The Last Pilot: A Novel (8 page)

After she’d bought the dog food and hauled it out to the car, she leaned against the door and lit a smoke and the metal against her back felt hotter than the burning cigarette tip flaring orange sending smoke twisting away in a sinewy line that her eyes followed; the thin column turning and rising. Her hand trembled and a brittle ashen hulk broke off and fell to the ground. She stared at the charred lump at her feet.
Burned Beyond Recognition
. That’s what they called it when a human body was exposed to the intense heat of combusting aviation fuel. Her heart hammered hard inside her. She dropped what was left of the cigarette, pulled Milo from the car and started up Main Street.

Grace, I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon.

Reverend Irving was at the lectern. He collected his papers, picked up a small Bible and stepped down from the platform.

How are you feeling today? he said. You look tired.

She sat down on the front pew. Irving joined her.

Grace? he said. Has something happened?

She stared down at the smooth floor.

Hasn’t happened in years, she said.

Can you tell me about it?

You know my husband, Jim, she said, sitting up. He’s a test pilot at the base. He came home once, few years ago, with bright red eyes. You’ve never seen anything like it; I thought his eyeballs had burst or something. He’d been pulling heavy negative g’s. They call it
red out
; the blood vessels in the eyes rupture. He looked terrible. Skin was so gray. He just sat in the kitchen, drinking a glass of milk. I asked him what had happened and he said, nothing much, bit of a corner; managed to luck out of it.
A corner. Lucked out of it.
I couldn’t blame him, or Jack—his engineer—for wanting to beat Scott Crossfield’s Mach two record, especially with the Wright Brothers’ big anniversary thing coming up a few days later and the celebration the navy had planned for Scotty, but the Bell guys, the engineers who built the plane, told them—told them straight—the X1-A could be pretty …
unforgiving
at speeds above Mach two; that it might, uh,
go divergent
. Which is a pretty little way of saying the airplane might suddenly lose all aerodynamics and fall out of the sky like a brick. Air’s pretty thin at seventy-five thousand feet. Sky’s purple, stars are flickering. You slide around like a car on ice. Every airplane has a performance envelope, its critical limits. Jim says flight test is all about
pushing the outside of the envelope
. That’s what they all talk about. That’s all they talk about. Well, in this case, the envelope didn’t want to stretch at all. At seventy-five thousand feet, above Mach two, the envelope was full of holes. Those Bell guys were right. The airplane just …
uncorked
. Started pitching and yawing
and
rolling, all at the same time. There isn’t anything you can do to maneuver out of a hypersonic tumble. In fact, almost anything you
do
try is going to make things a whole heap worse. They call it inertia coupling, but that don’t do a real good job of explaining what actually happens. You fall out of the sky, rolling and spinning and tumbling, end over end. Jim was thrown around so violently that he busted the canopy with his helmet and was knocked unconscious. He fell ten miles in seventy seconds before coming round at thirty thousand feet in an inverted spin. You wouldn’t wish an inverted spin at that altitude on anyone, but an inverted spin is something he knows how to get out of. So he wrestles the airplane into a normal spin then pops out of it, twenty-five thousand feet from the farm. You know what the sonofabitch says on the way down? That they won’t have to run a structural integrity test on the airplane now. It was a joke. He was making a joke. He put her down on the lakebed and everyone said, how the hell are you still here? He was home for lunch. I didn’t find out about the new record until I ran into Jack the next day. Mach two point four. Fastest man alive. They gave him the Harmon International Trophy. That was nineteen fifty-three. I had nightmares about it for a year. And then he shows up again, yesterday lunch, with bloodred eyes.

She started to cry, then stopped herself.

You know, she said, we went to this party, the year before, I think, old friend of mine; she’d moved east, New York, after the war. She was a journalist, worked at
Time
and a bunch of other places, then managed to get a job copywriting for one of those big advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. She spent the whole evening telling me how ruthless it was, how
cutthroat
and
dog-eat-dog
. I asked her how many of those men would still go into a meeting if there was a one-in-four chance of them not making it out alive. We lost sixty-two men over a thirty-six-week stretch once. That’s nearly two a week. I had to buy another black dress; I couldn’t get the one I had clean and dried in time. So I had two, on rotation. You want to know why I’m here? I remembered something. Back in fifty-three, Joe Walker, good friend of Jim’s, test pilot for the NACA—the NASA now—came over when he heard what happened to Jim in the X1-A. Tells Jim inertia coupling hit him hard a couple of times too. Jim asks how he got out of it. Joe pulls that big Huck Finn grin of his across his face and says, the
JC Maneuver
. In the
JC Maneuver
, he says, you take your hands off the controls and
put the mother in the lap of a su-per-na-tu-ral power
.

She gave a little laugh.

Sorry, Reverend, she said. I remembered that yesterday.

She looked down again at the hard stone floor.

Kinda thing I could use right about now, don’t you think? she said.

I’m glad you came back, Irving said. And I’m glad you’ve shared this with me. Where did you grow up?

Midwest. On a ranch. My father didn’t hold much with church. Figured that, with his mother outliving his wife, there wasn’t much of anyone watching over him.

I’ve met Jim before, he said, few times, over at Pancho Barnes’s place. He still the fastest man alive?

She smiled.

Mel Apt beat him to Mach three in fifty-six, she said, but … Mel bought it with that one. It had a seat, and Mel tried to eject, but …

I’m sorry.

Jim always says there’s no point trying to punch out of a rocket plane; it’s like committing suicide to keep yourself from getting killed.

The Lord will give you strength, Grace. He will hold you up. Would you like me to pray for you?

She nodded. Irving said a prayer. Then he said, you should come along on Sunday.

I can’t, I’m sorry, Reverend. He can’t know I’m here, no one can.

You feel that prayer would undermine his confidence in the air?

It’s more than that—these …
things
, they’re not talked—

I understand.

Thank you, she said.

Psalm one thirty-nine says,
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 hell, 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.
It’s funny, in a way; I’m already directing my prayers into the atmosphere, after the Sputnik.

Jim said it was nothing to worry about, it was so small.

Don’t let size deceive you. Look at the H-bomb. This country has always been protected by the vast oceans that surround it. Imagine if that could be breached, at any time, in minutes, by a Sputnik carrying an atomic bomb? What if it could shower us with radiation like a crop-duster as it passes overhead? This time last year, Rickover told the Senate he didn’t think the American people understood that we were at war. They need to hear shells! What we’ll be hearing before the year is out will be louder than shells, I assure you.

You really think so?

Only last week the Soviets launched another Sputnik—Mechta, whatever that means—that flew to the
moon
, then into orbit around the sun. The sun! How are they doing this? How are they doing these things before us? McCormack’s right, you know, we’re facing national extinction if we don’t catch up, and catch up soon. We simply
must
capture the high ground of space. Our survival—the free world, the church—depends on it.

He paused.

The Communists aren’t supposed to be good at technology. He sighed. I’m basing my next sermon on it.

On how the Communists are supposed to be technologically backward?

On us getting soft, he said. We’re standing still. The American man is drinking beer on his sofa in front of his new television set, while the Soviets are toiling, sweating and bleeding, becoming masters of the universe. Maybe Average Joe should concern himself less with the depth of the pile in his new broadloom rug, or the height of the tail fin on his new car. Maybe then we’d prevail. May I read you something?

She nodded. He opened his Bible and began to read from a newspaper cutting pressed between the pages of Leviticus.

Control of space means control of the world. From space, the Reds would have the power to control the Earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to direct the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid.

It’s a battle, Grace, he said. It’s a battle for the heavens. It’s good versus evil and we’re on the front line. You know, I might use that. These things are so difficult to write.

He made a note.

I pray for this country, Grace. I pray for the president, I pray for Vice President Nixon, and I pray for Premier Khrushchev. And I will pray for you and Jim.

I should go, she said. Thank you, Reverend.

God bless you, Grace.

In the car, driving home, she thought back to the fall of fifty-seven, sitting outside Pancho’s with a warm beer; Jim and a few of the others passing round the binoculars, trying to see the Sputnik as it passed overhead.

Ike said anything? Pancho said.

Why the hell should he? Harrison said.

You can certainly hear the damn thing, Ridley said.

Cardenas had pulled his car over. KCAW was broadcasting the satellite’s transmission live. You sure we’re gonna be able to see it? he said.

Damn right, Pancho said. I can’t get that goddamn bleeping out of my head. You think it’s a code, or something?

Hang on, Harrison said. Listen.

—
launched earlier tonight. The official Soviet news agency TASS says that the man-made satellite is circling the Earth once every hour and thirty-five minutes. The rocket that carried the artificial moon into space left the Earth at five miles a second. It has a diameter of twenty-two inches and weight a hundred and eighty-four pounds. Nothing has been revealed about the material of which it is constructed, nor where in the Soviet Union it was launched from.

What’s the big deal? Harrison said.

Beats me, Ridley said.

Both us and the Russians have been talking about launching an Earth satellite since fifty-five, for chrissake; part of the International Geophysical Year. Why the surprise? The Naval Research Lab’s launching ours on a Vanguard in December. That right, Jack?

That’s right.

Whole lot of fuss over nothing, Cardenas said.

Well I sure as hell don’t like the idea of some secret Commie machine buzzin me fifteen goddamn times a day, Pancho said.

I don’t like it either, Grace said.

Wait til the X-15 rolls out, end of June, Ridley said. It’s been designed to fly at two hundred and eighty thousand feet—that’s fifty miles up—beyond where the atmosphere ends and space begins. Scotty’s already in training to fly it. Jim here, a few other fellas—an maybe a coupla boys from the NACA—will follow. Forget satellites, they’ll be the first
men
in space.

Grace stared at her husband. He shrugged his shoulders.

You fellas got your sights set on space? Pancho said.

We been goin higher an faster the last ten years, Ridley said. Next logical step for the X-series.

Sounds like a whole heap of pie in the sky, Pancho said.