Now was different. It was like wartime again. He had a vector. He had a target. He had a mission.
He also had on an experimental Navy T-2 pressure suit. It was a girdle manufacturer's dream, all rubber and laces, pressure bottles, and a real space helmet, like out of Planet Comics, over his head. They had fitted him for it the night before, when they saw his high-altitude wings and drop tanks on the plane.
"Wed better tailor this down for you," the flight sergeant had said.
"I've got a pressurized cabin," said Jetboy.
"Well, in case they need you, and in case something goes wrong, then."
The suit was still too tight, and it wasn't pressurized yet. The arms were built for a gorilla, and the chest for a chimpanzee. "You'll appreciate the extra room if that thing ever inflates in an emergency," said the sergeant.
"You're the boss," said Jetboy.
They'd even painted the torso white and the legs red to match his outfit. His blue helmet and goggles showed through the clear plastic bubble.
As he climbed with the rest of the squadron, he was glad now that he had the thing. His mission was to accompany the flight of P-80s in, and to engage only if needed. He had never exactly been a team player.
The sky ahead was blue as the background curtain in Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, FoUy and Time, with a two-fifths cloud to the north. The sun stood over his left shoulder. The squadron angled up. He wigwagged the wings. They spread out in a staggered box and cleared their guns.
Chunder chunder chunder chunder went his 20mm cannons.
Tracers arced out ahead from the six. 50 cals on each P-80. They left the prop planes far behind and pointed their noses toward Manhattan.
They looked like a bunch of angry bees circling under a hawk.
The sky was filled with jets and prop fighters climbing like the wall clouds of a hurricane.
Above was a lumpy object that hung and moved slowly on toward the city. Where the eye of the hurricane would be was a torrent of flak, thicker than Jetboy had ever seen over Europe or Japan.
It was bursting far too low, only at the level of the highest fighters.
Fighter Control called them. "Clark Gable Command to all squadrons. Target at five five zero… repeat, five five zero angels. Moving ENE at two five knots. Flak unable to reach."
"Call it off," said the squadron leader. "Well try to fly high enough for deflection shooting. Squadron Hodiak, follow me." Jetboy looked up into the high blue above. The object continued its slow track.
"What's it got?" he asked Clark Gable Command. "Command to Jetboy. Some type of bomb is what we've been told. It has to be a lighter-than-air craft of at least five hundred thousand cubic feet to reach that altitude. Over."
"I'm beginning a climb. If the other planes can't reach it, call them off, too."
There was silence on the radio, then, "Roger."
As the P-80s glinted like silver crucifixes above him, he eased the nose up.
"Come on, baby," he said. "Let's do some flying."
The Shooting Stars began to fall away, sideslipping in the thin air. Jetboy could hear only the sound of his own pressurebreathing in his ears, and the high thin whine of his engines. "Come on, girl," he said. "You can make itl"
The thing above him had resolved itself into a bastard aircraft: made of half a dozen blimps, with a gondola below it. The gondola looked as if it had once been a PT boat shell. That was all he could see. Beyond it, the air was purple and cold. Next stop, outer space.
The last of the P-80s slid sideways on the blue stairs of the sky. A few had made desultory firing runs, some snap-rolling as fighters used to do underneath bombers in the war. They fired as they nosed up. All their tracers fell away under the balloons. One of the P-80s fought for control, dropping two miles before leveling out.
Jetboy's plane protested, whining. It was hard to control. He eased the nose up again, had to fight it.
"Get everybody out of the way," he said to Clark Gable Command.
"Here's where we give you some fighting room," he said to his plane. He blew the drop tanks. They fell away like bombs behind him. He pushed his cannon button. Chunder chunder chunder chunder they went. Then again and again.
His tracers arced toward the target, then they too fell away. He fired four more bursts until his cannon ran dry. Then he cleaned out the twin fifties in the tail, but it didn't take long for all one hundred rounds to be spent.
He nosed over and went into a shallow dive, like a salmon sounding to throw a hook, gaining speed. A minute into the run he nosed up, putting the JB-1 into a long circling climb. "Feels better, huh?" he asked.
The engines bit into the air. The plane, relieved of the weight, lurched up and ahead.
Below him was Manhattan with its seven million people. They must be watching down there, knowing these might be the last things they ever saw. Maybe this is what living in the Atomic Age would be like, always be looking up and thinking, is this it?
Jetboy reached down with one of his boots and slammed a lever over. A 75mm cannon shell slid into the breech. He put his hand on the autoload bar, and pulled back a little more on the control wheel.
The red jet cut the air like a razor.
He was closer now, closer than the others had gotten, and still not close enough. He only had five rounds to do the job. The jet climbed, beginning to stagger in the thin air, as if it were some red animal clawing its way up a long blue tapestry that slipped a little each time the animal lurched.
He pointed the nose up. Everything seemed frozen, waiting.
A long thin line of machine-gun tracers reached out from the gondola for him like a lover.
He began to fire his cannon.
From the statement of Patrolman Francis V ("Francis the Talking Cop") O'Hooey, Sept. 15, 1946, 6:45 P M.
We was watching from the street over at Sixth Avenue, trying to get people from shoving each other in a panic. Then they calmed down as they was watching the dogfights and stuff up above.
Some birdwatcher had this pair of binocs, so I confiscated 'em. I watched pretty much the whole thing. Them jets wasn't having no luck, and the antiaircraft from over in the Bowery wasn't doing no good either. I still say the Army oughta be sued 'cause them Air Defense guys got so panicky they forgot to set the timers on them shells and I heard that some of them came down in the Bronx and blew up a whole block of apartments.
Anyway, this red plane, that is, Jetboy's plane, was climbing up and he fired all his bullets, I thought, without doing any damage to the balloon thing.
I was out on the street, and this fire truck pulls up with its sirens on, and the whole precinct and auxiliaries were on it, and the lieutenant was yelling for me to climb on, we'd been assigned to the west side to take care of a traffic smash-up and a riot.
So I jump on the truck, and I try to keep my eyes on what's happening up in the skies.
The riot was pretty much over. The air-raid sirens was still wailing, but everybody was just standing around gawking at what was happening up there.
The lieutenant yells to at least get the people in the buildings. I pushed a few in some doors, then I took another gander in the field glasses.
"I'll be damned if Jetboy hasn't shot up some of the balloons (I hear he used his howitzer on 'em) and the thing looks bigger-it's dropping some. But he's out of ammo and not as high as the thing is and he starts circlin'."
I forgot to say, all the time this blimp thing is got so many machine guns going it looks like a Fourth of July sparkler, and Jetboy's plane's taking these hits all the time.
Then he just takes his plane around and comes right back and crashes right into the what-you-call-it-the gondola, that's it, on the blimps. They just sort of merged together. He must have been going awful slow by then, like stalling, and the plane just sort of mashed into the side of the thing.