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He smiled, nodded, one time.
and all at once, morning gone, I was aloft in a clear bright afternoon. I didn’t dream it, I was flying again, Puff turning toward the farm field. I was thinking nothing but the landing. Wheels are down, flaps are down. I was a quarter-mile from the land, didn’t need to see the instrument panel.
The canopy was open, I could hear the airspeed. It sounded a little fast, I moved the throttle down, a few engine revolutions. A little high, want a nice smooth landing on the grass, what a beautiful day it is, we’re living a painting, aren’t we, Puff?
She didn’t answer. She just listened, told me through the sound of the wind, the sound of the engine, the picture of the tree tops to the left and right, the cleared space ahead on the approach.
At sixty feet above the ground, the tops of the treetops left and right were level with us, we sank softly toward the ground. The grass was mowed on the runway ahead, grown longer in the wild parts of the land around. Dry grass, the color of sunset.
I heard a quiet little ping from the right wheel, and next instant, in slow motion, the flight controls failed. Puff was all of a sudden out of control. Never happened in my life. I was no longer a pilot, I was a passenger, and Puff went down.
Do I really want to live this? I think I might better well just forget…
The electric wires scraped the steel of the right landing gear, sparks spraying a dense fireworks fountain, high voltage incandescent snow, spraying off the right side, pouring up for an instant, then turning the fountain slowly, white hot, the sound of a welder’s cutting torch, over the field.
Puff tumbled, as though someone had tripped her, on her run to the land. I was tumbled, too, sudden negative high-G, a whiplash that blurred and blinded me — all I could see was the color of blood. She was nearly upside down. In a fiftieth of a second the weight of Puff broke free from wires. Two telephone poles were falling behind us, the wires and the sparks trailing to the ground.
Next instant, Puff was free, and she rolled. If she had a few hundred feet, she would have dropped back to level flight. a little singed but flying.
But she was free at thirty feet above the ground. She rolled to the right as hard as she could, hoping at least to keep me alive.
Then her r
ight wing hit the ground. As though the ground was a huge spinning grindstone, the outer part of her wing disappeared.
My seat belt and the shoulder harness slammed across my chest, breaking ribs, kept my body from tumbling free from the cockpit.
The grindstone came ten feet closer, upside down, now, throwing us sidewise at five feet above the ground, stopped the propeller at three feet, then smashed the engine behind my head while it crushed us inverted, the shoulder harness broke something in my back.
Was gasoline pouring, with the gas tank over me now? The gas tank spraying over the hot engine, then exploding, would have been a flash of beautiful color.
But there was no fire in the cockpit. All at once, everything stopped. It was dead still in that scene. Nobody moving, not Puff, not me, upside down in her cockpit.
Thank you, dear Puf…
Then came the black plastic visor in front of my eyes. That was what happened. Seemed to happen. Nothing in space-time is real.
A while later, I was not with Shimoda again, but aloft in the dirigible over a different world. That wasn’t true, either.
Everything in space and time is a dream.
“Let’s go,” Shimoda said, knowing one dream was over, time for another. No engine start, no takeoff, all at once we were flying, I was a wingman, on his right side.
He looked across the chasm between our airplanes, not a word for the dream of the crash, watching me. “Close it up a bit,” he said.
Flying for a lifetime I flew first, no memories of dreams, nothing else mattered. I flew. I thought I was close in formation, five feet between the airplanes. I tucked it up to two feet from my wing to his, I could do this, with air as smooth as honey. That’s about my limit. I’ve never touched another airplane in flight.
“A bit more,” he said.
Shocked me. Closer? “You want me to touch your wing?”
“That’s affirmative. Touch it, please.”
I thought, for a minute, that this is a different world than the space and time on Earth. Two places here, I’ll bet can occupy one space, I thought they could. He would never have asked me to touch his airplane if I was going to destroy it.
I nodded to him. Here goes. If I’m wrong I’ll be leaving pieces falling back through the air behind us.
My wings slowly moved ahead, the leading edge inches from his aileron.
