“Yes.” Feinman turned to Ord.
“And it will fly, won’t it?” Ord looked at him for a long moment too.
“Yes,” he said. Now Feinman turned to Shumann.
“Is it dangerous to fly?” he said.
“They all are,” Shumann said.
“Well, are you afraid to fly it?” Shumann looked at him. “Do you expect it to fall with you this afternoon?”
“If I did I wouldn’t take it up,” Shumann said. Suddenly Ord rose; he was looking at Sales.
“Mac,” he said, “this ain’t getting anywhere. I will ground the ship myself.” He turned to Shumann. “Listen, Roger—”
“On what grounds, Mr. Ord?” the secretary said.
“Because it belongs to me. Is that grounds enough for you?”
“When an authorized agent of your corporation has accepted a legal monetary equivalent for it and surrendered the machine?”
“But they are not good for the note. I know that. I was a damn stick-straddler myself until I got a break. Why, damn it, one of the names on it is admitted to not be signed by the owner of it. And listen: yair; I don’t even know whether Shumann did the actual signing; whoever signed it signed it before I saw it or even before Marchand saw it. See?” He glared at the secretary, who looked at him in turn with his veiled, contemptuous glance.
“I see,” the secretary said pleasantly. “I was waiting for you to bring that up. You seem to have forgotten that the note has a third signer.” Ord stared at him for a minute.
“But he ain’t good for it either,” he said.
“Possibly not, alone. But Mr. Shumann tells us that his father is and that his father will honour this signature. So by your own token, the question seems to resolve to whether or not Mr. Shumann did or did not sign his and his father’s name to the note.
And we seem to have a witness to that. It is not exactly legal, I grant you. But this other signer is known to some of us here; you know him yourself, you tell us, to be a person of unassailable veracity.
We will have him in.” Then it was that the amplifiers began to call the reporter’s name; he entered; he came forward while they watched him. The secretary extended the note towards him. (“Jesus,” the reporter thought, “they must have sent a ship over for Marchand.”)
“Will you examine this?” the secretary said.
“I know it,” the reporter said.
“Will you state whether or not you and Mr. Shumann signed it in each other’s presence and in good faith?” The reporter looked about, at the faces behind the table, at Shumann sitting with his head bent a little and at Ord half-risen, glaring at him. After a moment Shumann turned his head and looked quietly at him.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “We signed it.”
“There you are,” Feinman said. He rose. “That’s all. Shumann has possession; if Ord wants any more to be stubborn about it we will just let him run to town and see if he can get back with a writ of replevin before time for the race.”
“But he can’t enter it!” Ord said. “It ain’t qualified.” Feinman paused long enough to look at Ord for a second with impersonal inscrutability.
“Speaking for the citizens of Franciana who donated the ground and for the citizens of New Valois that built the airport the race is going to be run on, I will waive qualifications.”
“You can’t waive the A.A.A.,” Ord said. “You can’t make it official if he wins the whole damn meet.”
“Then he will not need to rush back to town to pawn a silver cup,” Feinman said. He went out; the others rose from the table and followed. After a moment Ord turned quietly to Shumann.
“Come on,” he said. “We’d better check her over.”
The reporter did not see them again. He followed them through the rotunda, through the amplifier’s voice and through the throng at the gates, or so he thought because his police card had passed him before he remembered that they would have had to go around to reach the apron.
But he could see the aeroplane with a crowd standing around it. The woman had forgotten too that Shumann and Ord would have to go around and through the hangar; she emerged again from the crowd beneath the bandstand. “So they did it,” she said. “They let him.”
“Yes. It was all right. Like I told you.”
“They did it,” she said, staring at him, yet speaking as though in amazed soliloquy. “Yes. You fixed it.”
“Yes. I knew that’s all it would be. I wasn’t worried. And don’t you…” She didn’t move for a moment; there was nothing of distraction especially; he just seemed to hang substance-less in the long peaceful backwash of waiting, saying quietly out of the dreamy smiling, “Yair.
Ord talking about how he would be disqualified for the cup, the prize, like that would stop him, like that was what.. not even aware that it was only the shell of her speaking quietly back to him, asking him if he would mind the boy.
“Since you seem to be caught up for the time.”
“Yair,” he said. “Of course.” Then she was gone, the white dress and the trench-coat lost in the crowd — the ones with ribbon badges and the ones in dungarees — which streamed suddenly down the apron towards the dark horse, the sensation.
As he stood so, holding the little boy by one damp sticky hand, the Frenchman Despleins passed again down the runway which paralleled the stands, on one wheel; the reporter watched him take off and half roll, climbing upside down.
Now he heard the voice; he had not heard it since it called his own name, despite the fact that it had never ceased, perhaps because of the fact:
“… oh oh oh, mister, don’t, don’t! Oh, mister! Please get up high enough so your parachute can try to open! Now, now; now, now…. Oh, Mac! Oh, Mr. Sales! Make him stop!” The reporter looked down at the boy.
“I bet you a dime you haven’t spent that nickel,” he said.
“Naw,” the boy said. “I ain’t had a chance to. She wouldn’t let me.”
“Well, my goodness!” the reporter said. “I owe you twenty cents then, don’t I? Come—” He paused, turning; it was the photographer, the man whom he had called Jug, laden again with the enigmatic and faintly macabre utensils of his calling so that he resembled vaguely a trained dog belonging to a country doctor.
“Where in hell you been?” the photographer said. “Hagood told me to find you at ten o’clock.”
“Here I am,” the reporter said. “We’re just going inside to spend twenty cents. Want to come?” Now the Frenchman came up the runway about twenty feet high and on his back, his head and face beneath the cockpit-rim motionless and alert like that of a roach or a rat immobile behind a crack in a wainscot, his neat short beard unstirred by any wind as though cast in one piece of bronze.
“Yair,” the photographer said; perhaps it was the bilious aspect of an inverted world seen through a hooded lens or emerging in grimacing and attitudinal miniature from stinking trays in a celibate and stygian cell lighted by a red lamp: “and have that guy come down on his whiskers and me not here to get it?”
“All right,” the reporter said. “Stay and get it.” He turned to go on. —
“Yair; but Hagood told me—” the photographer said.
The reporter turned back.
“All right,” he said. “But hurry up.”
“Hurry up what?”
“Snap me. You can show it to Hagood when you go in.” He and the boy went on; he did not walk back into the voice, he had never walked out of it:
“…an inverted spin, folks; he’s going into it still upside down — oh oh oh oh — —” The reporter stooped suddenly and lifted the boy to his shoulder.
“We can make better time,” he said. “We will want to get back in a few minutes.” They passed through the gate, among the gaped and upturned faces which choked the gangway. “That’s it,” he thought quietly, with that faint quiet grimace almost like smiling; “they ain’t human.
It ain’t adultery; you can’t any more imagine two of them making love than you can two of them aeroplanes back in the corner of the hangar, coupled.” With one hand he supported the boy on his shoulder, feeling through the harsh khaki the young brief living flesh. “Yair; cut him and it’s cylinder oil; dissect him and it ain’t bones: it’s little rocker arms and connecting rods….”
The restaurant was crowded; they did not wait to eat the ice-cream there on a plate; with one cone in his hand and one in the boy’s and the two chocolate bars in his pocket they were working back through the crowded gangway when the bomb went off and then the voice:
“… fourth event unlimited free-for-all, Vaughn Trophy race, prize two thousand dollars.
You will not only have a chance to see Matt Ord in his famous Ninety-Two Ord-Atkinson Special in which he set a new land plane speed record, but as a surprise entry through the courtesy of the American Aeronautical Association and the Feinman Airport Commission, Roger Shumann, who yesterday nosed over in a forced landing, in a special rebuilt job that Matt Ord rebuilt himself.
Two horses from the same stable, folks, and two pilots both of whom are so good that it is a pleasure to give the citizens of New Valois and Franciana the chance to see them pitted against each other….”He and the boy watched the take-off, then they went on.
Presently he found
