It was two thousand feet high when Jiggs shoved past the purple-and-gold guards at the main gate and through the throng huddled in the narrow under-pass beneath the reserved seats. Someone plucked at his sleeve.
“When’s the guy going to jump out of the parachute?”
“Not until he gets back down here,” Jiggs said, butting on past the other purple-and-gold guards and so into the rotunda itself and likewise not into the amplified voice again for the reason that he had never moved out of it:
“… still gaining altitude now; the ship has a long way to go yet.
And then you will see a living man, a man like yourselves — a man like half of yourselves and that the other half of yourselves like, I should say — hurl himself into space and fall for almost four miles before pulling the ripcord of the parachute; by ripcord we mean the trigger that—” Once inside, Jiggs paused, looking swiftly about, breasting now with immobility the now comparatively thin tide which still set towards the apron and talking to itself with one another in voices forlorn, baffled, and amazed:
“What is it now? What are they doing out there now?”
“Fella going to jump ten miles out of a parachute.”
“Better hurry too,” Jiggs said. “It may open before he can jump out of it.” The rotunda, filled with dusk, was lighted now, with a soft sourceless wash of no earthly colour or substance and which cast no shadow: spacious, suave, sonorous and monastic, wherein relief or mural-limning or bronze and chromium skilfully shadow-lurked presented the furious, still, and legendary tale of what man has come to call his conquering of the infinite and impervious air.
High overhead the dome of azure glass repeated the mosaiced twin F symbols of the runways to the brass twin F’s let into the tile floor and which, bright polished, gleaming, seemed to reflect and find soundless and fading echo in turn monogrammed into the bronze grilling above the ticket-and-information windows and inletted frieze-like into baseboard and cornice of the synthetic stone. “Yair,” Jiggs said. “It must have set them back that million….
Say, mister, where’s the office?” The guard told him; he went to the small discreet door almost hidden in an alcove and entered it and for a time he walked out of the voice though it was waiting for him when, a minute later, he emerged:
“… still gaining altitude. The boys down here can’t tell just how high he is but he looks about right. It might be any time now; you’ll see the flour first and then you will know there is a living man falling at the end of it, a living man falling through space at the rate of four hundred feet a second…
When Jiggs reached the apron again (he too had no ticket and so though he could pass from the apron into the rotunda as often as he pleased, he could not pass from the rotunda to the apron save by going around through the hangar) the aeroplane was no more than a trivial and insignificant blemish against the sky which was now definitely that of evening, seeming to hang there without sound or motion. But Jiggs did not look at it.
He thrust on among the up-gazing motionless bodies and reached the barrier just as one of the racers was being wheeled in from the field. He stopped one of the crew; the bill was already in his hand. “Monk, give this to Jackson, will you? For flying that parachute jump. He’ll know.”
He went back into the hangar, walking fast now and already unfastening his coverall before he pushed through the chicken-wire door. He removed the coverall and hung it up and only for a second glanced at his hands. “I’ll wash them when I get to town,” he said.
Now the first port lights came on; he crossed the plaza, passing the bloomed bloodless grapes on their cast stalks on the quadrate bases of which four F’s were discernible even in twilight. The bus was lighted too.
It had its quota of passengers though they were not inside. Including the driver they stood beside it, looking up, while the voice of the amplifier, apocryphal, sourceless, inhuman, ubiquitous and beyond weariness or fatigue, went on:
“…in position now; it will be any time now…. There. There. There goes the wing down; he has throttled back now now.
Now…. There he is, folks; the flour, the flour….” The flour was a faint stain unrolling ribbon-like, light, lazy, against the sky, and then they could see the falling dot at the head of it which, puny, increasing, became the tiny figure of a man plunging without movement towards a single long suspiration of human breath, until at last the parachute bloomed.
It unfolded swaying against the accomplished and ineradicable evening; beneath it the jumper oscillated slowly, settling slowly now towards the field.
The boundary and obstruction lights were on too now; he floated down as though out of a soundless and breathless void, towards the bright necklace of field lights and the electrified name on each hangar roof.
At the moment the green light above the beacon on the signal tower began to wink and flash too: dot-dot-dash-dot, dot-dot-dash-dot, dot-dot-dash-dot, across the nightbound lake. Jiggs touched the driver’s arm.
“Come on, Jack,” he said. “I got to be at Grandlieu Street before six o’clock.”
An Evening in New Valois
THE DOWN-FUNNELLED LIGHT from the desk-lamp struck the reporter across the hips; to the city editor sitting behind the desk the reporter loomed from the hips upward for an incredible distance to where the cadaver face hung against the dusty gloom of the city room’s upper spaces, in a green corpse glare as appropriate as water to fish. He saw the raked disreputable hat, the suit that looked as if someone else had just finished sleeping in it, and with one coat pocket sagging with yellow copy paper and from the other protruding, folded, the cold violent still damp black
ALITY OF BURNED
… the entire air and appearance of a last and cheerful stage of what old people call galloping consumption. This was the man whom the editor believed (certainly hoped) to be unmarried, though not through any knowledge or report but because of something which the man’s living being emanated — a creature who apparently never had any parents either and who will not be old and never was a child, who apparently sprang full-grown and irrevocably mature out of some violent and instantaneous transition like the stories of dead steamboat men and mules.
If it were learned that he had a brother for instance it could create neither warmth nor surprise any more than finding the mate to a discarded shoe in a trashbin. The editor had heard how a girl in a Barricade Street crib said of him that it would be like assessing the invoked spirit at a séance held in a rented restaurant room with a cover-charge.
Upon the desk, in the full target of the lamp’s glare, it lay too: the black bold still damp
FIRST FATALITY OF AIR MEET PILOT BURNED ALIVE
Beyond it, back-flung, shirt-sleeved, his bald head above the green eyeshade corpse glared too, the city editor looked at the reporter fretfully. “You have an instinct for events,” he said.
“If you were turned into a room with a hundred people you never saw before and two of them were destined to enact a homicide, you would go straight to them as crow to carrion; you would be there from the very first: you would be the one to run out and borrow a pistol from the nearest policeman for them to use. Yet you never seam to bring back anything but information.
Oh, you have that, all right, because we seem to get everything that the other papers do and we haven’t been sued yet and so doubtless it’s all that anyone should expect for five cents and doubtless more than they deserve.
But it’s not the living breath of news. It’s just information. It’s dead before you even get back here with it.” Immobile beyond the lamp’s hard radius the reporter stood, watching the editor with an air leashed, attentive, and alert. “It’s like trying to read something in a foreign language. You know it ought to be there; maybe you know by God it is there.
But that’s all. Can it be by some horrible mischance that without knowing it you listen and see in one language and then do what you call writing in another? How does it sound to you when you read it yourself?”
“When I read what?” the reporter said. Then he sat down in the opposite chair while the editor cursed him. He collapsed upon the chair with a loose dry scarecrow-like clatter as though of his own skeleton and the wooden chair’s in contact, and leaned forward across the desk, eager, apparently not only on the verge of the grave itself but in actual sight of the other side of Styx: of the saloons which have never sounded with cash register or till; of that golden District where gleam with frankincense and scented oils the celestial anonymous bosoms of eternal and subsidized delight.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he cried. “Why didn’t you tell me before that this is what you want? Here I have been running my ass ragged eight days a week trying to find something worth telling and then telling
