“I’ll not be happy to see you go, Shad, although I will enjoy seeing you on the telly again. You’re the only television star I’ve ever known. Val is very happy for you. So am I.”
“Well, it’s been a sincere privilege to work with someone who looks so much like Basir Redbone, wak, wak, w—”
Shad was staring straight ahead, his countenance frozen. I turned to look at what had captured his attention. We stepped out into the room. The second floor looked like a military officer’s club from the midtwentieth century, leather-covered overstuffed chairs, dim lights, a piano mech that played itself, and dozens of posters on the walls and ceiling of fighter aircraft of World War II, with several of the Hurricane but mostly of the Spitfire: Spits diving, climbing, turning, shooting, on floats, and on wheels. The piano mech was playing “The White Cliffs of Dover” and accompanying itself with a familiar sounding female voice. I glanced at Shad and he said, “Vera Lynn,” in answer to my unasked question.
“How do you know it’s Vera Lynn?”
“I recognize her from the end of Dr. Strangelove when she sang ‘We’ll Meet Again.’”
“Ah, yes. With the nuclear mushroom clouds going up. Nineteen sixty-six?”
“‘Sixty-four,” he corrected. “Get a load of this room, Jaggs. I feel like Errol Flynn in Dawn Patrol.” He nodded his head toward a strange-looking mech who was approaching us silently on soft rubber wheels. She was wearing a starched white dress, white cap, and a short midnight blue cape. The mech’s right eye looked human. The left eye glowed green, resembling a night scope with a variety of interchangeable lenses and filters. Instead of fingers her hands bristled with sensors, various tools such as a rubber hammer, tongue depressor, and things that poked, stuck, cut, sewed, cleansed, taped, and perhaps knitted for all I could tell. The most formidable of these instruments was a sensor that resembled a huge rubber finger.
“I’m Nurse Florence,” she announced in a raspy voice. As she came to a halt, her big rubber finger thrust up toward a poster of a ME 109 going down in flames.
“I’m just a little duck,” Shad whimpered to the nurse in a tiny voice.
The big rubber finger retracted and was replaced by a smaller, but still fearsome, digit. “Follow me,” she commanded.
“Chocks away, lad,” I said to Shad. As we followed Nurse Florence to the examination rooms, the piano mech struck up the Glenn Miller version of “Little Brown Jug.”
After our stasis bed physicals, about which the less said the better, we were escorted to a third floor room which housed approximately eighty triple bunk stasis beds, about half of which were filled with old men, old women, old bios, and at least one very rusty mech. “Two-sixty-four Squadron,” whispered our escort, a tech mech named Watkins. “Them’s the blokes you chaps’ll relieve once you get in the air.” In the 712 area, along with a woman in her seventies named Mathilda, Shad and I copied into our Hurricane pigeon suits. Watkins ran the three of us and eight other “chicks” directly to the roof where we met Hell’s pigeon.
“You lot will never make it.”
Flight Sergeant Ponsonby marched up and down our file of eleven ledge marshal trainees, his gray, black, and white Spit feathers glossed back, his pink toes gleaming with some sort of gloss, and something resembling a chopstick thrust beneath his left wing. He alternated his growling and barking with the following: “You lot come creepin’ up on me roof from hospital, from the flippin’ dole queue, from bloomin’ Bide-A-Wee Nursin’ Home, or hidin’ out from old bill or the missus happy as you please, all fired up to singe Jerry’s tail feathers for Pureledge’s tenner, and not a bleedin’ clue how to get in the bleedin’ air. Just look at you feather bags. I might as well be talkin’ to a stack of flippin’ flapjacks—”
And so on. Once flight sergeant was finished with his set piece, he bellowed, “Staff!” and two pigeons emerged marching from in back of us. Through a series of shouts, bellows, shoves, and curses they herded us over to a skylight. Standing upon the edge of the raised casement looking down upon us was a one-legged, one-eyed pigeon Spit with one droopy wing. The missing undercarriage limb had been replaced by a red plastic peg leg. The missing eye was covered by a black patch held in place by a thin black elastic band.
“I am Squadron Leader Leslie Haverill, ground commander of Castle Field,” he said in a calm voice. “I, Flight Sergeant Ponsonby, and the staff personnel at Castle Field welcome you to RPAF, Exeter. I know you’ll do well here, become part of our rich tradition, and be credits to the Royal Pigeon Air Force.”
Squadron Leader Haverill then read us Kings Regulations pertaining to private investigators, guards, watch officers, and ledge marshals. Curiously enough, besides chasing pigeons and other fowl off ledges, unlike detectives from the Artificial Beings Crimes Division, ledge marshals were actually allowed to detain suspects and make arrests. In cases of pigeon and other fowl bios carrying human imprints, those trespassing on private, company, corporate, or government property protected by Pureledge were subject to arrest using whatever force necessary to subdue said arrestee. Miscreants thus detained were then to be turned over to the Devon & Cornwall Constabulary, Exeter Police Station. There was, in addition, a robust course in beak-to-toe combat during which Staff Foster—a Spit pigeon wearing a tiny set of prescription goggles—mentioned that all those staffing ground and flight schools had been killed in action. That is, their suits reclining in stasis had cacked out. Like Tommy Shay, they had opted to remain in wings.
“What happened to the squadron leader’s Spit?” asked Shad when we were on break.
“Terrible thing, lad,” answered Sgt. Foster shaking his head, his voice lowered. “A year ago squadron leader used to command 331 of the First, covering Rougemont Castle down to High and southwest to Iron Bridge. Out on the rooftops, towers, and ledges, lads: That’s where Jerry is; that’s where we expect the attack.” He shook his head sadly. “Danger’s all around, lads, everywhere. See, back then we had a brand new pilot officer assigned to 712, lad by name of Kumar. He took to that Spit like he was born to it. Once off the tower and he was airborne. A natural flyer. Only with us a few days, though. Disappeared, he did. They only found a feather or two over by the Royal Clarence. Must’ve took on a falcon or hawk. Snapped him up quick as Bob’s your uncle his parts parceled out ‘mongst Henry and the other hawk chicks in the nest I imagine. Heart of an eagle, young Kumar, but he had the body of a pigeon and the judgment of a scone. You find a hawk or falcon squattin’ in your patrol area, flyer, you call it in. Special Unit goes after the big ones.”
“Haverill?” prompted Shad.
“Don’t be impatient, lad.” He regarded Shad down the length of his beak. “Let’s see, then. Squadron Leader Haverill in his pigeon suit was cuttin’ through 712’s stasis beds when Kumar went down. Kumar, he slams awake all stressed from bein’ turned into hawk vittles. Wildebeest bio, he was. Sprung right off that bed he did, hit the ceiling, and landed on Haverill all four hoofs a-runnin’ at the same time. Tore up squadron leader proper.” Foster faced me. “Took poor Kumar in his wildebeest suit that night and run him straight off to the wigpicker works, bleedin Happy Valley, they did. Still there, poor lad.” He returned his goggled gaze to Shad. “Pieced squadron leader together but his flyin’ days was done for. Took him out of the air and made him ground commander.”
“Why the prescription goggles, Staff?” asked Shad, nodding toward flight’s set. “Aren’t all Spit bios genetically coded for good eyesight?”
“Well, lad, that were a cock-up of me own. I joined back when each squadron did it’s own flight training. About eight years ago it was. They sent me straight into the 994 patrol area south o’ the Guildhall. Only an hour or so in the air, lad, then we was on break. I put down on a windowsill by the Catacombs. Nice little stairclimb o’ houses called Napier Terrace. I was recitin’ the flap changes—” He lowered his voice as though passing on official secrets. “The changes was brand new back then. Your flight leader’ll fill you in. I was number five in the flight and it were one, two, three, four, five, six—a flap on me own number, see—then two, one, four, three, six, five—up flap—then two, four, one ... or was that two, one, five—bugger it. Been so long I forget. Anyway, I was recitin’ the changes out loud when next thing I know Jerry hits me with poison gas.”