Dunc Breaks the Record (2 page)

“I don’t see anything.”

“You will if you open your eyes.”

Amos opened his eyes. Then wider—so wide, they seemed to pop out of his head. “Dunc, I can’t see anything! I’m blind! The altitude is making me blind!”

Dunc reached across and jerked on Amos’s helmet strap. “Your helmet is in front of your eyes. Look—it’s beautiful.”

“It’s down—everything is down from here.” Amos blinked. “There is no up.”

Dunc pulled the bar sideways, and the glider moved off to the right.

“What are you doing?” Amos clutched at the bar. “Don’t move that way.”

“It’s so strange. I can turn left or right, but it won’t go down. In fact, we’re still climbing. I’ll bet we’re ten, twelve thousand feet up now. I wish I had an altimeter—I
know
we’ve got the record now.”

All the time he talked, Amos had been strangely silent. He craned his neck around to look back, then forward. “Dunc …”

“Not just the distance record for two boys our age, but probably the altitude record as well.”

“Dunc …”

“Maybe if I held the nose up a little, we’d climb still more—just to clinch it.”

“Dunc!”

“You don’t have to scream—I’m right next to you.”

“I’ve been looking down.”

“I know. And I’m very proud of you, conquering your fears that way.”

“That’s not it. I’ve been looking down, and I don’t recognize anything.”

“It all looks different from up here.”

“No.” Amos shook his head, his helmet wobbling in the sunlight. “I mean, we’re moving. It’s hard to tell from up here, but I think we’re sliding sideways all the time.”

Dunc studied the ground, then nodded slowly. “I think you might be right—there must be a sidewind, and we’re blowing with it. I think we’re moving southwest.”

“Southwest,” Amos said, “southwest. How fast are we going?”

Dunc shook his head. “I can’t be sure. I think I read an article in the library once that said the
fronts go through here at about thirty-five miles an hour.”

“And we’ve been up here how long?”

Dunc looked at his watch. “Almost an hour—man, that’s
got
to be the record! Not only distance but altitude and time—we’ve got them all!”

But Amos was figuring. “So we’ve come close to thirty-five miles, heading southwest.”

Dunc nodded. “I think so—maybe. About.”

“And we haven’t started down yet.”

“Not yet.”

“This isn’t good,” Amos said. “Not good at all.”

“What’s the matter? We’ll come down sooner or later.”

“Think,” Amos said. “You’ve been so caught up in this record business, you’re forgetting something. We’re heading southwest. We’ve come thirty or so miles, and we’re still heading that way.”

“Right—when we come down, we’ll get to a phone and call home. It’ll all work out.”

“Except for one point—the Davis Wilderness Area starts twenty-five miles southwest of town.”

“Oh.” Dunc nodded. “I didn’t think of that.”

“And it stretches for close to eighty miles in a southwest direction.”

“Almost ninety, actually,” Dunc said. “I read that it was named after a guy named Milton Davis who worked hard to save some small trees or fish or something. He disappeared back in the seventies.”

“You’re not following me, Dunc.” Amos took his hand off the bar long enough to wave a finger, then slammed it back down when the glider wiggled. “Stay with me now—we’re flying in a hang glider out over a wilderness area where there isn’t a phone or a road. We don’t have any way to get out. We don’t have any food or clothing with us. We don’t even have a compass.”

Dunc studied Amos for a moment, then nodded slowly. “I see your point, but I think you’re worrying needlessly. We haven’t started down yet. Heck, we might go all the way across the wilderness area before we come down.”

But they didn’t.

.3

“Dunc, why is everything getting bigger?” Amos was looking down. “See the trees, and that river—aren’t they getting bigger?”

Dunc nodded but said nothing. He was also watching the ground intently, frowning. Below them stretched miles and miles of raw wilderness—thickly wooded small mountains and rolling hills. Here and there lay a lake, cut back between hills, and across the whole of it stretched a river.

“Are we going down?” Amos looked at Dunc.

Dunc nodded. “We must have lost the thermal.”

Amos looked down at the forest. He looked
forward, then back, then left and right. “I don’t want to seem like a party pooper, but has it occurred to you that there is nowhere to land? I can’t even see a clearing.”

Dunc nodded again. “I know. I’ve been looking for some time now.”

“Well, we’ll just have to not land, that’s all.”

“Amos …”

“Keep the nose up, and we’ll just keep flying.”

Dunc sighed. He held the glider almost on the edge of stalling, felt it shudder, dropped the nose, and turned to the right a bit. “It doesn’t work that way. When it’s time to come down, it’s time to come down. There’s nothing I can do. Now, help me find a place to land—quick. We only have a few minutes.”

He angled back to the right, then to the left.

“I don’t see anything,” Amos said. “Do you?”

“No.”

By now, the glider had dropped low enough that they could make out individual trees and brush.

“There’s nothing,” Amos said. “We’re going to crash in the trees.”

“No.” Dunc canted the bar. “We can’t land in
the trees. If we lose flying speed at the tops of the trees, we still have to fall to the ground.”

“There’s nowhere else.” Amos’s voice rose to the edge of shrill.

“Only one place,” Dunc said, lining the glider out. “The river.”

“In the
water
?”

“We don’t have any choice.” Dunc moved the bar again and slowed the descent as much as he dared. Still the glider dropped, and now he could see limbs on trees, even large leaves.

The river below them was not a peaceful winding stream. It shot through cuts between hills, and here and there it had whitewater rapids. It was also not straight. Because the hills kinked it back and forth, most of the river below the glider—where Dunc would have to bring it down—was in narrow twisting cuts.

“There,” Dunc said, pointing with his chin. “Right there—see where the water cuts across the face of that hill, that straight part? That’s where we’ll bring it in.”

“Those are rapids, Dunc.”

“Just out in the middle. I’m going to come in on the side. I’ll just skin her in, and …”

He trailed off as he concentrated on flying.
He turned away from the landing spot, let the glider sink a bit, then brought it back around, lined the nose up heading back up the river and into the wind, and aimed directly at the site he’d picked for landing.

It almost went perfectly. Even Amos was impressed.

Dunc brought the glider in just as he’d said, lined the nose up on the side of the river, wobbled it down into the wind, and flared just above the water. The two boys lowered their feet until it seemed they were just about to walk on the water.

“Beautiful,” Amos said. “I couldn’t have done it better—”

He had been about to add the word
myself
. But he didn’t get it out. He very nearly never said another word again of any kind.

Their feet hit the water almost at the same time. Amos was introduced violently to some basic laws of physics concerning fluids and gases. He found that his upper half, attached to the glider, kept moving through the air much better than his bottom half, which was in the water.

In fact the bottom half stopped dead.

“Pluummphh!”

As their bodies entered the water, the glider tried to keep flying. It couldn’t, and in half a second it slammed forward and down into the water in an impact that shot water thirty feet into the air.

They were on the edge of the rapids—Dunc had brought the glider down as he said he would—but the sudden jerk forward pushed the nose of the glider out into the current.

The glider material acted in the water like a parachute, caught the full force of the river, and took off at a speed matching the current.

The boys were still attached in their harnesses. Upside down, tumbling, the hang glider thundered down the river, cartwheeling in the current, breaking spars and snapping cables, dragging Amos and Dunc end over end behind it.

Dunc grabbed at the harness and fought to get free. He clawed, missed the release, and found it again when he was upside down. Air bubbles streamed up from his nostrils. He pulled, tore free, then reached back for Amos.

And missed.

He had one glimpse of Amos, head down, eyes squinched shut, stiff as a poker under water. Then the current ripped the glider away from Dunc, and Amos disappeared downstream.

.4

Amos was dreaming.

In the dream he was standing in the center of his living room, turned toward the door, ready to go outside, when the phone rang.

Even in the dream he had good form. He wheeled in one smooth motion and felt his legs power him, driving him off sideways at a perfect angle to grab the phone on the wall just inside the kitchen door, to get it by that all-important second ring. There was another phone on the end table in the living room, but his mind, quick as a computer, reckoned it to be nearly eight centimeters farther than the one in the kitchen.

Both legs driving, arms pumping, a little spit out the side of his mouth—classic form.

Then the cat.

“Amos!”

They didn’t even have a cat. His sister Amy, whom Amos called the Dragon, was allergic to cats. But in the dream there was a cat. A big old tom, scarred and mangy, and just as Amos made the pivot it moved from beneath the dining-room table and stepped perfectly between his ankles. As the phone began the second ring, he started down. With one clawing hand he caught the phone—just as his face slammed into the carpet so hard, he felt the fabric drive through his skin.…

“Amos—wake up.…”

Amos opened his eyes.

For a moment he couldn’t remember anything, and he was startled to see Dunc leaning over him wearing a helmet and apparently wrapped in some kind of red cloth.

“Dunc?”

“Oh, man, I thought you were gone this time.” Dunc rolled Amos on his side. “You must have puked five gallons of water.”

“What are you doing here?” Amos stared at
Dunc. “I was just going to answer the phone.… Oh. Oh. Now I remember. It was a dream. Man, even in my dreams I can’t get to the phone.”

Dunc stood. He had grabbed some of the material from the glider and pulled the glider off Amos so he could pump his chest, and he was now tangled in the cloth. He pulled it away and dropped it onto the ground. “I can’t believe I found you.”

“What happened?”

“You want the whole story?” Dunc asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, we decided to break the record for two boys our age on a hang glider—”

“No, I remember all that. I mean in the river, with the glider. What happened?”

“We got separated. I broke loose, and the current took you on down. It was just a fluke—you got caught up on a snag that jutted out from the bank, and I saw the red of the glider cloth. Otherwise you would have been in trouble.”

Amos stared at him. “This isn’t trouble?”

“Well—not as much as it could have been.”

“Dunc,
we
didn’t decide to break the record.
You
decided to break the record, and if
you
hadn’t decided to break the record,
we
wouldn’t be in this fix.”

“Amos—”

“Admit it.”

“Amos—”

“Admit it now. It’s all your fault.”

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

“Even the thermal?”

“Everything. Everything in the whole world that has ever gone wrong is completely and totally your fault, starting with maybe the Second World War and going right up to the present time and maybe even in the future.”

“All right. It’s all my fault.”

“Thank you—I feel much better now.” Amos took his helmet off and leaned over. He wiggled his head to clear the water out of his ears, then stopped and looked up at Dunc with his head cocked. “So what do we do now?”

Dunc didn’t answer right away. He took his own helmet off, pulled his jacket and T-shirt off, and wrung them out. Then he sat on a rock, pulled his shoes and pants off, and hung all his clothing on a branch to dry.