I

HE cut the car switch just as the front wheels nosed through the plant gates. The car, noiseless now, and with slackening momentum, coasted past the buildings, around two corners, and came to rest precisely on the white edge of the concrete apron. So far, so good. Nothing the matter with his judgment this morning.

Mechanics in shapeless, oil-stained brown were busy on the apron. No surprise in that; they were out there every morning. But now, strolling toward them, he could feel excitement in the air. He paused to scratch a light; over the glowing tip his eyes rested speculatively on the cause of it — the new super-speed pursuit job for the Army. Small, wicked, graceful as a dragon fly, it glinted and shimmered in the morning sunlight, the dwarfed body and tiny wings hung on to a massive engine. This was her début. Like a bird from an egg, she was newly hatched from a shell of slide rules and machine shops.

Sweet, was his reaction; sweet, but queer. No airplane had ever looked quite like it. Each part perfect, but somehow the whole did not fit into his brain. It had worried him for days. She was too much of a question mark. The fantastic bid for speed made her exact performance incalculable: the paper work always failed to yield that final link, to divulge the ultimate secret without the gamble of a human life. The fact that she was brand-new, unflown, of itself meant nothing to him.

With cheerful unconcern he had tested other designs and repair jobs one after the other, hundreds of them. That was a test pilot’s job. You took them up, untried, flung them around with the pitiless skill of experience, trying in every conceivable way to break them in the air. If you brought everything back in one piece it was a good plane. Or again, if someone in the drafting room had been too imaginative, you fought like a fiend to get clear of the wreckage in time to pull the parachute ring. Sometimes you jumped clear, and then the industry was richer by valuable knowledge; sometimes you could n’t, and then it was just too bad. Still, there was never a dull moment.

This speed crate, now, was something different again. The thing that worried him was quite simple: at diving speed the wings might blanket the tail, produce a vacuum around it, leave him wrenching at impotent controls. Finish!

The mechanic was busy giving an unnecessary polish to the Townend ring. He looked up, grinning. ‘Meet the bride! Treat her kind and she’ll fly to Hell for you!’

‘Yeah?’ replied the pilot dryly. ‘For or with?’

‘No kiddin’ —’

The pilot steadied his forehead against the leading edge and sighted along the underside of the wing at the tail surfaces. The mechanic opened his mouth, closed it again, and went on with his polishing.

II

The pilot straightened up and moved casually into the hangar and through to the drafting room. Here, as he had expected, was the conference.

The president of the company, pencil in hand, stood by the chief designer’s plot table. Beside him two Army officers, with tanned faces and metal wings on their tunics, bent over the drawings and listened attentively. No idle curiosity, the pilot knew, had brought them there. They had been sent by Washington. This new job sounded well on paper—revolutionary.

He shook hands with them, accepted a cigarette. Beside him stood the chief designer, on whose face and restless hands nervousness was apparent. If his design had failed — suppose that brain child out there on the concrete, blossomed from countless paper calculations, missed in a vital factor — the picture of this man, he knew, would haunt him to his dying day. The pilot looked back at him and grinned. The grin broke an expression that might have passed for boredom.

The president was still glowing with enthusiasm untainted by doubt.

‘Most radical design ever made . . . stride in aviation history . . . military value . . . two-fifty level flight, gentlemen, and that’s guessing low . . . you’ll see for yourselves, though . . . how about it? ’ He turned to the pilot.

‘Sure,’ said the pilot easily. ‘Give me those tail surface curves again.’

The chief designer flicked them over. The pilot studied the curving line on the graph paper. He followed it around with a blunt forefinger. The second finger had been amputated, and there were deep puckered scars over the back of his hand. He examined the calculations minutely. To the right of the vertical line marked ‘300 M.P.H.’ the curve leveled, and along it was penciled ‘Estimated,’ The blunt finger halted there, encircled the word while its owner meditated.

Momentarily the silence tightened. His was the final say-so. Not so glib with sines and cosines, perhaps, but in the air a wizard. His experience was enormous, and they respected it. From Farman box kites to Schneider Cup contenders, from special jobs to stolid tri-motors, he’d flown them all and knew their tricks by heart.

The junior Army man broke the silence. ‘ Going to put her through the power dive?’

The pilot flipped the paper away. The prospect of the great dive, ten thousand feet at open throttle, had been drilling qualms into his scalp all morning. The supreme test of tests, the hallmark of a fighting plane. Now this cub wanted to know —

Aloud he said curtly: ‘Why not? Let’s go!’

He picked up his head mask and led the way to the ramp. Outside, his chute and flying suit were lying ready on the ground.

‘All set to bail?’ inquired the Army officer.

‘Sure!’ The pilot and chief designer exchanged glances. They shared a thought. If anyone could get out of this baby when she was doing seven miles a minute, he’d rate a vaudeville billing. Silently, the pilot climbed into his flying suit.

III

The speed job had been turned round facing the open field. They had just fueled her, and there were gasoline stains on the concrete. The mechanic standing by the engine nodded.

‘All set.'

Another long, careful look from boss to tail, from wing tip to wing tip, his eye trying to get the hang of her as she lay there lounging like a brilliant lizard in the sun. That was the devil of these radical experiments. You could figure them over a hundred times and never know a fraction of what a minute in the air revealed. He ran his eye over the gleaming finish. His, he reflected, would be the first marks on her; the next man in the seat would read his safety guarantee in scuffs and scratches.

Well . . . up with the curtain! They were waiting.

Still he made no move. What was this anyway? Premonition? For a few racing seconds he considered an arbitrary decision — get out! Had to stop sometime or it got you. It got your goat, and then your nerves, and then your judgment, and then the insurance boys paid up and you were just a memory. Seventeen years of flying, ten of them in this testing game. Long enough . . . too long! He was the only one left of the old gang anyway.

The mechanic scraped his shoe uneasily backward and forward on the concrete. The pilot sighed, made a brief circular motion with his forefinger. The mechanic turned instantly.

’Wind her up! ’

The inertia starter moaned into life. From all over the plant people began to gather on the apron. Out of the corner of his eye the pilot noticed the chief designer’s hand gripping the edge of the wing, the knuckles white and hard. Compassionately he thought, ‘Poor devil!’

‘Take it easy, Einstein ... I’ll be seein’ you!’

The designer looked away. He was too old a hand at the game.

From the cockpit the engine sounded fine. The pilot knew it well enough. It had been taken out of a cabin job and mounted here. Thrifty touch, that; no need to risk a new one! He watched the oil temperature rising.

He pulled the stick back to keep her tail down, and opened up. Thunders unleashed, a snarling cataract of sound crashed against the hangar walls. He pushed her right up, then down again, easing the throttle carefully so as not to strip the supercharger gears. He threw the stick around to test the controls. All set. He pulled the chute straps around his shoulders and clipped them to the rest of the harness. There was scarcely room to move inside the tiny fuselage.

He looked up from the instrument panel, caught the mechanic’s eye, gave a little lift of his head. No need to speak. The mechanic caught the signal and away came the chocks from the wheels. The pilot turned his head, nodded casually to the group, and fed her a little gun. She slid off the concrete, the wheels bumbling along over the rough grass. The tiny machine was overheavy forward because of the huge engine; he had to be careful not to nose her over. At the full length of the field he turned into the wind.

He pulled his face mask down and adjusted it carefully. Under his heavy flying suit he was already perspiring, but he could not afford to leave a scrap of skin exposed. Where he was going it would be well below zero. He set his head comfortably on the headrest behind him and gave her the throttle.

She came off sweetly. A few smacks on the undercarriage, then the engine roar deepened and the ground flashed away from the cowling. They had miscalculated her trim a little. He put his hand down quickly and adjusted the stabilizer. She flew under his hand, pliant, responsive — too good, almost, to be true. His senses quickened.

IV

There were scattered clouds at four thousand feet. He drove past them, climbing two thousand feet a minute. The roaring engine rushed him up an invisible slope into cloudless infinity. Solitary and cold, he passed the tenthousand-foot level, and moved on to his placeless rendezvous above. He adjusted gas and air continually; the supercharger caught the thin air, compressing it over and over to give the whirling mass of metal enough to work with. He began to feel in himself the familiar effects of high altitude.

At four miles high he leveled off. It was difficult now, even with rapid breathing, to get enough oxygen. Almost inert, he sat in the open cockpit, conserving every motion. Twenty thousand feet below, the earth was vague, its rugged outline softened by the haze. All that was apparent of the towns, the towering citadels, the fabulous activities of each community, was just a shroud of smoke. Far above the last outpost of life, he flew from nowhere into nowhere, a swift phantom that was real.

Slowly, to save his breath, he stretched out his hand to the scratch pad bolted on to the instrument panel. Laboriously he wrote down the airspeed, R.P.M., throttle setting, and the height. He had come up in record time; the sealed barograph, with its automatic clock, would take care of that.

Tearing like a bullet through this wilderness of space, he had no sense of speed. Even the clouds had abandoned him. In all his infinite kingdom there was not one crumb of substance, for all his sense of mastery, no sign of tribute from the soundless atmosphere. He was on high, lifted to the very zenith of power, yet no fraction of his realm could uphold him for an instant. He might fly on forever, yet he would never pass a living thing, nor see a single shadow. In this pale void, the shimmering circle made by his propeller alone held movement.

His senses split into three main grooves of apperception — the roar, the bitter cold, the utter boundlessness. It crowded him a little now. He pulled the throttle back and floated down. The song of the air through the wires dropped several octaves. The altimeter needle flicked off its thousandfoot divisions. Twelve thousand.

Here, by comparison, it was almost warm, and his breathing loosened. Plenty of air here, air for the controls to bite on, air to feed a man. Now for the preliminaries; down below they’d be waiting.

Over on one wing, until it was vertically below him. Back with the stick. He swung round and round in a tight vertical turn. First to the right . . . that went well. He turned her level, then over to the left. That went well, too. Level again. He closed the throttle, held the nose up, and felt for the stalling point. She hung for a moment, then he came up into the safety belt. Down again, wind whistling over the cowling, to full speed.

He shot her through some loops, six for good measure, over and over like a wheel. Centrifugal force drove him into the machine until the parachute pack he sat on tightened against him like a rack. She came round cleanly, no fall-off in the apex of the loop. Silly business, looping, anyway . . . circus stuff ... no real help if you are mixed up in a jam. He tried a couple of rolls and an Immelmann. Pretty. He ran through them again for the benefit of those grouped on the tarmac.

v

He remembered his first Immelmann, high over the Argonne. It had looked like taps for him, five against one, and he headed east. No time to bank and turn. Half loop until he was on his back, roll out sideways, and off like an arrow in the opposite direction. He had played winner-take-all. A few long rips in the wing fabric, a faint tapping stammer, and the Immelmann had saved his life, the gift of precious seconds that had meant escape.

Gosh, if he had had this baby then! He’d have been supreme, invincible, the name of names above all other giants of the war. The war . . . countless æons ago; his wife in pinafores and kindergarten then, and he himself up in the thick of it, outgrown from boyhood in a week, living a dozen lives of terror in an hour, a negligible atom that survived from day to day apparently by favor of some enigmatic God.

Was this, then, why he had been spared? Was this the answer to the Question — the thing that plagued them in those years: how to extract from that degrading object lesson some future ground plan for a worthier generation? Testing a new pursuit plane for the Army — in this, then, was his whole usefulness resolved. Better machines, so that another generation might undertake more deadly risks in bigger wars. . . . On with the wars! Step up, O Young Man, and be killed! A prayer, a promise, ten million promises grown vague across the years; ideals grown flabby, horror confused with glory, and let it go at that. . . .

He flung the plane around. Test her, that was the game. Test her to the excited, outraged limit of endurance. Test her until the wires screamed for pity, until the tired body shook and shuddered and the wings clung to a mad eggshell band of safety and the controls stretched for the cracking point with silent terror. Abuse her some more. Twist and torment and agonize her until she writhed beneath you, but set her down tested, foolproof ... so that some bright young spark in a new uniform could keep his neck safe for the next war.

He drew her out level again. The control stick in his gloved hand felt gentle now, perfectly steady. He’d get the spin over with first, reserve the power dive for the star spot of the performance, the curtain act. He gathered himself together, felt her again very carefully. Then he pulled up the nose, and kicked on the rudder. She fell over, screaming, into the spin.

The hard straps of the parachute pack rammed into him with renewed insistence. His forearms fell against his knees, and his shoulders hunched under the strain. Below, the earth and clouds were locked in an insane pinwheel before the shining disk of the propeller. Round and round and round they spun, a whirligig in green and brown and white. Automatically he counted: '. . . four, five, six, seven . . .’ Down the invisible reaches of that spiral stairway she dropped, a wounded eagle spinning to the earth. On the secure concrete far below the crowd was watching him, holding its breath. The whirligig was nearer now — uncomfortably nearer. Now for it! At the ninth turn, he pressed the stick central and drove his heel into the rudder pedal.

She came out instantly.

He opened the throttle, pulled her up, and once again sunlight splashed over his lap, reassuring, steady. A friendly feeling. His muscles relaxed by degrees and his breathing rearranged itself composedly. He shifted the damp fur of his flying helmet higher on his forehead to stop its tickling. Then he pushed the nose up again. Up, up ... up to the inhospitable heights of fifteen thousand. The engine note deepened slightly.

Now for the power dive.

Yellow-green the earth looked under the gentle glaze of sunshine. Somewhere on that smiling surface his wife would be making beds and shaking dusters, his kid, like a fat butterball, rolling unconcernedly around the Lilliputian lawn. Inestimably, supremely unimportant in the great pageant of the universe — but incalculably dear!

VI

He tightened the safety belt as close as it would go. Delicate stuff, this called for delicate handling, an exquisite touch. He could n’t afford to be thrown around an inch before the pull-out. A single flick of the wrist, misjudged or accidental, would rip the wings off, project him furiously through space, embed him like a rivet on the face of that stupendous target. He felt the chute harness, looked at the ring to see that it was hanging free. A grim smile hung for a moment under the mask, vanished again without visiting his eyes.

‘ All set to bail?’ He remembered the words of the Army man. In a power dive! Sure! All out here; change for the local. Four hundred miles an hour, thirty-four thousand feet a minute, five hundred and seventy frantic feet a second, but that’s all right. Just step up smartly and present your neck to that murderous razor edge of air that shrieks along outside the cockpit. Snap! Snap — like a match in your hand, like a twig from a branch, like a . . . Oh, sure, all set to bail. Bah!

He put one hand on the throttle, crooked his little finger round the fuselage member to hold his hand steady. He gripped the control stick a few inches down from the top, resting his forearm on one knee to keep that steady too. He was flying level — exactly fifteen thousand. He felt unnaturally calm, his mind clear as a bell, his movements careful and unhurried, now that this final minute was paying out its seconds like a sandglass.

Thirty-six years — that was just half a man’s allotted span, but the best half. Nothing to kick about, really. He had filled in the years, not blamelessly, perhaps, but satisfactorily. He would n’t have them changed, so if it pleased that enigmatic God to strike this time, for his part there would be no fuss.

Well, here we go! He threw her over on one wing, kicked on the rudder. They were in the dive.

One second . . . two seconds . . . three seconds. The speed mounted like a whirlwind. Gone was the steady drone. The engine note screamed up the scale like a fire-engine siren. The air-speed indicator flung around to the metal rest and stuck. Three hundred M.P.H. It stuck because that was its limit. The instrument was built to register three hundred and not a mile beyond. The frontier line of speed, impassable, unreachable, in the day of its assured designer! But still the speed mounted, furiously, hand in hand with the engine note. Desperately the altimeter needle chased the loss of height. Practically, it might as well have chased a comet as struggle to keep pace with this shimmering missile catapulted from space. Down, down. . . .

Four seconds . . . five seconds. The pressure against his eardrums expressed itself in needle points of pain. He swallowed again and still again to ease the torment. His eyes reached quickly out along the wings, apprehensive for the first suspicion of a tremor. The barest flutter, and they would be out from under him, find their way down to earth like scraps of paper. There was no flutter. The job was workmanlike. A fraction of his mind moved over to another base of concentration.

Six seconds . . . seven seconds. His mental processes sharpened to an incredible degree, his brain multiplied, became a super-brain capable of concerting a prodigious range of thought. A host of unrelated things — ideas, emotions, vivid little pictures from the past — crowded through his mind, pleading to be remembered.

There was a man, he recalled, who had told him that he could do his clearest thinking in a moving train. Perhaps there was something to that after all. The faster the world moved, perhaps, the faster it could think, the more in harmony with the gigantic rhythm of the spheres. Maybe that Einstein guy knew what it was all about!

Eight seconds — twelve to go, the last twelve seconds of his life, perhaps . . . or again the uneventful finish of another routine job.

He stared past the nose at the earth that tore to meet him. The amorphous plain split into component parts — farms, woods, the tricky pattern of the fields. He felt no fear. He was still earth-free, part of remote, passionless space. Impersonality engulfed him. Even the anguish in his ears ceased to reach him. His mind stretched out and foresaw those last few seconds clearly, as though the Future had already slipped into the Past.

He’d close the throttle. Then subtly, almost imperceptibly, he’d pull the stick back. In that moment every doubt would be allayed. If it were firm, if he could feel the elevators biting on the typhoon of his slip stream, he’d press a little more and still a little more. No eager snatching, for then the plane would pull apart like shrapnel. From this howling, headlong dive, he would draw her out by a hair, taper off with flawless delicacy, let her exhaust her speed in a mile of powerless climb. But, if it were n’t — if he could feel it sloppy, unresponsive between his hands — well . . . maybe he’d have time for one quick prayer. Maybe he would n’t. Anyway, it did n’t matter much. They’d scrape him off the tarmac with a board, and in time some fool would tell his kid his daddy was a hero. A war hero, of course. War . . . more wars . . .

Suddenly he was sweating. A cold appalling fear seized him like the hand of Death, griped his stomach, struck along his veins. The stick would mush — he knew it. A few seconds more and he’d be spattered out like paint . . . God, get me out of this! . . .

Below, the earth puffed up, a silent, sinister explosion. Woods burst into trees, towns into myriad little homes. . . . Now!

His fingers tightened on the stick.

He drew the Report Pad across the yellow oak desk. Type of Machine: — Pursuit Experimental, F 12 c. Type of Test: —

Mechanically, his pencil filled in, ‘Routine.’