The Last Pilot: A Novel (19 page)

Harrison arrived home. The nurse’s car was still outside. He frowned. Loose stone crunched beneath his heavy boots as he walked toward the front door. He pushed it open, it closed behind him.

Hi, Grace said. She was standing by the staircase.

Nurse still here? he said, surprised.

Grace nodded.

How’s Duck? Is she okay?

She’s asleep.

What’d the nurse say?

It’s Joan; she’s coming down now.

Joan stepped into the living room.

Hello, Jim, she said.

Joan, he said. What’s goin on?

His words hung in the air.

Florence has got pneumonia, she said.

He looked at his wife; Grace held him up with her eyes.

She’s very weak, Joan said, but in good spirits. That’s a good sign. She’s such a gay little thing.

Harrison didn’t say anything.

He looked around the room. Jesus, he said. What a mess.

He began collecting glasses, picking up newspapers and books and dropping things into drawers.

Jim, it’s okay, please, Joan said. That really isn’t necessary.

Grace looked over to Joan. Harrison disappeared into the kitchen with mugs between his fingers and plates balanced on his hands. He came back.

Jim, Grace said.

It’s fine, he said.

Jim, she said.

Hang on, he said, and moved Milo’s basket back into the corner by the window.

Jim
.

He looked up at his wife. He stopped. He sat down. Grace went to him.

Lapitus said something like this might happen, she said.

Harrison shut his eyes. The room went divergent. The outside of the envelope, he thought. Son of a bitch.

I’ll need to run through a few things with you, Joan said.

I want to see her, he said.

Let her sleep, Grace said. She’s coughing pretty hard. She’ll be awake soon enough.

Is she okay?

Apart from the cough, Joan said, she’s breathing very fast, and wheezing, but there’s no sickness, at least not yet, and no fever.

I’ll make some coffee, Grace said.

They sat around the kitchen table and talked for an hour. The radio broadcast the news in the background. Outside the rain threw itself against the glass windows and thudded on the porch. When there was nothing left to say they just sat and let the radio talk for them.

Saigon, Harrison said after a while. Shit.

You think he knows what he’s doing? Grace said.

Sure as hell hope so; he’s got plenty enough advisers.

Four hundred combat troops sounds like an awful lot, Joan said.

And thirty-three choppers, Harrison said.

Thing I like about Kennedy, Joan said, he takes advice, but makes up his own mind.

I guess this is it then, Harrison said.

Haven’t we already given the Laotian government helicopters? Grace said. What’s the difference?

Difference is, Harrison said, those were operated by the Civil Air Transport of Taiwan. These will be flown by Americans.

Direct military support, Joan said.

You mean war, Grace said.

Yeah, Harrison said.

The rain stopped. Joan said she’d be back in the morning. Grace and Harrison were alone.

Florence woke, coughing, gasping, every twenty minutes or so. They took shifts, sleeping on the rug by her bed, sitting up to comfort her until she slept again.

It was late, dark, some time around three.

Daddy? Florence said.

Huh?

Daddy?

I’m here, Duck, he said, sitting up.

Her face was milky-white, pale like the moonlight that fell into the room. He stroked her face, brushing hair from her eyes. She looked confused.

Hey, Duck, he said. It’s okay. I’m right here.

She settled slightly, coughed, smiled. He smiled back.

Hey, he said.

Why you call me Duck, Daddy? she said.

He looked at her. He stared at the rug. He bit down hard on his cheeks until they bled.

Well, Duck, he said, when you were born uh, when you were a few days old; this tiny thing; I used to, used to hold you, against my chest, walk about, and sometimes you’d uh, push your face into me and make this strange sound, like a quack, like a duck, so I started callin you a little duck and uh, yeah.

I’m tired, Daddy.

C’mon, he said, let’s go back to sleep.

Harrison woke on the floor, the early sun lighting the room. He stood and crept over to the window. There were no clouds; the sky was a beautiful blue. He looked over to where Florence slept and something inside him broke.

Grace was in the kitchen when he came down, her hand on the handle of the fridge. He stood in the doorway and didn’t move. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and she knew, and her fingers fell from the handle.

The low sun leaked pale light along gaunt tallowy clouds and bleached the bone-cold December ground white.

This is not a eulogy, Irving said. This is a lament.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in the depths, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

All test planes had been grounded. Jim and Grace sat with Joe and Grace Walker. Pancho sat with Chuck and Glennis, together with Jack Ridley and almost every pilot and engineer the Harrisons knew, and plenty they didn’t. Annie couldn’t make it and it was too far for Hal, Grace’s father, to travel.

If I say, surely the darkness shall overwhelm me, and the light about me shall be night; even the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day. For thou didst form my inmost being. Thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Let us pray.

They prayed. The silence was as hard as the earth.

Irving spoke some more. A slight breeze picked up and they heard horses bucking and snorting from the ranch close by. The men and women sat very still. The mares whinnied into the cold air. Then the wind changed direction and all that remained was Irving’s strong voice and his steady hands and a small wooden coffin sitting on the hillside in the freezing December morning.

Harrison held his wife’s hand hard and she gripped it until he thought it would turn blue. He turned around, behind him, and whispered, say, Ridley, got any Beemans? Ridley looked at him, nodded, and reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a stick. With his free hand Harrison unwrapped the gum and put it in his mouth then heard Irving say his name and Grace released her grip and he stood and walked to the podium. He pulled a typed index card from his pocket and placed it carefully on the stand. He looked up and said,

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,

I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untresspassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

He sat down. Grace squeezed his hand.

Suffer little children to come unto me
, Irving said.
For of such is the kingdom of God.

She shook and he held her tight.

Pancho stayed with them for the weekend. She cleaned and cooked and fed Milo and answered the telephone and drove home Sunday night and on Monday morning Harrison returned to work. He sat at his desk and studied diagrams for an adaptive control system he’d been developing with engineers from Minneapolis-Honeywell to automatically monitor and change the X-15’s gains. Voltage alterations were required to adjust the flight control system, and the stability augmentation system used in previous flights was not an effective solution.

It was impossible to set the gains in the flight control system to a single value that would be optimum for all flight conditions. The speed range was too wide. The MH-96 prototype was designed for high altitude flights outside of the atmosphere. It would automatically combine both aerodynamic and reaction controls, compensating for the reduction in effectiveness of the aerodynamic controls as altitude increased. It consisted of electrical modules and mechanical linkages designed and tested in the simulator, which had analogue computers to replicate the nonlinear aircraft dynamics.

He drank hot black coffee. He stared at a schematic of the inner-loop control architecture.

He was scheduled to make the first X-15 flight with the MH-96 installed that Friday. It was also the first flight test of Reaction Motors’ XLR-99 rocket engine, also known as the Big Engine, capable of fifty-seven thousand pounds of thrust.

He studied a memo from Bob Bridshaw at Honeywell.

Bridshaw warned that the MH-96 was a rate-command, attitude-hold system and might not observe usual speed stability characteristics if the thrust did not match the drag. More problems: the system was designed to maintain a limit cycle oscillation at the servoactuator loop’s natural frequency. The laws of gain adjustment made Harrison wonder if the gain valve would lag behind the optimum setting. It would still be a better solution than the standard stability augmentation system with pilot-selectable gains, especially during reentry.

He grunted and took another sip of coffee. Ridley walked in.

Jim, he said, surprised. Wasn’t, uh, expectin to see you today.

Runnin a program, ain’t we?

Ridley thought for a second, considered the situation.

Sure are, he said.

You think the MH-96 might disengage in flight? Harrison said.

It’s been designed to run for seventy-five, seventy-six thousand hours between failures, Ridley said.

Uh-huh.

Reset the system, you shouldn’t have any problems.

Yeah.

Want a coffee? Ridley said.

Got one here.

How long you been here?

Couldn’t sleep. Goddamn coyotes, Harrison said.

Mating season, Ridley said.

If it was up to me, Harrison said, I’d gather a posse and hunt down every last one of em.

Thankfully it ain’t up to you.

Where we launching?

Over Silver Lake.

I reckon landing might be a problem, Harrison said.

With the lakebed?

With the stick. I usually have to pull it back, keep increasin the force to keep her on the angle as I slow. I reckon the stick will have to stay dead center.

You might be right, Ridley said.

Only one way to find out, Harrison said.

Ridley sat down opposite him.

We’ll climb at seventy-five percent thrust, he said, level out at a hundred thousand feet. Then accelerate to Mach five; hundred second burn; shutdown. Then you can evaluate the system’s responses by making a series of yaw, pitch and roll inputs.

Sure the lakes are dry enough now? Harrison said.

Hell, yeah, Ridley said. Driest goddamn winter I ever seen. Joe and Neil tested em on Saturday. Say, here’s something I found out from Walker. You know why your flight was delayed til Friday?

Thought Jerry said there was a problem in the coupling?

Nope, Ridley said. The air force was conducting an ejection seat test using a tranquillized bear.

You made that up.

Did not. His name was Little John.

They named him?

On my mother’s life.

Little John?

Ejected at forty-five thousand feet.

How’d he pull the cinch ring?

Guess a bear’s got claws.

How fast was he goin?

One point four Mach.