American Front

That was too much for A

"Things change." Tom Colleton swung back toward her. He leaned forward a little. The implied threat of attack made A

A

"Get me another drink, Scipio." She kept her voice low, but it was brittle with fury even so. The butler hurried away. When he came back a moment later with the second whiskey, she drank it fast, too. She could feel the liquor building a transparent wall between her and the world, but even that numbing could not disguise the fact that her kid brother's homecoming, far from being the celebration she'd expected, looked more like a disaster.

Percy Stone was dressed in his flying togs and had his camera by his side, but that hadn't kept him from sitting in on a poker game while he waited for Jonathan Moss to finish getting ready to fly. By the expression on his face, it hadn't kept him from losing money to Lefty the mechanic, either. He was in good company there; almost everybody rash enough to sit down with Lefty ended up sadder, if not necessarily wiser.

"Oh, thank God-duty calls," Stone said when Moss came in. "I think I'd sooner go up there and get shot at than stay here and get ski

"And other one." The mechanic named Byron tossed in a folded bill.

Two other players threw in their hands with various noises of disgust. Lefty said, "I'll see those and bump it another three." He made his five dollars with a gold half-eagle.

"That's enough for me," Stone said, and folded. Byron looked harassed, but called-and promptly regretted it. Chuckling, Lefty scooped up the pot.

"I could have told you not to play cards with Lefty," Moss said as Stone picked up the camera and the two fliers walked out to their Wright 17. "As a matter of fact, I have told you not to play cards with Lefty."

"It's the Socialist in me," Stone answered. Moss let out a questioning grunt. The observer explained: "I make more money than Lefty does, but at the poker table we redistribute the wealth." He shook his head. "I wouldn't mind it so much if the redistribution went my way a little more often."

Moss blew air out through his lips with a snuffling noise, like a horse. "I'm a Democrat," he said. "Always have been, probably always will be. If I earn something, I figure it's mine, and I want to keep it. I don't much like riots, either, so Socialism was a hard sell for me even before the Remembrance Day horrors."

"That was pretty bad, if you believe what you read in the newspapers," Stone agreed. He lifted the camera into his cockpit, then climbed in after it. Once he'd set it in the mount, though, he added, "Of course, if you believe what you read in the newspapers, we've already won the war four or five times by now, which does make me wonder what the two of us are doing, going up in this contraption." He slapped the doped linen fabric covering the side of the fuselage. It was taut, and thumped like a drum.

He had such a disarming ma

"You have less faith in my card-playing than I do, and I didn't think that was possible," Stone said. He whacked the pilot on the shoulder with a length of rubber tubing to which a cheap tin fu

The rubber tubing was of the sort that ran from the speedometer to the pitot tube out at the far end of the wing. Moss undid the fu

Stone's voice sounded metallically in his ear: "Can you hear me all right?"

Moss spoke into the fu

"Sure isn't," Stone agreed. "They don't pay off for looks, though, not in this man's army they don't. If we can make it work, somebody else'll make it pretty, sooner or later."

The ground crew men came out to help them get the two-seater started. Lefty gri

Tachometer, gasoline gauge, gasoline-flow indicator, gasoline feed system pressure indicator, oil gauge, oil-pressure gauge, radiator temperature indicator-all the instruments were good. Moss waved to the ground crew men. Byron and another mechanic, a fellow named Edwin, pulled the chocks away from the wheels. Moss advanced the throttle. The Wright 17 bounced down the airstrip. After enough bounces, it didn't come back to earth.

Percy Stone's voice sounded in his ear: "Can you hear me?"

He shifted the other tube to his mouth. "I sure can. Can you hear me?" When the observer assured him he could, Moss went on, "Say, this is great. We can really talk to each other now." Percy Stone promptly started singing " America the Beautiful." Moss made a hasty amendment: "Maybe it's not so great after all."

Both young men laughed, pleased with their ingenuity. More seriously now, Stone said, "We have to spread the word about this. Biggest problem two-seaters have is that the pilot and observer can't talk back and forth."

"I've seen that with us working together," Moss agreed. "Now that we know pitot tubing makes a good speaking tube, we could come up with better earpieces and mouthpieces than these fu

"That's not bad," Stone said. "Better than thinking about this like it is school, anyway. If you flunk here, they don't make you take the class over. You get expelled-for good."

"Yeah," Moss said; it wasn't anything on which he cared to dwell. He peered ahead. "Front's coming up. Get ready for some hate."

Land over which the American and Canadian armies had already fought was barren, chewed to shreds, as if an insane giant had gnawed on it for a while and then, deciding it wasn't to his taste, spit it out again. Over the front itself, smoke and dust rose high into the air, a legacy of the shelling the two sides kept trading. Percy Stone said, "You'd think we'd have fired enough shells by now to kill all the Canadians there are, by hitting them over the head if no other way."