Posted by NL on August 13, 2004 at 14:00:36:
Freak Flight
Wow! TV land! The lights are blinding...
"And Timmy Wheaton's secret is-- he made a death ray out of ordinary household materials!" Yeah! The audience loves it! They know what death rays mean, things like lots of dead commies and apple pie. I'm such an unprepossessing kid, the panelists can't believe it. Dorothy Kilgallen blinks as though she's just been swatted upside the head. Bill Cullen weeps. Henry Morgan smirks. Poor saps!
Curtains part and a sexy blonde in a glittering white dress wheels my deadly device onto center stage. It sure looks homemade, and yet, it's also intimidating, with massive coils of wire, insulators, meters, and dials. At the end of a three foot length of black iron pipe there's a quartz crystal from my rock collection. What I don't like is that somebody decided to put my creation on dinky little casters like a sofa or loveseat-- ugh! Indignant, I adjust my enormous hornrim spectacles and lean toward the microphone. In the corner of my eye there's a technician making frantic hand signals. I guess I'm not supposed to say anything.
"Sir", I say, "mounted like that, on those stupid little wheels, the recoil would propel this device right off the stage and decapitate most of your audience. In practice..." But I'm drowned out with cued applause. Garry fumbles with his bowtie and Henry Morgan leers at me as though I have two heads, each more contemptable than the other.
"Timmmmeeeee!" My Mom called to me from inside the house and my moment of glory dissolved, leaving me in the middle of a muggy summer evening, sprawled in a lawn chair. My scrawny legs, exposed in bermuda shorts, were making a nice meal for the mosquitoes. I scratched until my fingernails left welts.
I found my Mom at the kitchen table with that day's evening paper. She frowned at my legs. "Haven't I warned you not to scratch those mosquitoe bites? You're gonna get an infection!"
"Ummm?" I couldn't reply satisfactorily. It was tough for come up out of a Deep Think.
"Well, don't do it!" She made an exasperated snort and handed me a section of the paper. "Here's something I'll bet you'll want to read," she said, tapping a column of print with a fingernail displaying much chipped red polish. What she indicated was a photo of the Bell X-2 rocket plane, with an article about it. She was right! I did want to read that!
"You can clip that part if you want," she said. "I've got to make popcorn for your Dad." She rose from the kitchen chair, making sticky noises on the plastic as her sweaty flesh broke adhesion. She liked to wear shorts in the summer, too.
"Don't leave off the butter this time," my father bawled from the living room. He was stretched out, as usual, on the sofa with a box fan set up to blow across him. The tv roared with gunfire and stampeding hooves. A dewy pilsner half full of his favorite beer made wet rings on the coffee table. He'd unbuttoned his shirt and sweat pooled on his chest. I felt the usual queasiness. He just didn't look like the father of a whizz-kid. Neither of my parents really seemed like they fit the part.
Back in my room I read the article about the X-2. It was exciting stuff, the kind of thing I ate up in those days. I liked to imagine myself in a cramped cockpit full of noxious fumes, bravely battling for control of a wildly gyrating X-plane. Right away I had a problem with that photo. It looked all wrong to me. The X-2 was laid out much like an F-86 fighter jet, and the F-86 was only marginally supersonic. The X-2 was going to fly out to Mach 3. My intutions told me it needed more cross-sectional area behind the center of mass, and the rudder moments ought to be symmetrical about the inertial axis. That big tall vertical fin looked like a prescription for disaster. Of course, I didn't have the math to prove it, but I was sure the darned thing would be unstable above about Mach 2.5.
But you know, I could take a scale model of a hypothetical high mach aircraft and pit it against a scale model of the X-2! I could build one the right way, the way I thought it should be laid out, with a ventral fin and trapezoidal wings, and then build a model of the X-2 just as it was pictured in the newspaper. I could shoot them into the air with a high-powered sling shot and see which one was the most stable. I was good at building things out of balsa wood and I had everything I needed. I got to work right away, carving cutting, sanding, and best of all-- gluing. I liked to use Ambroid. There was something about the fumes I really liked. While I worked, and the divine glue fumes thickened, I did some mental calculations. I figured a velocity of sixty feet per second would be equivalent to 2000 mph at 1/50 scale. Perfect for a slingshot, and I had the very one, a very powerful sucker, as yet unused, that I made from maple scraps found in the alley and slices of inner tube. I worked fast and got both models built up before bedtime. I felt nice and dreamy and buzzy by then.
In the morning, after a hasty breakfast of puffed rice and chocolate milk, I carried my rocket plane models into the backyard for the flight testing. I was pleased to see that the glue dried nicely and all the wings and tails were still lined up. To get them balanced right I had to carve their sharp nose cones out of some of the maple I had left over from making the slingshot. But I used lots of glue the night before, and my models were good and solid. The problem was, where to launch? Trees were the problem and they were all over the neighborhood. They'd eaten more than one model airplane in my career. Doing it in the street was out of the question-- too much traffic. I really had only one flightpath, and that would have to be across our yard, side-to-side, and out across the neighbor's yard, with a likely impact several houses away, near the end of the block.
The X-2 would go first. I hooked the launching rubber into a slot under the fuselage, and stretched out the slingshot just as hard as I could. At that moment, I heard our neighbor's backdoor slam and a young woman in a housecoat, barefoot, sauntered right out into the middle of the restricted zone beneath my flightpath! It was definitely not our neighbor, Mrs. Tinsley-- Mrs. Tinsley was an old lady and you rarely saw her outdoors. I could see the girl clearly enough through gaps in the low, scraggly hedge growing along the propery line. She looked to be a teen-ager. The faded yellow robe she wore was pretty loose, and it got looser still when she reached up to sweep masses of red hair aside. She was smoking a cigarette. If Mrs. Tinsley was still there, she'd have made her go out if she wanted to smoke, and maybe that's why this girl was outside. I didn't know what was going on, but I was very irritated. The sight of that darned girl loitering in my flightpath, smoking, brushing her bare tootsies negligently through the lightly dewed grass, tossing her head once in a while to get the hair out of her face, began to be infuriating. I had a scientific experiment to perform! I yanked my X-2 back as far as I could and let fly. It shot away smartly, promptly entering a vicious flat spin, just as anticipated. It vanished into tall grass at the near corner of my landing zone after zipping within a foot or so of the girl's head. She must have felt the wind of passage because she glanced over her shoulder at me, frowning, then turned away, walking out a little farther into Mrs. Tinsley's backyard. But she was still in my way. I could imagine what I looked like to her, glaring at her, dangling a huge slingshot from my hand. Too bad!
The near-miss was kind of exciting. I'd have to be much more careful. I slipped the other model into the launcher. What I remember best about that moment is the sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down and getting an attack of vertigo. I don't think I really wanted to hit her. I had the inspiration that the best way not to hit her would be to aim directly at her head. I mean, I wasn't that accurate a shot. The other plane almost hit her, and I tried really hard to aim as far away as I could. So I felt like I solved that problem and launched my other model just as hard, and wow! It flew straight and true! It smacked the back of the girl's head, hard. There was a sharp *crack* and two little trapezoids went fluttering-- the impact tore the wings clean off. She flopped to her knees and tumbled flat on her back with her knees spread, housecoat parted, naked to the world. That was the first time I'd ever seen so much naked female flesh, boobs and flaming red bush and soft belly. She was lightly freckled all over.
It was that simple. Inside our house, the vacuum cleaner (a Hoover) howled like a banshee. I crept inside, to my room, but when I got there I realized I really needed to go to the bathroom instead. I locked the door after me and stood quietly in the middle of the floor. It wasn't too long before I heard old Mrs. Tinsley screaming.
Well, it wasn't really that bad. I didn't kill the girl, who turned out to be a sort of prodigal granddaughter fleeing from abusive parents, or something like that. She was pregnant and arrived at her
grandmother's house just a few days earlier, just a few days before I shattered her occiput for her. She wasn't too long in the hospital, didn't lose her baby, but she had some sort of freakish damage to her visual cortex that left her unable to attend to anything moving left to right across her visual field. She was killed a month after she got out of the hosptal, trying to drive her grandmother's Nash Rambler in heavy traffic-- t-boned at a busy intersection.
I was so numbed by my misdeed, even my father's rage failed to move me.
"How the hell could you do something so stupid! You idiot! Is this my son the rocket scientist? I'm gonna get sued! This family is in deep shit!" I figured I'd better not try to explain the important research aspect; it wasn't like I was a juvenile delinquent.
A few days later I got brave enough to recover what was left of my rocket planes. One of them had dark stains on its nosecone-- I got a curious thrill out of those rust-colored spots. Bell's design for the X-2 was just as seriously flawed as I suspected, but I got little satisfaction out of the knowledge. One evening, month's later, as I sat struggling with math homework, my Mom handed me a section of her newspaper. "Here's something that'll interest you," she said. And she gave me a kindly look. "You screwed up, Timmy, but I know you didn't mean to hurt that girl-- it'll be OK. Really." She no longer polished her nails, I noticed. They were a disaster area.
What I read in that paper was a real eye-opener:
X-2 SMASHES SPEED RECORD
"The Air Force revealed recently that the Bell X-2 rocket research aircraft, piloted by Captain Milburn Apt, set a new unofficial world speed record of 2120 mph on September 27th. It was Captain Apt's first flight in the formerly trouble-plagued X-2. 'The aircraft performed perfectly,' Apt noted. Stability problems reported on earlier flights were not apparent during the record flight. Future plans call for the sleek experimental aircraft to be fitted with jettisonable rocket boosters for an assault on speeds four times greater than that of sound..."
And so on.
It's weird. When I put the crosshairs of that deer rifle on the back of that girls's head-- the one I killed in the park, the one sunbathing in her bikini, all this old shit from my childhood started tumbling through my head-- it was tumbling, turning, going every which way, just like a rocketplane, one of those old time X-planes, out of control...