We’re going to sell this plane on the basis of its safety! By implication, we’re going to be telling people that the jets aren’t as safe. The Starduster’s going to be the only plane in the world that can claim it’s crash proof.”

  “I don’t think you can—or should—say that about any plane,” Jim Redwood said.

  “I agree,” Buzz McCall said. “Until you get perfect pilots, planes are always gonna crash.”

  “I intend to say that about this plane—and prove it!” Adrian said.

  He pointed to Buzz McCall and his engineers. “I want you to come up with tests no one’s ever tried before. I want someone to attack the fuselage with an ax while it’s under pressure—to prove it won’t disintegrate like the Comet. I want landing gear strong enough to carry six tons more than the plane’s gross weight. I want those wings twisted on racks, loaded with tons of sandbags and put into simulated four-hundred-mile-an-hour dives. I want a one-sixteenth scale model put through a hundred thousand wind tunnel tests. Forget about costs. Just concentrate on proving that this is the world’s safest airplane!”

  “Brilliant!” Jim Redwood boomed.

  “Fantastic!” cried Bruce Simons, their raffish public relations director, who drank almost as much as Redwood.

  “I like it,” Cliff Morris said.

  Adrian appreciated but discounted this praise. Redwood, Simons, and Cliff were all students of the power curve. For some reason he did not entirely understand, he wanted Frank Buchanan to say something even more extravagant. But his chief designer turned away without a word.

  After lunch, Frank caught Adrian at his office door. “How’s Amanda?” he asked.

  The question unnerved Adrian more than a challenge to his plans for the Starduster. “The same. But I have some hopes of bringing her home soon. They’ve developed a new therapy that seems effective.”

  “What is it? Another drug? I have grave reservations about them. I question whether we should let the doctors play God with other people’s minds.”

  “It—does involve drugs,” Adrian said, an evasion at best.

  “My offer still stands, Adrian,” Frank said. “I feel I’m as responsible as you.”

  “I don’t think either one of us is responsible,” Adrian snapped. “It’s an inherited disease.”

  “That’s a trivial explanation,” Buchanan said. “I prefer a spiritual answer. She’s in revolt against the real world because between us we’ve made it intolerable for her.”

  “I have no such guilty feelings,” Adrian lied. “Maybe I should have spent more time with her. But I had an aircraft company to keep alive.”

  “Are you sure she’s not worse? All last night I heard her calling my name. This morning, around six A.M. it suddenly stopped. I wondered if she’d died.”

  “She’s quite well,” Kirk Willoughby said, from the doorway to the stairs. “I saw her this morning at the sanitarium.”

  “I’m—glad to hear it,” Frank said and retreated down the stairs.

  Willoughby followed Adrian into his office. “Is she all right?” he said.

  “She’s out of the anesthetic and quite calm. She recognized me. She didn’t react negatively when I mentioned your name. She smiled when I mentioned Victoria.”

  “When did they do it?”

  “Very early. About six A.M.”

  Adrian struggled for calm. “Do you believe Buchanan’s story? Do you believe in psychic communication?”

  “No.”

  “It’s done. We can both li
ve with it, can’t we?”

  “We can try,” Willoughby said.

  Two days later, Dr. Farber was on the telephone, informing Adrian that the operation was a “complete success.” Adrian soon learned that the medical world measured success in ways quite different from the aircraft business. Amanda emerged from the surgery tranquilized, her violent fantasies obliterated. In fact she was so passive she refused to get out of bed for the first several days. But firm nursing soon overcame this reluctance.

  Amanda had another reaction that Farber said was not unusual in lobotomies, although it seemed bizarre to Adrian—extreme tactile sensitivity. She screamed in agony when an adhesive bandage was removed. She could not endure even the slightest squeeze of her arm, her hand. In a word, her skin was so sensitive to pain she was untouchable.

  “There is one other problem,” Farber continued in his bland professional way. “About thirty percent of those who have lobotomies became extraordinarily outspoken. Their inclination to physical violence vanishes, but in an interesting compensation, they develop a tendency to make cruel and tactless remarks. Amanda seems to be among this thirty percent.”

  Was that a mocking smile in Willoughby’s eyes? For a moment Adrian was tempted to get a new medical director. “In the aircraft business, we call these unpleasant surprises unk-unks,” Willoughby said.

  Two weeks later, Adrian brought Amanda home from the hospital. When he arrived to pick her up, Dr. Farber revealed a final qualification of the completely successful operation. “I think she can deal with most social situations. But I must make one recommendation. I don’t think she can handle sexual intercourse. Aside from the pain you might cause if you touched her too aggressively, it might arouse memories in the deepest part of her psyche. We don’t really understand how the brain—the mind—works.”

  For a moment Adrian hoped Willoughby would challenge Farber on this prohibition. But Willoughby said nothing. Did he think Adrian Van Ness was getting exactly what he deserved? Was he sitting in judgment on him in Frank Buchanan’s name? Struggling for composure, Adrian took Amanda home. Around-the-clock nurses guaranteed her safety. She was quiet and completely submissive. She spent most of her time watching television, mostly game shows and sitcoms. She had no interest in the news. When she asked why she could not remember so many things from the past, Adrian blamed a head injury in a car accident.