He looked at his watch. Dahlia should be an hour out of Beirut now, coming back.
Lander could think comfortably about two things: Dahlia and flying.
His scarred left hand gently pushed forward the throttle and propeller pitch controls, and he rolled back the big elevator wheel beside his seat. The great airship rose quickly as Lander spoke into the microphone.
“Nora One Zero, clearing stadium for a twelve-hundred-foot go-around.”
“Roger, Nora One Zero,” the Miami tower replied cheerily.
Air controllers and tower radio operators always liked to talk to the blimp, and many had a joke ready when they knew it was coming. People felt friendly toward it as they do toward a panda. For millions of Americans who saw it at sporting events and fairs, the blimp was an enormous, amiable, and slow-moving friend in the sky. Blimp metaphors are almost invariably “elephant” or “whale.” No one ever says “bomb.”
At last the game was over and the blimp’s 225-foot shadow flicked over the miles of cars streaming away from the stadium. The television cameraman and his assistant had secured their equipment and were eating sandwiches. Lander had worked with them often.
The lowering sun laid a streak of red-gold fire across Bis cayne Bay as the blimp hung over the water. Then Lander turned northward and cruised fifty yards off Miami Beach, while the TV crew and the flight engineer fixed their binoculars on the girls in their bikinis. Some of the bathers waved.
“Hey, Mike, does Aldrich make rubbers?” Pearson the cameraman was yelling around a mouthful of sandwich.
“Yeah,” Lander said over his shoulder. “Rubbers, tires, de icers, windshield wiper blades, bathtub toys, children’s balloons, and body bags.”
“You get free rubbers with this job?”
“You bet. I’ve got one on now.”
“What’s a body bag?”
“It’s a big rubber bag. One size fits all,” Lander said. “They’re dark inside. Uncle Sam uses them for rubbers. You see some of them, you know he’s been fooling around.” It would not be hard to push the button on Pearson; it would not be hard to push the button on any of them.
The blimp did not fly often in the winter. Its winter quarters were near Miami, the great hangar dwarfing the rest of the buildings beside the airfield. Each spring it worked northward at thirty-five to sixty knots, depending on the wind, dropping in at state fairs and baseball games. The Aldrich company provided Lander with an apartment near the Miami airfield in winter, but on this day, as soon as the great airship was secured, he caught the National flight to Newark and went to his home near the blimp’s northern base at Lakehurst, New Jersey.
When Lander’s wife deserted him, she left him the house. Tonight the lights burned late in the garage-workshop, as Lander worked and waited for Dahlia. He was stirring a can of epoxy resin on his workbench, its strong odor filling the garage. On the floor behind him was a curious object eighteen feet long. It was a plug mold that Lander had made from the hull of a small sailboat. He had inverted the hull and split it along the keel. The halves were eighteen inches apart and were joined by a broad common bow. Viewed from above, the mold looked like a great streamlined horseshoe. Building the mold had taken weeks of off-duty time. Now it was slick with grease and ready.
Lander, whistling quietly, applied layers of fiberglass cloth and resin to the mold, feathering the edges precisely. When the fiberglass shell cured and he popped it off the mold, he would have a light, sleek nacelle that would fit neatly under the gondola of the Aldrich blimp. The opening in the center would accommodate the blimp’s single landing wheel and its transponder antenna. The load-bearing frame that would be enclosed by the nacelle was hanging from a nail on the garage wall. It was very light and very strong, with twin keels of Reynolds 5130 chrome moly tubing and ribs of the same material.
Lander had converted the double garage into a workshop while he was married, and he had built much of his furniture there in the years before he went to Vietnam. The things his wife had not wanted to take were still stored above the rafters—a highchair, a folding camp table, wicker yard furniture. The fluorescent light was harsh, and Lander wore a baseball cap as he worked around the mold, whistling softly.
He paused once, thinking, thinking. Then he went on smoothing the surface, raising his feet carefully as he walked to avoid tearing the newspapers spread on the floor.
Shortly after four a.m. the telephone rang. Lander picked up the garage extension.
“Michael?” The British clip in her speech always surprised him, and he imagined the telephone buried in her dark hair.
“Who else?”
“Grandma is fine. I’m at the airport and I’ll be along later. Don’t wait up.”
“What—”
“Michael, I can’t wait to see you.” The line went dead.
It was almost sunrise when Dahlia turned into the driveway at Lander’s house. The windows were dark. She was apprehensive, but not so much as before their first meeting—then she had felt that she was in the room with a snake she could not see. After she came to live with him, she separated the deadly part of Michael Lander from the rest of him. When she was with him now, she felt that they were both in a room with the snake, and she could tell where it was, and whether it was sleeping.
She made more noise than necessary coming into the house and sang his name softly against the stillness as she came up the stairs. She did not want to startle him. The bedroom was pitch dark.
From the doorway she could see the glow of his cigarette, like a tiny red eye.
“Hello,” she said.
“Come here.”
She walked through the darkness toward the glow. Her foot touched the shotgun, safely on the floor beside the bed. It was all right. The snake was asleep.
Lander was dreaming about the whales, and he was reluctant to come out of sleep. In his dream the great shadow of the Navy dirigible moved over the ice below him as he flew through the endless day. It was 1956 and he was going over the Pole.
The whales were basking in the Arctic sun, and they did not see the dirigible until it was almost over them. Then they sounded, their flukes rising under a chandelier of spray as they slid beneath a blue ice ledge under the Arctic Sea. Looking down from the gondola, Lander still could see the whales suspended there beneath the ledge. In a cool blue place where there was no noise.
Then he was over the Pole and the magnetic compass was going wild. Solar activity interfered with the omni, and, with Fletcher at the elevator wheel, he steered by the sun as the flag on its weighted spear fluttered down to the ice.
“The compass,” he said, waking in his house. “The compass.”
“The omni beam from Spitsbergen, Michael,” Dahlia said, her hand on his cheek. “I have your breakfast.”
She knew the dream. She hoped he would dream often of the whales. He was easier then.
Lander was facing a hard day, and she could not be with him. She opened the curtains and sunlight brightened the room.
“I wish you didn’t have to go.”
“I’ll tell you again,” Lander said. “If you have a pilot’s ticket they watch you really dose. If I don’t check in, they’ll send some VA caseworker out here with a questionnaire. He’s got a form. It goes like this—‘A. Note the condition of the grounds. B. Does the subject seem dejected?’ Like that. It goes on forever.”
“You can manage that.”
“One call to the FAA, one little half-assed hint that I might be shaky and that’s it. They’ll ground me. What if a caseworker looks in the garage?” He drank his orange juice. “Besides, I want to see the clerks one more time.”