He lets out a deep breath. The truth is, he realizes, that he has not flown a powered aircraft in more than three years and he is glad that telemetry is not sending his heart rate back to a bank of doctors; they would diagnose tachycardia after one look at the monitors. Baedecker opens the throttle with his throbbing left hand and squeezes the trigger switch with his good finger. There is a loud whine, the turbine fires up with a loud hiss like the pilot light on a huge hot-water heater catching, and the exhaust-gas temperature gauge shoots into the red while the rotors begin to turn. In five seconds the turbine is humming smoothly, and the rotors are only a blur and a half-sensed pressure overhead.
'Okay, good,' Baedecker mutters into his dead microphone. 'Now what?' He turns on the heating fan and defroster, waits thirty seconds for the windshield to clear, and pulls up lightly on the collective control stick. Even that slight pull — it reminds Baedecker of the finicky parking brake on Joan's old Volvo — increases the pitch angle sufficiently to raise the Huey six feet off its skids.
A hover would be nice, Baedecker thinks. He gives it more throttle to compensate for the increased pitch angle, his left hand protesting with pain at being asked to do two things at once. He slacks off at ten feet, planning to hold the Huey there for a minute, his windshield on level with the open hayloft door of Kink's barn fifty feet away. Immediately the torque tries to spin the machine counterclockwise on its axis. Baedecker gives it some right pedal, overcompensates, and causes the tail rotor to push the Huey around the opposite direction. He brings the rotation to a stop 180 degrees from where he started, but in the meantime the reduced pitch angle has dropped the ship five feet, now eight, and Baedecker is tugging the cyclic stick back too far, leveling off three inches above the ground only to hop fifteen feet into the air as the controls respond.
Baedecker lets it sink back to ten feet, feverishly working throttle, cyclic, pitch control, and pedals in an effort to achieve a simple hover. Just as he thinks he has achieved it, he glances left and sees that he is sideslipping smoothly, as if on frictionless glass rails ten feet above the cold ground, headed directly and implacably for Kink's barn.
He kicks the pedal hard enough to bring the heavy machine around in a yawing, wallowing turn, tucks the stick forward and then quickly back, and flares the Huey into an inelegant, molar-grinding excuse for a landing that sends it skipping twice in four-foot hops before it settles shakily on its skids in the center of the barnyard.
Baedecker mops the back of his hand across his brow and feels sweat running down his neck and ears. He releases the stick and collective and sits back, the harness moving with him, holding him snugly. The rotors continue their senseless spin.
'Okay,' Baedecker says softly, 'I could use some help here, amigo.'
Try holding your breath, dummy. It is Dave's voice over the inactive intercom, through Baedecker's silent earphones. It is Dave's voice in his mind.
Baedecker relaxes, lets the air go out of him in a long exhalation, does not inhale, and lets his mind wander while his body remembers those many hours of instruction seventeen years earlier. Still easily holding his breath, he lifts the pitch lever, pulls back gently on the cyclic stick, adjusts the throttle and pedals as he rises, and hovers effortlessly ten feet above the ground. He carefully takes a breath. The hover is solid, easily held, as simple as sitting in a small boat on a smooth sea. Baedecker swings the Huey around, pitches the nose down to pick up speed, and begins a long, climbing turn that will bring him back across Lonerock at about two thousand feet.
It is not dark yet, the sun is still up, actually becoming visible below the clouds for the first time all day, but Baedecker fumbles on the collective lever for the switch and then trips the landing light on and off several times. Below him, the dark cube of the cupola atop the school remains dark. Baedecker levels off at twenty-five hundred feet and aims the nose of the Huey west-southwest.
At one hundred knots, the trip will take Baedecker less than fifteen minutes. The setting sun glares directly into his eyes. He clicks down the helmet-visor, but the view is too darkened that way, so he slides it back up and squints. Mount Hood gathers a gold corona in the west, and even the underbelly of the clouds glow now in rose and yellow hues as if releasing the colors they had spent the week absorbing.
Baedecker drops to three hundred feet as the John Day River falls behind. He smiles. He can almost hear Dave's voice, 'You're doing the oldest kind of IFR flying, kid. ‘I Follow Roads.'' He almost misses the ashram access road because he is watching a string of cattle to the south, but then he swings to the right in a comfortable bank, feeling the machine working with him now and he with it, glancing sideways almost straight down out his right window at sagebrush and snowbanks and low pines casting long shadows across a dry creek bed.
He passes over the roadblock at a steady 150 feet, seeing two men emerge and resisting the impulse to swing around and make a pass at 120 knots with skids eight feet above the ground. He has not come for that.
Two miles farther he crosses a rise, sees the ashram-ranch, and realizes his error.
It is a goddamn city. The road becomes asphalt through the long valley, and hundreds of permanent tents sit in rank and file along one side while buildings and parking lots line the other. There is a gigantic structure at the junction of two streets, a veritable town hall, rows of buses sit parked behind it, and scores of people are in the streets. Baedecker makes two passes over the main thoroughfare at a hundred feet, but the noise of his rotors only brings more people out of buildings and tents. The muddy streets fill with red-shirted ants. Baedecker half expects the flash of small-arms fire to begin at any moment. He holds the Huey in an indecisive hover above what might be the main hall — a long building with permanent roof and foundations and canvas sides — and thinks, What now?
Relax.
Baedecker does. He rotates the helicopter to watch the sun disappear behind the hills. The sudden twilight is somehow more gentle than the gray day had been. Looking quickly at the mile-long complex below, he picks a flat-topped hill near an unfinished wooden building on the southeast corner of town. The hill and the lone structure are off the main lanes, separated by several hundred yards from the rest of the maze.
He circles once and begins descending carefully. He is still thirty feet above the rough hilltop when he catches a glimpse of red out of the corner of his eye. Five people have emerged from the unfinished building, but Baedecker has eyes only for the one in front. The figure is still sixty yards away, half-hidden in the shadow of the building, but Baedecker knows instantly that it is Scott — Scott thinner than he has ever seen him, Scott without the beard he had worn in India and with hair shorter than Baedecker has seen it in a decade, but Scott nonetheless.
The landing is smooth, the Huey settling onto its skids without a jar. Baedecker has to concentrate on the console for a minute, leaving the rotors turning in a hot whisper but making sure the machine will stay earthbound for a few minutes. When he looks out and down, he sees four of the figures still motionless in shadow, but Scott is moving quickly uphill now, breaking into a slow jog up the rough and rocky hillside.
Baedecker kicks open the door, leaves his helmet in the seat, and moves out from under the rotors in an instinctive crouch. At the edge of the hill he stands upright for a minute, hands on his hips, watching. Then, moving quickly but surely on treacherous footing, Baedecker starts down so as to meet his son halfway.