Airship Hunters (2 page)

Valiantine said nothing. The backward feeling of the office and of the man in front of him grew so strong as to cause him physical pain in his temples. This had often been the case when he’d been confronted with discordant stimuli, and the odd mix of the familiar and unfamiliar of the major and his office certainly qualified as that.

“No, I don’t need to go on because you are the man for the job. And this is a direct order.”

The lieutenant gazed out the window, at the executive mansion beyond and the trees blossoming around it. He sighed, yet very quietly.

“Sir, is the... supposition that this is the work of a foreign power, or that it is domestic?” he inquired, facing the major once more.

Wellington nodded, seemingly pleased. “Good. Good. You’re thinking again. Both of those are somewhat frightening questions, eh? Some other country flying things above our heads without our knowledge or say-so... or our own citizens doing the same?

“That’s for you to uncover, Lieutenant. And this goes all the way to the top office, by the way. The President’s looked at that file, read it, so there’s some weight being placed upon it.”

“Where should I begin?”

“Indiana. We don’t care where. Your choice.”

“And what should I do there?”

“Look into it, Valiantine. Keep watch. And report back. Dismissed.”

As Valiantine rode the chugging Chesapeake & Ohio into Indiana, clouds outside the window turned to great sailing vessels in the sky.

The train ride had afforded him some peace of mind, and he found his thoughts clearing to line up and be assessed. He felt it was now possible he might regain something of his old self and carry out his orders, no matter how vague or fanciful they might seem to him.

In planning his attack on the problem of where to begin his “watch,” Valiantine turned to a map of the state of Indiana and narrowed his focus. He immediately dismissed Chanute and Paul’s Dune Park flight experiment the previous year in Indiana as too incongruous with the known airship sightings and swung his attention to what he imagined as a kind of trajectory of the impossible vehicles—if even vehicles they were.

Ultimately, the rail line he rode would end in Chicago, but he’d no intention of riding it to that conclusion. If his research held any weight at all, the latest glimpse of a supposed airship occurred miles to the south of the big city, somewhere below Gary, Indiana. Valiantine intended to disembark in either Peru or potentially the next stop and then make his way northwest, watching and observing all the way.

As a plan went, it lacked clearly defined parameters. This niggled away at the lieutenant’s usually well-ordered approach to a mission, but he had far less to go on than possibly ever before in his career.

In short, he would be not much more precise than a blind man stumbling around in the dark.

In a way, he understood and somewhat sympathized with his superiors at the War Department and their concerns. A bloody conflict with Spain loomed on the horizon, a foregone conclusion to a bout of saber-rattling and bellyaching the likes of which had not been seen for many years in the halls of government. But, that said, the thought that the Spaniards had somehow crafted and launched a fleet of flying machines over America came across as overly ludicrous. War would most certainly come, and soon, but the lieutenant felt secure in his opinion it would not be waged in the skies above them.

He waved down a boy on the platform at Marion from his window and bought a newspaper. Flipping through it, Valiantine hoped to gain a sense of Indiana’s cultural mindset. Within its pages he found reports of farming and mining, political squabbles, and the like. The most interesting bit of news sprung from an article detailing a series of robberies throughout the central portion of the state, the latest one in a bank in Lafayette.

The swaying of the train and the progression of type across the page lulled the lieutenant into dozing in his seat. The flat countryside moved past him out the window, the sailing vessels of the clouds forgotten as he nodded off into a light sleep.

The sharp, shattering blast of a whistle brought him back to consciousness with a start and he realized with cold dread that he’d missed his stop in Peru. Valiantine gazed out of his window and tried to make out the station’s sign through the thick smoke that choked the platform.

Finally, he made it out: Manitou.

The name was unfamiliar to him; he didn’t remember it from his perusal of his maps. The whistle blew again, signaling the train’s imminent departure and, in a burst of reckless adrenalin, Valiantine leapt from his seat, snatched his bag from the upper rack, and swung out the door and onto the platform.

A split second later, the train lurched and pulled away from the platform. A uniformed railwayman stood with hands on hips nearby, glaring at the lieutenant and shaking his head from side to side in disbelief. Valiantine tipped his hat to the man and made his way into the station, pulling his watch from his vest as he entered.

Stepping up to a large map that hung on the station’s wall, he studied it in hopes of pinpointing his location. He found himself landed almost fifteen miles outside of Peru, and a small trek south of a lake also named Manitou.

The lieutenant grinned a bit at his impulsive behavior, picked up his bag and went in search of a hotel.

Manitou, Indiana would have to do for a start, he reasoned.

A few hours later, after checking into the small town’s single hotel, he found himself, of all things, attending a town meeting.

Valiantine looked down at his civilian attire and fussed with it a bit, wondering for the hundredth time since he left his room over the extent of his ability to blend in with the locals. He’d chosen a plain brown suit with no ornamentation save for a straw hat and his watch and chain. He’d even eschewed spats for a solid pair of commonplace boots.

As entertainment went, a town meeting wasn’t exactly high on the bill for a pleasurable experience, but Valiantine knew that immersing himself in the heart of a populace, in a venue designed to air thoughts and debate, would potentially reward him far more than a saloon would.

At first glance, Manitou appeared to be a typical small town in the heartland of the country. Valiantine hadn’t yet gotten a lock on the industry that fed the town, but, he told himself, he was more concerned with what hung above it than what transpired at ground level. And if the first several minutes of the meeting were any indication, Manitou, with its population of slightly more than a thousand citizens, had a monopoly on mundanity.

There came a loud noise from off to one side of the meeting hall. Forty sets of eyes narrowed and focused on the disturbance. Valiantine rose a bit from his seat in the back of the room to glimpse the source of the commotion.

A man at a side door jostled another man, clearly trying to block him from entering. The second man had become quite vocal and was yelling his protestation over his treatment by the first man.

“Can’ keep me out, you corn-fed idiot! I got rights, too! I went t’school here! I got papers! Papers!”

Valiantine saw that people around him were beginning to wag their heads and even snicker at the man’s antics. Low whispering spread throughout the small crowd.

The man was dressed in what could charitably be called a haphazard fashion. He wore a pair of pants perhaps one size too big for him, with only suspenders holding them on to his lanky frame. He wore no socks, only a pair of worn shoes, and no vest underneath his well-patched topcoat. A small, dusty bowler sat perched on the man’s head, barely containing a wild mop of salt-and-pepper hair.

“Take him out, take him out,” said the man at the front of the room who led the meeting. “We’ve no time for such foolishness.”

More men appeared, ringing themselves around the odd character. Valiantine thought immediately they seemed much too big and burly and in excessive number to eject one, down-on-his luck townsperson.

One of the men clamped a hand around the mouth of the odd man and together all five of the supposed guardians dragged him through the door and outside. The door slammed shut behind them, echoing loudly in its finality.

Overly curious, the lieutenant rose from his bench and slipped away from the meeting to follow after the entourage.

He exited through a door on the opposite wall and made his way around the building to the other side. There he found an alleyway, dark and disused, yet now occupied by the odd man and his ejectors. The men had their charge up against a brick wall, wagging fingers in his face. Valiantine listened in.

“We’ve told you before to keep your damn mouth shut, Mr. Perklee,” one of the men said. “This town’s sick of you, hear? You and your crazy talk will be the death of you.”

The odd man squeezed his eyes shut and popped them open once again. “Boys, boys! Let me talk! Let me talk! It relieves the pressure—”

A fist shot out from the throng of men around him, planting itself in Perklee’s belly. He doubled over, moaning.

The lieutenant frowned, watching the scene from his vantage point. It was of no concern of his. A local matter, a dispute he had no business even witnessing. It had nothing to do with him.

He turned away with the sounds of more delivered punches and the yelps of the odd man washing over him.

“Oh, my!” Perklee shouted. “Oh my Lord! They can’t find me like this! They won’t like it! They won’t like it! The voices will be very angry!”

Valiantine came to an abrupt stop. He turned back to the melee, listening intently.

“The voices of the skies!” the odd man said. “The skies! The skies!”

The attackers grew tired of the beating quickly, and Valiantine waited for them to depart before moving in to sweep up the odd man from the alleyway and offering to remove him to his home. The man nodded silently, blood trickling from his nose and the corner of his mouth, and pointed the way.

Their conjoined journey proved to be a long walk to the north, beyond the confines of the town, and ended at the southernmost portion of Lake Manitou at a small cabin that sat on its serene shore.

Valiantine felt a chill in the air, the last dregs of winter’s hold on the flat Indiana landscape. His charge had said precious little on their shuffling march to the cabin, granting an awkward air to the situation as he half-carried Perklee along. The lieutenant hoped what he’d heard from the man’s own mouth in the alley were not simply the ravings of the inebriated, but something tangible for him to bolster his mission.

It seemed a very weak hope by the time they’d reached the cabin.

Perklee’s home was a cluttered mess; Valiantine’s often-prickly sense of order roiled at the sight of it. There was no actual filth present, but the man’s housekeeping left much to be desired. His belongings sat everywhere, with no real rhyme or reason to be discerned by an outsider, though the lieutenant assumed the man himself could divine an order to the disarray.

Setting his charge down carefully in a threadbare chair, he looked around the cabin’s main room, settling his attention on the many framed documents that hung on the walls. Valiantine discovered with mild surprise the man was an educated individual, with diplomas and other various forms of official documentation to prove it. Glancing back at the wreck of human life that sat nearly insensate in the chair, he found it difficult to reconcile it all.

“Mr. Perklee,” he said, kneeling down next to the chair, his voice quiet at first, but then increasing in volume. “I’d like to ask you some questions, sir.”

The odd man stirred, eyes attempting to focus on Valiantine. One hand lifted and pointed at a shelf off to one side. A bottle sat there.

With some disgust, the lieutenant fetched the bottle and handed it to the man, who pulled out its cork and drank sloppily from it.

“Why did those men beat you, back in the town?” the lieutenant asked, witnessing animation creeping back into Perklee.

“Didn’ wan’ me t’talk,” came the whispery, slurred reply.

“Why? Talk about what?”

“Not import’nt.”

“It is to me, sir. What can you tell me about it? About the skies?”

Perklee’s eyes widened. “Oh,
that
. There’s a story there...”

“Tell me, please,” Valiantine said, expectant.

The man shifted in the chair, turning himself slightly to face the lieutenant.

“’Twas music. I heard music. In the sky.”

Valiantine silently urged the man to continue.

“The branches, of the trees, you know. Kept breakin’. So I said I better see what was doin’ it. Then I heard th’music. Like an orchestra. Yeah... jus’ like ’n orchestra, but up above.”

He pointed heavenward, as if to press home the distinction.

“Heard ‘Far ’bove Cayuga’s Waters’ firs,’ then... then... wha’ was it? ‘Beautiful Dreamer,’ ’m guessin’. Than it really kicked off, wit’ Schubert. Whole orchestra. Was nice, real nice. Th’strings was, was partic’larly good, you know?”

He paused. Once again, Valiantine reflected upon Perklee’s degeneration from learned man to slurring derelict.

“Do you like music, young gen’lman?”

The lieutenant found himself unable to answer at first, but soon nodded and mumbled in the affirmative.