He folded the paper neatly and returned to the corridor, where one glance into the dark city-room showed him that the women were done. “Yair. It’s making towards four,” he thought, wondering if it were actually dawn which he felt, or that anyway the dark globe on which people lived had passed the dead point at which the ill and the weary were supposed to be prone to die and now it was beginning to turn again, soon beginning to spin again out of the last laggard reluctance of darkness — the garblement which was the city: the scabby hop poles which elevated the ragged palm-crests like the monstrous broom-sage out of an old country thought, the spent stage of last night’s clatterfalque Nile barge supine now beneath today’s white wings treading, the hydrant gouts gutter plaited with the trodden tinsel-dung of stars.
“And at Alphonse’s and Renaud’s the waiters that can not only understand Mississippi Valley French but they can even fetch back from the kitchen what you were not so sure yourself you told them to,” he thought, passing among the desks by feel now and rolling the paper into his coat for pillow before stretching out on the floor.
“Yair,” he thought, “in bed now, and he will come in and she will say Did you get it? and he will say What? Get what? Ob, you mean the ship. Yair, we got it. That’s what we went over there for.”
It was not the sun that waked him, nor what would have been the sun save for the usual winter morning’s overcast: he just waked, regardless of the fact that during the past forty-eight hours he had slept but little more than he had eaten, like so many people who, living always on the outside of the mechanical regimentation of hours, seem able at need to coincide with a given moment a sort of unflagging instinctive facility.
But the train would be ordered by mechanical postulation, and there would be no watch or clock in the building yet. Gaunt, worn ( he had not even paused to wash his face), he ran down the stairs and along the street itself; still running he turned in this side of the window and the immemorial grape-fruit halves which apparently each morning at the same moment at which the street lamps went out would be set out, age-and time-proved for intactness and imperviousness like the peasant vases exhumed from Greek and Roman ruins, between the paper poinsettias and the easel bearing the names of food printed upon interchangeable metal strips.
In the city-room they called it the Dirty Spoon: one of ten thousand narrow tunnels furnished with a counter, a row of buttock-polished backless stools, a coffee urn and a Greek proprietor resembling a retired wrestler adjacent to ten thousand newspapers and dubbed by ten thousand variations about the land; the same thick-bodied Greek in the same soiled drill jacket might have looked at him across the same glass coffin filled with bowls of cereal and oranges and plates of buns apparently exhumed along with the grape-fruit in the window, only just this moment varnished. Then the reporter was able to see the clock on the rear wall; it was only fifteen past seven. “Well, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
“Coffee?” the Greek said.
“Yair,” the reporter said. “I ought to eat too,” he thought. Looking down into the glass-walled and topped gutter beneath his hands, not with any revulsion now, but with a kind of delicate distasteful abstemiousness like the old women in novels.
And not from impatience, hurry: just as last night he seemed to see his blind furious course circling implacably back to the point where he had lost control of it like a kind of spiritual ground-loop, now he seemed to feel it straighten out at last, already lifting him steadily and undeviatingly onward so that now he need make no effort to move with it; all he had to do now was to remember to carry along with him everything which he was likely to need because this time he was not coming back.
“Gimme one of these,” he said, tapping the glass with one hand while with the other he touched, felt, the folded slip of paper in his watch-pocket. He ate the bun along with his coffee, tasting neither, feeling only the coffee’s warmth; it was now twenty-five past seven. “I can walk,” he thought. The overcast would burn away later. But it still lay overhead when he entered the station where Shumann rose from the bench. “Had some breakfast yet?” the reporter said.
“Yes,” Shumann said. The reporter looked at the other with a kind of bright grave intensity.
“Come on,” he said. “We can get on now.” The lights still burned in the train shed; the skylight was the same colour of the sky outside. “It will be gone soon though,” the reporter said. “Maybe by the time we get there; you will probably fly the ship back in the sun. Just think of that.”
But it was gone before that; it was gone when they ran clear of the city; the car (they had the entire end of it to themselves) ran almost at once into thin sunlight. “I told you you would fly back in the sunshine,” the reporter said. “I guess we had better fix this up now, too.” He took out the note; he watched with that grave bright intensity while Shumann read it and then seemed to muse upon it soberly.
“Five thousand,” Shumann said. “That’s…”
“High?” the reporter said. “Yair. I didn’t want there to be any hitch until we got into the air with it, got back to the airport with it. To look like a price that even Marchand wouldn’t dare refuse to…” He watched Shumann, bright, quiet, grave.
“Yair,” Shumann said. “I see.” He reached into his coat. Then perhaps it was the fountain pen, though the reporter did not move yet and the brightness and intensity and gravity had not altered as he watched the deliberate, unhurried, slightly awkward movement of the pen across the blank signature line beneath the one where he had signed, watching the letters emerge: Roger Shumann.
But he did not move even then; it was not until the pen without stopping dropped down to the third line and was writing again that he leaned and stopped it with his hand, looking at the half-finished third name: Dr. Carl S —
“Wait,” he said. “What’s that?”
“It’s my father’s name.”
“Would he let you sign it on this?”
“He’d have to, after it was done. Yes. He would help you out on it.”
“Help me out on it?”
“I wouldn’t be worth even five hundred unless I managed to finish that race first.” A train-man passed, swinging from seat-back to seat-back, pausing above them for a moment.
“Blaisedell,” he said. “Blaisedell.”
“Wait,” the reporter said. “Maybe I didn’t understand. I ain’t a flyer; all I know is that hour’s dual Matt gave me that time. I thought maybe what Matt meant was he didn’t want to risk having the under-carriage busted or the propeller bent or maybe a wing-tip….” He looked at Shumann, bright, grave, his hand still holding Shumann’s wrist.
“I guess I can land it all right,” Shumann said. But the reporter did not move, looking at Shumann.
“Then it will be all right? It’ll just be landing it, like what Matt said about the time he landed it?”
“I guess so,” Shumann said. The train began to slow; the oleander bushes, the moss-hung live-oaks in which light threads of mist-snared gossamer glinted in the sun; the vine-shrouded station flowed up, slowing; it would not quite pass.
“Because, Jesus, it’s just the money prize; it’s just one afternoon. And Matt will help you build your ship back and you will be all set with it for the next meet.” They looked at one another.
“I guess I can get it back down,” Shumann said.
“Yair. But listen—”
“I can land it,” Shumann said; “All right,” the reporter said. He released the other’s wrist; the pen moved again, completing the signature steadily: Dr. Carl Shumann, by Roger Shumann. The reporter took the note, rising.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.” They walked again; it was about a mile; presently the road ran beside the field beyond which they could see the buildings — the detached office, the shop, the hangar with a broad legend above the open doors: ORD-ATKINSON AIRCRAFT CORPORATION — all of pale brick, as neat as and apparently contemporaneous with Ord’s new house. Sitting on the ground a little back from the road they watched two mechanics wheel out the red-and-white monoplane with which Ord had set his record and start it and warm it, and then they saw Ord himself come out of the office, get into the racer, taxi to the end of the field and turn and take off straight over their heads, already travelling a hundred feet ahead of his own sound.
“It’s forty miles over to Feinman from here,” the reporter said. “He flies it in ten minutes. Come on. You let me do the talking. Jesus,” he cried, in a kind of light amazed exultation, “I never told a lie in my life that anybody believed; maybe this is what I have been needing all the time!” When they reached the hangar the doors were now closed to a crack just large enough for a man to enter.
Shumann entered, already looking about, until he found the aeroplane — a low-wing monoplane with a big nose and a tubular fuselage ending in
