The reporter had brought with him into the house, the room, that atmosphere of a fifteenth-century Florentine stage scene — an evening call with formal courteous words in the mouth and naked rapiers under the cloaks.
In the impregnably new glow of two rose-shaded lamps which looked like the ones that burn for three hours each night in a living-room suite in the store windows dressed by a junior man clerk, they all stood now, as they had come from the airport, the reporter in that single suit which apparently composed his wardrobe, and Shumann and Ord in grease-stained suède jackets which a third person could not have told apart, standing in the living-room of Ord’s new, neat, little flower-cluttered house built with the compact economy of an aeroplane itself, with the new matched divan and chairs and tables and lamps arranged about it with the myriad compactness of the dials and knobs of an instrument panel.
From somewhere towards the rear they could hear a dinner-table being set, and a woman’s voice singing obviously to a small child. “All right,” Ord said. He did not move; his eyes seemed to watch them both without looking at either, as though they actually were armed invaders. “What do you want me to do?”
“Listen,” the reporter said. “It’s not the money, the prize; I don’t have to tell you that. You were one too, not so long ago, before you met Atkinson and got a break. Hell, look at you now, even when you got Atkinson and all you have to do is just build them without even seeing a pylon closer to it than the grand-stand, without ever taking your other foot off the ground except to get into bed. But do you? Yair; maybe it was somebody else pulling that Ninety-Two around those pylons at Chicago last summer that day; maybe that wasn’t Matt Ord at all.
So you know it ain’t the money, the damn cash: Jesus Christ, he ain’t got the jack he won yesterday yet. Because if it was just the money, if he just had to have it and he come to you and told you, you would lend it to him. Yair, I know. I don’t have to tell you. Jesus, I don’t have to tell anybody that after to-day, after up there in that office at noon.
Yair; listen. Suppose instead of them up there on those damn hard chairs to-day it had been a gang of men hired to go down into a mine say, not to do anything special down there but just to see if the mine would cave in on top of them, and five minutes before they went down the big-bellied guys that own the mine would tell them that everybody’s pay had been cut two and a half per cent, to print a notice how the elevator or something had fell on one of them the night before: would they go down?
Naw. But did these guys refuse to fly that race? Maybe it was not a valve that Shumann’s ship swallowed but a peanut somebody in the grand-stand threw down on the apron. Yair; they could have kept back the ninety-seven and a half and give them the two and a half and it would—”
“No,” Ord said. He spoke with complete and utter finality. “I wouldn’t even let Shumann make a field hop in it. I wouldn’t let any man, let alone fly it around a closed course. Even if it was qualified.” Now it was as though with a word Ord had cut through the circumlocution like through a light net and that the reporter, without breaking stride, had followed him on to new ground as bleak and forthright as a prize-ring.
“But you have flown it. I don’t mean that Shumann can fly as good as you can; I don’t believe anybody can do that even though I know mine ain’t even an opinion: it’s just that hour’s dual you give me talking. But Shumann can fly anything that will fly. I believe that. And we will get it qualified; the licence is still O.K.”
“Yes. The licence is O.K. But the reason it hasn’t been revoked yet is the Department knows I ain’t going to let it off the ground again. Only to revoke it would not be enough: it ought to be broken up and then burned, like you would kill a mad dog. Hell, no. I won’t do it. I feel sorry for Shumann, but not as sorry as I would feel to-morrow night if that ship was over at Feinman Airport to-morrow afternoon.”
“But listen, Matt,” the reporter said. Then he stopped. He did not speak loudly, and with no especial urgency, but he emanated the illusion still of having long since collapsed yet being still intact in his own weightlessness like a dandelion burr moving where there is no wind.
In the soft pink glow his face appeared gaunter than ever, as though following the excess of the past night, his vital spark now fed on the inner side of the actual skin itself, paring it steadily thinner and more and more transparent, as parchment is made. Now his face was completely inscrutable. “So even if we could get it qualified, you wouldn’t let Shumann fly it.”
“Right,” Ord said. “It’s tough on him. I know that. But he don’t want to commit suicide.”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “He ain’t quite got to where won’t nothing else content him. Well, I guess we better get on back to town.”
“Stay and eat some dinner,” Ord said. “I told Mrs. Ord you fellows—”
“I reckon we better get on back,” the reporter said. “It looks like we will have all day to-morrow with nothing to do but eat.”
“We could eat and then drive over to the hangar and I will show you the ship and try to explain—”
“Yair,” the reporter said pleasantly. “But what we want is one that Shumann can look at from inside the cockpit three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Well, sorry we troubled you.” The station was not far; they followed a quiet gravelled village street in the darkness, the Franciana February darkness already heavy with spring — the Franciana spring which emerges out of the Indian summer of fall almost, like a mistimed stage resurrection which takes the curtain even before rigor mortis has made its bow, where the decade’s phenomenon of ice occurs simultaneous with bloomed stalk and budded leaf.
They walked quietly; even the reporter was not talking now — the two of them who could have had nothing in common save the silence which for the moment the reporter permitted them — the one volatile, irrational, with his ghost-like quality of being beyond all mere restrictions of flesh and time; the other single-purposed, fatally and grimly without any trace of introversion or any ability to objectivate or ratiocinate, as though like the engine, the machine for which he apparently existed, he functioned, moved, only in the vapour of gasoline and the film slick of oil — the two of them taken in conjunction and because of this dissimilarity capable of almost anything.
Walking, they seemed to communicate by some means or agency the purpose, the disaster, towards which, without yet being conscious of it apparently, they moved. “Well,” the reporter said. “That’s about what we expected.”
“Yair,” Shumann said. They walked on in silence again; it was as though the silence were the dialogue and the actual speech the soliloquy, the marshalling of thought:
“Are you afraid of it?” the reporter said. “Let’s get that settled; we can do that right now.”
“Tell me about it again,” Shumann said.
“Yes. The guy brought it down here from Saint Louis for Matt to rebuild it; it wouldn’t go fast enough for him. He had it all doped out, about how they would pull the engine and change the body a little and put in a big engine and Matt told him he didn’t think that was so good, that the ship had all the engine then it had any business with and the guy asked Matt whose ship it was and Matt said it was the guy’s and the guy asked Matt whose money it was and so Matt said O.K.
Only Matt thought they ought to change the body more than the guy thought they ought to and at last Matt refused to have anything to do with it unless the guy compromised with him and even then Matt didn’t think so much of it, he didn’t want to butcher it up because it was a good ship, even I can tell that by looking at it.
And so they compromised because Matt told him he would not test it otherwise, besides getting the licence back on it and the guy saying how he seemed to have been misinformed in what he had heard about Matt and so Matt told him O.K., if he wanted to take the ship to somebody else he would put it back together and not even charge the guy storage space on it.
So finally the guy agreed to let Matt make the changes he absolutely insisted on and then he wanted Matt to guarantee the ship and Matt told the guy his guarantee would be when Matt got into the cockpit and took it off and the guy said he meant to turn a pylon with
