The Rocketeer (14 page)

Cliff batted away Malcolm’s fists and snapped, “Don’t fight me, dammit!
It’s me! Cliff!”

Malcolm marveled at the insidiousness of the creature, that it would usurp Cliff’s voice. It terrified him even more than ever, because the nightmare monster might have even more tricks up its inhuman sleeves. Then Malcolm, in his panicked haze, remembered that he had the control stick gripped in his hand, and he swung it around and smashed the monster on the head.

Once again the world around Cliff took on the general appearance of the inside of a bell. And now he realized that the clouds were far above them, which meant that the ground was not especially far below them. They had maybe seconds left at most.

He could have just leapt clear, ignited the rocket, and have done with it. But then he’d have to live with the knowledge that he’d left Malcolm behind. Malcolm, who had been trying to do him a favor and paid for that attempted kindness with his life.

No. It was either together or not at all. But if it was going to be together, it was clearly going to have to be the hard way. So be it, then.

Cliff slammed his helmeted head forward and it smashed into Malcolm’s unprotected cranium. That was more than enough to send the already-groggy Malcolm screaming back to dreamland. And then Cliff saw the ground yawning up at them and realized that he had under ten seconds to prevent that trip to dreamland from being one way.

Throwing his arms around Malcolm from behind, he shouted,
“C’mon, you tub of guts!”
He punched the rocket to life, and the jet pack blasted them skyward, with Malcolm going seat and all. They punched through the top wing in a shower of shattered wood and canvas, and barely a second later the Standard hit ground zero . . .

Which just happened to be, in a turn of events that was cosmically just, Bigelow’s brand-new fuel truck. The airplane and truck went up in an enormous explosion that rocked the airfield.

The spectators saw the blast first, and seconds later heard the tremendous noise and felt the skin-searing heat. Bigelow staggered back, almost knocked clear off the observation podium. On the ground, Peevy and the others were watching with breath-holding suspense, for from where they were sitting,
Miss Mabel
had made her final swan dive with all hands aboard.

And then, just when it seemed that there was no way that it could possibly happen, the helmeted flying man seemed to hurtle right from the midst of the fireball. He was firmly gripping Malcolm, who was unconscious and still strapped into his seat.

To small children it proved that Fearless Freep was so fearless, he was able to sleep through something as incredible as this. To the adults it proved that miracles could happen. To Peevy it seemed a final vindication of everything that he’d worked for up to that moment in his life. And for Bigelow, it was a meal ticket that could set his table for the rest of his life.

He stepped forward, starting to shout, but the rocket man never even slowed down. He angled upward toward the clouds again as the crowd went absolutely crazy. Malcolm, just coming to, looked around in utter confusion, not certain just how he had managed to get down onto the runway, considering that he was supposed to be dead along about now. But he heard the cheers and then saw the adulation, and the reporters trying to shove and get through to him, stumbling over each other, and he did what seemed to be the most appropriate thing—he grinned widely and raised the broken control stick above his head like a scepter.

“Sister Mary Francis!” roared Bigelow, watching the flying man soar against the blue sky. “What I wouldn’t pay for that act!”

As if holding a casual conversation, Peevy said, “Five hundred bucks a show?”

“Easy!” said Bigelow.

And the tone of Peevy’s voice changed immediately, from casual speculation to hard-edged negotiation. “We’ll take it,” he said.

Bigelow shot him a stunned look, picking up on the tone that Peevy had suddenly taken. Peevy was already in motion, heading toward his truck, and Bigelow came right after him. The circus man was glancing around, trying to ascertain Secord’s whereabouts, as if he couldn’t believe what the exchange between himself and Peevy signified. But Secord was nowhere around and . . .

“You mean to tell me that’s—” began Bigelow, pointing to the horizon line.

Peevy turned and snapped, “You don’t know
who
he is! That’s part of the deal, understand?” Without waiting for an answer, he hopped into his truck and peeled out in the direction of the flying man, leaving an amazed Bigelow behind to cope with the flood of reporters.

Behind Peevy, Eddie and his men were also piling into their cars. They pulled forward, honking at the crowds blocking their way.

The reporters, meantime, were surging around the pay phones, trying to call the story in. Fistfights were breaking out, and over the general shouting of the crowd could be heard the openings of stories being bellowed into the phone, orders being issued.

“You heard me! Hold the front page!”

“That’s right, a flying man! And I got the pictures to prove it!”

One elderly woman, determined to tell her sister of this phenomenon, was saying, “Hello, Louise?” only to have the phone ripped away from her.

“Pardon me, toots,” said a reporter. “Your time’s up.”

The old woman decked him with a roundhouse right, and went back to her conversation without missing a beat. “You’ll never believe what I saw at the air show today . . .”

T
he black sedan barreled along on the road, with Spanish Johnny leaning out a back window, clutching a pair of binoculars. “There!” he shouted. “I think I see him up there!”

Rusty leaned out of the other window and squinted. “Nah. That’s a bird. No, it’s a plane.”

“I see the bird, I see the plane. Over there! Heading toward the plane! That’s him!”

“Don’t worry about him!” snapped Eddie to Mike, who was at the wheel with some popcorn balanced between his legs. “Don’t lose sight of the truck. I got a feeling they’re connected somehow. And when we find where they connect, we find the rocket pack.”

High above the earth, Cliff burst through a cloud, trailing wisps of vapor. His arms were spread wide as if in thanksgiving, and a howl of pure joy burst forth from him.

It was incredible, beyond belief. As the rocket pack had proven consistently reliable, and with the pure accomplishment of having saved Malcolm from fiery death, Cliff’s fears had fallen away to be replaced by a giddy euphoria.

It was like seeing the world through entirely new eyes. Here he had always thought that flying in a plane gave him freedom, even power. Now he felt as if he had been kidding himself all that time. Being crunched into a cockpit was crippling compared to what he was experiencing now. The wind whistled past his body, and he stretched his arms out like a plane, experimenting with directions by angling the fin of his helmet.

It was staggeringly easy. What had there been to be afraid of? He was doing what no man had ever done in history, what men had only dreamed of. Men had given their gods the ability to fly as free as birds, but not themselves.

Not anymore though. Now there was Cliff Secord, the flying man. He had come through his literal baptism by fire, and now nothing could stop him. The idea of ever returning to flight the way it had been was as unthinkable as an adult deciding that he was going to return to crawling as sole means of locomotion.

Up ahead he saw a Mercury Airways Tri-Motor, and they had most definitely not seen him. Inside were nice, ordinary passengers who were entertaining themselves with the notion that they were flying. They weren’t flying. Even the pilot wasn’t flying, not really. Cliff understood that now. The plane was doing the flying. The plane was feeling the wind rush beneath it, the plane was hurtling forward. The people were just along for the ride.

Time to show them that.

He hit the thrust and, seconds later, had overtaken the plane. He cruised past the windows as astonished faces pressed against the glass, pointing and gawking. A pretty stewardess peered out. Cliff boldly tossed her a salute and tilted his head to see her better . . .

. . . and spiraled completely out of control. With a scream he plummeted out of sight, dropping like a stone.

On the ground, his truck racing, Peevy spied the tumbling speck in the sky and breathed a prayer as he veered sharply onto another road.

Cliff was flying with all the grace of an anchor. Birds flapped to get out of his way as he plunged down, down, the ground coming up even faster than it had when he’d been fighting to save Malcolm.

Gone were airy thoughts of gods and man’s ultimate destiny. Banished were notions of pilots not really knowing what flight was. The only thing that was pounding through Cliff’s brain at the moment was how mortified he would be if they found him smeared into jelly against a boulder somewhere.

Cliff saw that he was plummeting toward a farm, and corrected his worry. Now he was concerned that he might literally hit the broad side of a barn and end his life as a cliché.

He pulled out of it at literally the last second, angling off and roaring along the ground at an altitude of a less-than-impressive five feet. He shot past a woman who was hanging up laundry and, before he could slow himself down, became utterly enmeshed in a sheet she had been hanging up. She screamed and he kept on going, trying to untangle himself and having zero success.

His next nonstop was an orchard, smashing into a pair of wooden ladders that were supporting a couple of fruit pickers. They grabbed on to the branches, narrowly averting falls, and watched in amazement at the ghost that soared away past the fruit trees.

Cursing and yanking, Cliff finally managed to disengage himself from the sheet. He tossed it aside and it fluttered away as he turned his attention back to trying either to stop or to get some altitude.

Before he could do either, he saw what he was zipping toward and screamed. He threw his arms up in front of his head reflexively, as if his helmet weren’t going to afford him enough protection, and before he could slow himself down, he smashed through a fence that was bordering a cornfield.

Wood splintered and flew as Cliff shot straight down the middle of the cornfield, chewing up a furrow from one end to the other.

Two good ol’ boys sat perched on another section of fence. They had not seen Cliff make his explosive entrance, nor his equally dynamic exit. What they did see, though, was stalk after stalk being uprooted and sent flying by something that was fairly low to the ground and moving with remarkable speed. There was a succession of cracking and thudding, of corn being smashed down as loudly as possible.

A scarecrow with the poor luck to be in the way of the unseen force blasted skyward, twirling through the air and landing a couple of feet away from the silent spectators. They watched the trail of destroyed corn work its way across to the far end, and then turned and looked at each other with surprising calm.

“Big gopher,” said one. The other simply nodded.

Cliff burst out of the cornfield, and just had time to congratulate himself for surviving that debacle when he discovered he was on a collision course with Peevy’s speeding truck. Screaming once more, and feeling as if his vocal cords had gotten one hell of a workout, Cliff veered in one direction while Peevy swerved in the other. The truck spun out and scudded to a halt in a ditch just off the road.

In the meantime, Cliff finally managed to cut his thrust. However, the laws of motion required that he keep moving forward until some outside force acted to stop him. In this case, the outside force turned out to be a duck pond. He skipped across it like a stone, sending alarmed ducks skyward and quacking as if they were saying,
Who’s this idiot who thinks he can fly?
He didn’t fly much longer, though, as he crashed headlong into a thicket of reeds, bringing to a rather inglorious end the maiden flight of Cliff Secord, rocket-propelled pilot.

By the time Peevy caught up with him, certain that he was going to find a corpse, he instead discovered Cliff sitting up in steaming water, looking rather dazed but otherwise in one piece. Having found Cliff to be alive, Peevy’s natural and immediate inclination was to kill him.

“You damn fool, you had to show off!” He waved his arms around. “Lucky you didn’t break your neck! And what were you gonna do, fly to Paris? How much fuel do you think she holds?”

Peevy pulled the helmet off Cliff, and was amazed to see the pilot grinning ear to ear. He looked up at Peevy with the expression of a child on Christmas morning and said, “I
like
it!”

For a moment Peevy stared at him, not sure of which way to cuss the kid out. And then, slowly, the success of Cliff’s flight and the immensity of what they had accomplished began to sink in. The old mechanic grinned back and extended a hand. Cliff took it and Peevy hauled him to his feet with surprising strength for the old bones. The moment he was standing, the overjoyed Cliff threw his arms around him in an enthused bear hug.

Both of them were whooping and laughing, although Peevy managed to get enough breath to say, “Put me down, you lunatic!” Cliff complied by dropping him into the pond with a loud splash. Peevy tossed some water at Cliff, like a child at play, and Cliff kicked some back at his friend and co-conspirator.