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Episode 4: Borne on Wings of Steel, but Without all of that Tedious Steel
Fleming sprinted ahead, straight toward the edge of the cliff. As he reached it, he leaned forward, holding the nose of his glider down so that its wings angled into the wind that blew up the face. The ground dropped away beneath his feet. Then he was climbing in the updraft as his crewmates cried out a hurrah. "Go get ‘em, Peter-me-boy!" yelled MacKiernan, the ship’s Navigation Officer. "No way he can make it," said Abercrombie, the grizzled old rigger from Scotland. "Ye wanna put some money on that?" asked MacKiernan. They’re at it again, thought Fleming. Smiling, he eased the stick right to bank his craft into a turn -- like most modern gliders, it had true flight controls in place of the awkward weight-shift system Otto Lilienthal had used in his original wings. The glider responded crisply and soon he was soaring parallel to the cliff, gaining altitude as he flew towards the west. To the south, the Coral Sea was a rich tropical blue. To the north, the jungle rose in waves of green toward the line of mountains that crowned the center of the island. When he felt that he was high enough, Fleming banked left to head back the way he'd come. By the time reached his launch point, he was well above it, above even the wreckage of their airship where it towered above the trees. Looking down, he could see Captain Everett gazing upwards, studying the glider with a calculating eye. Fleming waved down to his commander. The captain waved back in return. Fleming made several more passes, getting a feel for his aircraft, remembering the skills that had served him so well competition. But this so-called ‘ridge lift’, where the trade winds turned to blow up the face of the cliff, was restricted to a narrow band above shore. It would not carry him across the island where he wished to go. For that, he needed a thermal. Ahead he could see a frigate bird -- perhaps the same one his captain had spotted earlier -- circling as it climbed. He turned in its direction. Moments later, his glider nosed up and rolled left in a movement that, left unchecked, would have sent it wheeling back into the ground. But Fleming had been waiting for this, and shifted the stick to bank his craft into a turn. The wing surged upwards, harness straps digging into his armpits. In front of him, his crude rate-of-climb instrument -- two pith balls in a pair of tapered glass tubes -- shifted to show he was climbing. "Hurrah!" he yelled -- a pure unbridled burst of emotion that echoed from the hills. The bird glanced in his direction, wondering at this awkward creature that had come to share its thermal. Then, annoyed by the young man’s exuberance, it flapped off down the ridge. As a child, Fleming had watched hawks circle in thermals, envying the way they soared. Their flight had seemed so effortless! Now he laughed at his naivety, for working a thermal was anything but easy. This one was particularly demanding, changing in strength and direction with every foot he climbed, so that he had to make continual corrections to stay in the invisible column of rising air. But he was up to the task, and stayed with it until he neared the base of the clouds. From here, three thousand feet above the shore, the youth could see for miles, but there was little to see. The ocean was featureless -- as unmarked by shipping as it had been during their drift to the island. The jungle was a patchwork of green and dark, mottled by cloud shadows, with no sign of any fields or clearings. This was hardly surprising, for the southern coast of the island was a precipitous line of cliffs, lashed by surf, with no beaches, inlets, or places to put ashore. Any settlements would be to the north, on the other side of the mountains, where there were more likely to be harbors. Could he make it that far? By competition standards the distance was modest. Indeed, he’d flown significantly farther in an attempt to impress a sheila in Tawonga. The attempt had not been an unqualified success -- the girl had seemed strangely uninterested in a scruffy young man, covered with dust, with wild eyes and wind-tussled hair -- but the flight itself had been something to remember. So thinking, Fleming set off toward the north. As the miles passed, he speculated about what kind of settlements he might find. The French had used these islands as a penal colony for more than a generation, dumping their worst convicts here to rot in the jungle. Before that, the place had been inhabited by cannibals. Neither alternative seemed palatable. Though he worried that he might seem palatable to the latter. The flight grew harder as he left the coast behind. The thermals were weak, far apart, and tended to disappear at inconvenient moments, leaving him low over the jungle with no place to land. More than once, Fleming felt the sickening realization that he had taken one chance too many chance and was going down in the trees, where he would be stuck, injured and unable to move -- a convenient feast for those hypothetical cannibals. And what about those convicts? His pastor had warned him about the French and their unsavory habits. Though when pressed for specifics, the only habits he’d been able to describe seemed to involve snails. At last, to his relief, he found himself approaching the crest of the range. It was still some distance ahead, but one more climb to cloudbase should get him high enough to see beyond it. He studied the terrain ahead, trying to predict where the next lift would be. The thermal, when it came, was a monster -- an invisible giant that batted his craft about like a fly. For several long minutes, Fleming’s attention was occupied by the struggle, trying to avoid getting tossed out by a force that was capricious, unforgiving, and far stronger than him. It was, he reflected, much like the girlfriend he’d left to join the Navy. Then the clouds were spreading above him, the air was smooth and cold, and he could look past the hills. "Bloody hell!" he exclaimed, when he saw what lay on the other side. He turned away and set a course back toward the place the others were waiting. The Captain would want to know about this! To be continued... |
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