“‘You look like you might have to jump yourself to sleep, too,’ I said.
“‘No, I sleep fine. The trouble is, the nights aren’t long enough. I’d like to live at the North Pole from September to April, and at the South Pole from April to September. That would just suit me.’
“‘You aren’t going to last long enough to get there,’ I said.
“‘I guess so. It’s a good engine. I see to that.’
“‘I mean, you’ll be in jail.’
“Then he said: ‘Do you think so? Do you guess I could?’
“We went on to the café. He told me about the racket, and showed me one of those Demon Duncan handbills. ‘Demon Duncan?’ I said.
“‘Why not? Who would pay to see a man named Ginsfarb jump from a ship?’
“‘I’d pay to see that before I’d pay to see a man named Duncan do it,’ I said.
“He hadn’t thought of that. Then he began to drink water, and he told me that Ginsfarb had wanted a hundred dollars for the stunt, but that he and the other fellow only got sixty.
“‘What are you going to do about it?’ I said.
“‘Try to keep him fooled and get this thing over and get to hell away from here,’ he said.
“‘Which one is Ginsfarb?’ I said. ‘The little one that looks like a shark?’
“Then he began to drink water. He emptied my glass too at one shot and tapped it on the table. Vernon brought him another glass. ‘You must be thirsty,’ Vernon said.
“‘Have you got a pitcher of it?’ Jock said.
“‘I could fill you a milk bottle.’
“‘Let’s have it,’ Jock said. ‘And give me another glass while I’m waiting.’ Then he told me about Ginsfarb, why his hair had turned gray.
“‘How long have you been doing this?’ I said.
“‘Ever since the 26th of August.’
“‘This is just January,’ I said.
“‘What about it?’
“‘The 26th of August is not six months past.’”
He looked at me. Vernon brought the bottle of water. Jock poured a glass and drank it. He began to shake, sitting there, shaking and sweating, trying to fill the glass again. Then he told me about it, talking fast, filling the glass and drinking.
“Jake (the other one’s name is Jake something; the good-looking one) drives the car, the rented car. Ginsfarb swaps onto the car from the ladder. Jock said he would have to fly the ship into position over a Ford or a Chevrolet running on three cylinders, trying to keep Ginsfarb from jumping from twenty or thirty feet away in order to save gasoline in the ship and in the rented car. Ginsfarb goes out on the bottom wing with his ladder, fastens the ladder onto a strut, hooks himself into the other end of the ladder, and drops off; everybody on the ground thinks that he has done what they all came to see: fallen off and killed himself.
That’s what he calls his death-drop. Then he swaps from the ladder onto the top of the car, and the ship comes back and he catches the ladder and is dragged off again. That’s his death-drag.
“Well, up till the day when Jock’s hair began to turn white, Ginsfarb, as a matter of economy, would do it all at once; he would get into position above the car and drop off on his ladder and then make contact with the car, and sometimes Jock said the ship would not be in the air three minutes. Well, on this day the rented car was a bum or something; anyway, Jock had to circle the field four or five times while the car was getting into position, and Ginsfarb, seeing his money being blown out the exhaust pipes, finally refused to wait for Jock’s signal and dropped off anyway.
It was all right, only the distance between the ship and the car was not as long as the rope ladder. So Ginsfarb hit on the car, and Jock had just enough soup to zoom and drag Ginsfarb, still on the ladder, over a high-power electric line, and he held the ship in that climb for twenty minutes while Ginsfarb climbed back up the ladder with his leg broken. He held the ship in a climb with his knees, with the throttle wide open and the engine revving about eleven hundred, while he reached back and opened that cupboard behind the cockpit and dragged out a suitcase and propped the stick so he could get out on the wing and drag Ginsfarb back into the ship. He got Ginsfarb in the ship and on the ground again and Ginsfarb says: ‘How far did we go?’ and Jock told him they had flown with full throttle for thirty minutes and Ginsfarb says: ‘Will you ruin me yet?’”
III
The rest of this is composite. It is what we (groundlings, dwellers in and backbone of a small town interchangeable with and duplicate of ten thousand little dead clottings of human life about the land) saw, refined and clarified by the expert, the man who had himself seen his own lonely and scudding shadow upon the face of the puny and remote earth.
The three strangers arrived at the field, in the rented car. When they got out of the car, they were arguing in tense, dead voices, the pilot and the handsome man against the man who limped. Captain Warren said they were arguing about the money.
“I want to see it,” Ginsfarb said. They stood close; the handsome man took something from his pocket.
“There. There it is. See?” he said.
“Let me count it myself,” Ginsfarb said.
“Come on, come on,” the pilot hissed, in his dead, tense voice. “We tell you we got the money! Do you want an inspector to walk in and take the money and the ship too and put us in jail? Look at all these people waiting.”
“You fooled me before,” Ginsfarb said.
“All right,” the pilot said. “Give it to him. Give him his ship too. And he can pay for the car when he gets back to town. We can get a ride in; there’s a train out of here in fifteen minutes.”
“You fooled me once before,” Ginsfarb said.
“But we’re not fooling you now. Come on. Look at all these people.”
They moved toward the airplane, Ginsfarb limping terrifically, his back stubborn, his face tragic, outraged, cold. There was a good crowd: country people in overalls; the men a general dark clump against which the bright dresses of the women, the young girls, showed. The small boys and several men were already surrounding the airplane. We watched the limping man begin to take objects from the body of it: a parachute, a rope ladder. The handsome man went to the propeller. The pilot got into the back seat.
“Off!” he said, sudden and sharp. “Stand back, folks. We’re going to wring the old bird’s neck.”
They tried three times to crank the engine.
“I got a mule, Mister,” a countryman said. “How much’ll you pay for a tow?”
The three strangers did not laugh. The limping man was busy attaching the rope ladder to one wing.
“You can’t tell me,” a countrywoman said. “Even he ain’t that big a fool.”
The engine started then. It seemed to lift bodily from the ground a small boy who stood behind it and blow him aside like a leaf. We watched it turn and trundle down the field.
“You can’t tell me that thing’s flying,” the countrywoman said. “I reckon the Lord give me eyes. I can see it ain’t flying. You folks have been fooled.”
“Wait,” another voice said. “He’s got to turn into the wind.”
“Ain’t there as much wind right there or right here as there is down yonder?” the woman said. But it did fly. It turned back toward us; the noise became deafening. When it came broadside on to us, it did not seem to be going fast, yet we could see daylight beneath the wheels and the earth.
But it was not going fast; it appeared rather to hang gently just above the earth until we saw that, beyond and beneath it, trees and earth in panorama were fleeing backward at dizzy speed, and then it tilted and shot skyward with a noise like a circular saw going into a white oak log. “There ain’t nobody in it!” the countrywoman said. “You can’t tell me!”
The third man, the handsome one in the cap, had got into the rented car. We all knew it: a battered thing which the owner would rent to any one who would make a deposit of ten dollars. He drove to the end of the field, faced down the runway, and stopped. We looked back at the airplane. It was high, coming back toward us; some one cried suddenly, his voice puny and thin: “There! Out on the wing! See?”
“It ain’t!” the countrywoman said. “I don’t believe it!”
“You saw them get in it,” some one said.
“I don’t believe it!” the woman said.
Then we sighed; we said, “Aaahhhhhhh”; beneath the wing of the airplane there was a falling dot. We knew it was a man. Some way we knew that that lonely, puny, falling shape was that of a living man like ourselves. It fell. It seemed to fall for years, yet when it checked suddenly up without visible rope or cord, it was less far from the airplane than was the end of the delicate pen-slash of the profiled wing.
“It ain’t a man!” the woman shrieked.
“You know better,” the man said. “You saw him get in it.”
“I don’t care!” the woman cried. “It ain’t a man! You take me