Lufo, of course, was not transfixed as I was. Stan had explained that the languid reverse curves of the flight surfaces make the Daytripper float at scarcely more than a walking pace. Slithering with the wind, now, it moved faster than I can run. Lufo must have realized he must keep it between himself & the moon for visual contact. He leaped away, racing, head turned over one shoulder— & crashed headlong into a small cedar. Curses & consternation, for he had lost sight of the Daytripper while wrenching free.
Stan reappeared from the soddy's nightshadow, & suddenly splinters of moon glinted above me.
The Daytripper was answering its homing signal, wheeling ecstatically, now bereft of its lifegiving breeze but striving to clear the trees. I knew that it could not.
I was nearer than Lufo, saw the noiseless craft straighten & begin its descent. It was no more than five meters over my stumbling feet when a wingtip sliced into a cedar top.
The Daytripper pivoted so slowly that I ducked under the long ghostly sweep of the free wing, held my arms out, felt the cool sleekness of plastic film, fell on my backside in the brush. A number 3
'owie, but it could've been prickly pear!
Lufo rushed up gasping, took my dead albatross from me, & stalked back to Stan Thompson on the crest of a wave of curses. I followed, fearful of bloodshed, but Stan had been punished enough. Once we disassembled the wings, we found no damage worse than torn film and a broken wingtip. Stan would not sleep until he had made penitent repairs. Lufo had long-since stormclouded off to relieve Espinel at picket duty with the horses.
The launch, this mom, was almost anticlimactic. Stan drilled Lufo & Espinel until they chafed.
After all, snarled Lufo, it didn't even need its chingada propeller last night! The launcher was merely a stake driven into the ground (facing my garden, for Stan is a great believer in failure) with a 20-meter elastic band as thick as Childe's finger, leading from the stake to a rigid loop. A single-post slingshot, then, stretching nearly a hundred meters.
I imagined it would hurl the Day tripper away with great force but, at Stan's command, Espinel severed the tiedown and the gleaming craft accelerated with a sort of langour. It kited to 20-meter height before the elastic slackened and dropped into my com. Lufo, standing where he might catch it if it faltered, leaped among my tomatoes like an idiot and waved his grungy sombrero, employing last night's curses but this time in joy.
Then Stan engaged the electric drive by remote control, kept his bird's beak facing what breeze there was, & did not let it circle until it was— how far up? Perhaps half a km. In early sunlight the canard shape made it seem a skeletal buzzard soaring backward against sundrenched clouds. I had never seen Stan laugh— & he had never seen me cry. He thought it was because the machine was leaving & I did not enlighten him.
Stan says the Daytripper yields almost no radar echo when its rectenna is inactive (it actually unfolds like a hothouse flower inside the lifting body!). Little danger of an intercept after noon, when Stan risked a telemeter check. It was fifteen klicks up, near the Rio Grande— unless the lovely thing was lying. I wouldn't be surprised, for it seemed a living and whimsical creature.
I did not care about the dark things in Lufo's past, nor that his real name carries a death sentence with it. I do care that I may never again feel those cruelly callused hands, the furnace of his mouth, the— well! One day Childe will learn to read…
I hope Lufo lied to impress me, but not when he promised to return. They lit a shuck for the border in midaftemoon, and they paused to wave as they topped out on the South ridge. I suspect they'll wetback it from something Stan let slip about the Indy supply dumps. How could they imagine I don't know about the caverns that undermine this entire region? I watched my daddy slowly die of radiation poisoning in one & we made it his tomb. Wonder what some future explorer will think when he discovers my hoard of playthings in my own cavern. A plastic tea set
& debris from a ghastly air crash. Pathetic toys but my childhood treasures. Should I tell Lufo what I suspect of the canister I found?
At dusk, long after my sorrowful goodbyes, he came in. Those dainty little strides don't fool me, I know he was smelling manscent & nothing would serve but to let him inspect the soddy, me, the windmill which Stan rewired for me, — everything. He finally relented, plopped his great breast flat until I took a ride. First time I've done that in ages. That was his idea of reconciliation! Mine was a five-kilo hunk of horsemeat, not even half smoked, & of course he made a pig of himself with it.
Piedras Negras is holocasting again tonight. Glorious to think that I'm now a tiny fleck of that rebellious voice, if only on XEPN, Channel 3.
CHAPTER 22
At 8:03, the shift whistle finally blew. A fading sun cast the shadow of the construction crane across the City of the Saints. Soon it would be dark.
Dandridge Laird stood with his legs apart and mopped his brow with one khaki sleeve, proudly gazing down on his departing work crew from his perch atop the unfinished building. It had been only a few years since the airburst nuke that had blossomed far out North Temple Street, obliterating the airport, the monorail interchange, and many buildings almost to the Salt Palace and the State Capitol.
Already, though, Salt Lake City had repaired much of herself through prayer and twelve-hour shifts by a beehive of sturdy Mormon citizens. Already, Laird could smile down on the rebuilt state fairgrounds, noting the subtle LDS gable motif that graced strictly secular buildings just as the old ones had. And already, Dandridge Laird had marked himself for death by insisting on workmen's compensation for his laborers.
Laird limped to the nearest crane pillar, his scuffing gait masking softer footfalls in the elevator control room behind him. He did not catch the movement of the khaki-clad 'workman' in the un-glazed window; would not have recognized the man in any case. Laird was testing his gimpy forty-two-year-old leg, wondering if the Church would be able to help his family much when he could no longer earn a living as construction supervisor.
Laird's own LDS 'stake', his local church organization, had so many helpless mouths to feed already!
And as for the gentile workers, — Laird shook his head in honest commiseration. The proper solution was industry-funded insurance. The stumbling block was the blind refusal of management.
Or maybe the consortium that owned the construction company saw, and then looked away. None of the big conglomerates seemed likely to allow such reforms. Laird had gone to his congressman, to his elders, even to local reporters without achieving much. But somewhere along the line he'd been overheard by the people who'd come to him with help — and asking his help. Laird would have laughed to think of himself as a conspirator, yet he knew better than to talk about those meetings to anyone but trusted workers.
You didn't keep a strawboss job after they spotted you as a union organizer.
Nor could you expect to keep your life if you were the first Mormon convert to organized labor in Salt Lake City since postwar reconstruction began, a crucial nucleus of Indy reform in the very shadow of White House Deseret. Dandridge Laird did not know how carefully he was groomed by labor 'outlaws'; how high were their hopes for him. Certainly he did not know that a man hidden in the lengthening, softening shadows had been sent to shatter those hopes.