Then rev the motor, prop the plane on air.
And crack the switch, to fire the rocket fuse.
And together in a single leap, swim, rush, flail, jump, sail, and glide, upturned to sun, moon, stars, they would go above Atlantic, Mediterranean; over country, wilderness, city, town; in gaseous silence, riffling feather, rattle-drum frame, in volcanic eruption, in timid, sputtering roar; in start, jar, hesitation, then steady ascension, beautifully held, wondrously transported, they would laugh and cry each his own name to himself. Or shout the names of others unborn or others long dead and blown away by the wine wind or the salt wind or the silent hush of balloon wind or the wind of chemical fire. Each feeling the bright feathers stir and bud deep-buried and thrusting to burst from their riven shoulder-blades! Each leaving behind the echo of their flying, a sound to encircle, recircle the earth in the winds and “speak again in other years to the sons of the sons of their sons, asleep but hearing the restless midnight sky.
Up, yet further up, higher, higher! A spring tide, a summer flood, an unending river of wings!
A bell rang softly.
No, he whispered, I’ll wake in a moment. Wait …
The Aegean slid away below the window, gone; the Atlantic dunes, the French countryside, dissolved down to New Mexico desert. In his room near his cot stirred no plumes in golden wax. Outside, no wind-sculpted pear, no trapdrum butterfly machine. Outside only a rocket, a combustible dream, waiting for the friction of his hand to set it off.
In the last moment of sleep, someone asked his name.
Quietly, he gave the answer as he had heard it during the hours from midnight on.
‘Icarus Montgolfier Wright.’
He repeated it slowly so the questioner might remember the order and spelling down to the last incredible letter.
‘Icarus Montgolfier Wright.
‘Born: nine hundred years before Christ. Grammar school: Paris, 1783. High school, college: Kitty Hawk, 1903. Graduation from Earth to Moon: this day, God willing, 1 August 1970. Death and burial, with luck, on Mars, summer 1999 in the Year of Our Lord.’
Then he let himself drift awake.
Moments later, crossing the desert tarmac, he heard someone shouting again and again and again.
And if no one was there or if someone was there behind him, he could not tell. And whether it was one voice or many, young or old, near or very far away, rising or falling, whispering or shouting to him all three of his brave new names, he could not tell, either. He did not turn to see.
For the wind was slowly rising and he let it take hold and blow him all the rest of the way across the desert to the rocket which stood waiting there.
Almost the End of the World
SIGHTING ROCK Junction, Arizona, at noon on 22 August 1961, Willy Bersinger let his miner’s boot rest easy on the jalopy’s accelerator and talked quietly to his partner, Samuel Fitts.
‘Yes, sir, Samuel, it’s great hitting town. After a couple of months out at the Penny Dreadful Mine, a juke-box looks like a stained-glass window to me. We need the town; without it, we might wake some morning and find ourselves all jerked beef and petrified rock. And then, of course, the town needs us, too.’
‘How’s that?’ asked Samuel Fitts.
‘Well, we bring things into the town that it hasn’t got – mountains, creeks, desert night, stars, things like that….’
And it was true, thought Willy, driving along. Set a man way out in the strange lands and he fills with wellsprings of silence. Silence of sagebrush, or a mountain lion purring like a warm beehive at noon. Silence of the river
shallows deep in the canyons. All this a man takes in. Opening his mouth, in town, he breathes it out.
‘Oh, how I love to climb in that old barber-shop chair,’ Willy admitted. ‘And see all those city men lined up under the naked-lady calendars staring back at me, waiting while I chew over my philosophy of rocks and mirages and the kind of Time that just sits out there in the hills waiting for Man to go away. I exhale – and that wilderness settles in a fine dust on the customers. Oh, it’s nice, me talking, soft and easy, up and down, on and on….’
In his mind he saw the customers’ eyes strike fire. Some day they would yell and rabbit for the hills, leaving families and time-clock civilization behind.
‘It’s good to feel wanted,’ said Willy. ‘You and me, Samuel, are basic necessities for those city-dwelling folks. Gangway, Rock Junction!’
And with a tremulous tin whistling they steamed across city limits into awe and wonder.
They had driven perhaps a hundred feet through town when Willy kicked the brakes. A great shower of rust flakes sifted from the jalopy fenders. The car stood cowering in the road.
‘Something’s wrong,’ said Willy. He squinted his lynx eyes this way and that. He snuffed his huge nose. ‘You feel it? You smell it?’