Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“Monday?” said Dar, shocked. “But it’s only Saturday afternoon.”

“And I haven’t had a goddamned weekend off in seven months,” snapped Syd, her eyes fierce. “I want one more day off and one more night to sleep in the sheep wagon before this goes any further.”

Dar held both palms up. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had even a Sunday off.”

“Agreed then?” she said.

“Agreed,” Dar said, and held out his hand to shake hers.

She reached up, pulled his face closer to hers, and kissed him firmly, slowly, surely, on the lips. Then she went to the door.

“I’m going to take a nap, but when I come back this evening, I expect steaks to be grilling.”

Dar watched her leave, considered following her, considered kicking himself in the ass, and then drove into town to buy the steaks and some more beer.

Dar pulled the lap belt tight and then tugged the shoulder straps snug as he settled into the L-33 Solo and moved the rudder pedals back and forth to make sure he was comfortable. Ken taxied the towplane forward a bit while his brother, Steve, stood watching the two-hundred-foot-long tow rope lose slack. Ken stopped for a moment. Steve looked over at Dar in the bubble cockpit of the L-33 and made a circular motion with his fist and thumb up, meaning “check controls.” Dar had checked them, and gave the thumbs-up signal for ready to go.

Steve caught his brother’s eye in the towplane and swung his right hand low across his body from left to right. Ken pulled the tow rope taut and glanced back from the single-seater Cessna. Steve looked over at Dar again, who nodded, his right hand comfortably loose on the stick, his left hand on his knee but ready to grab the tow-hook release knob at the first sign of trouble. The towplane began its roll-out and the sailplane jerked slightly and began to bump along behind it off the grass and then down the asphalt runway.

Dar went back through his A-B-C-C-C-D checklist again as he rolled toward takeoff speed: Altimeter, Belts, Controls, Canopy, Cable, Direction. Everything all right. He shifted slightly to get more comfortable. Besides his lap belt and shoulder straps, he was strapped into a model 305 Strong Para-Cushion Chair parachute—the integrated seat pad putting something between his butt and the metal seat, and the inflatable air bladders along the back of the chute giving him much better back support than the upright strip of metal offered by the plane’s seat. Most sailplane pilots of Dar’s acquaintance disdained parachutes, but two of those he’d known had died for the lack of them: one in a totally foolish midair collision above Mount Palomar a few miles to the north, and the other in a highly improbable accident doing loops in his high-performance glider when the left wing simply detached.

Dar liked both the physical comfort of the integrated chute seat under him and the mental comfort of having the chute aboard.

The sailplane left the ground before the towplane, of course, and Dar held it a firm six feet above the runway until Ken got the Cessna airborne in a few hundred feet, and then Dar expertly put the L-33 in the normal “high tow” position, staying just about level with Ken’s little Cessna and just above the towplane’s wake. Officially, Dar was using a standard mountain-country technique of keeping his glider aligned properly with the towplane—that is, keeping the towplane at a fixed position on his windshield just above the sailplane’s simple instrument console—but in truth he was using the skilled pilot’s trick of just placing himself where he wanted to be in relationship to the towplane and staying there. This skill required a certain amount of precognition and telepathy, but after being aero-towed by Ken several hundred times, both those elements were there.

It was a beautiful morning with unlimited visibility, a gentle three-knot wind out of the west, and lovely thermals building in the foothills and mountains around the valley airstrip. But when they had gained a thousand feet of altitude, Dar could see a storm front far to the west. It would be moving in over the coast soon and would spoil the day’s soaring within a few hours.

They climbed at a steady rate as the towplane turned north and then west, then continued climbing as the Cessna turned them back onto a northeasterly course, toward Mount Palomar and into the wind. At the prearranged altitude of two thousand feet, Dar let the tension on the towline grow taut so that Ken could feel the imminent release. Then Dar pulled the release knob twice, saw and felt the towrope go free, and banked into a right climbing turn as Ken dropped the Cessna into a steep left descent.

Then the L-33 was on its own, lifting into the thermals rising from the foothills and steep ridges north of the airfield, and Dar settled back to enjoy silence broken only by the lulling and informative rush of air over the metal wings and fuselage.

Dar had awakened early that Sunday morning, prepared coffee, set out bagels, cereal, and a note for Syd, and was prepared to leave for the Warner Springs gliderport when Syd herself showed up at the door, dressed again in jeans with a red cotton shirt this day and a light khaki vest with many pockets. Her holster and pistol were on her belt under the vest.

“I was out for a walk,” she said. “Are you skipping out on me?”

“Yep,” Dar said, and explained.

“I’d love to go along.”

Dar hesitated. “It’s boring just standing around the field waiting,” he said. “You’d have a better time hanging around here and reading the Sunday paper…I can drive down to the junction and get it. They have a paper dispenser near the row of mailboxes.”

“Won’t you let me fly with you?” she asked.

“No,” said Dar, hearing more harshness in the syllable than he had meant. “I mean, my sailplane is a one-seater.”

“I’d still like to go watch,” said Syd. “And remember, I’m not really your guest this weekend, I’m your bodyguard.”

So they rinsed a Thermos with hot water and filled it with coffee, put some bagels in a bag, drove back through the little town of Julian on Highway 78 and then turned north and west through canyons on Highway 79 before coming out into the broad valley at Warner Springs.

Syd was surprised at how small his sailplane was. “It’s not much more than a pod, a boom, wings, and a tail,” she said as he unlashed the tie-down cords.

“You don’t need much else for a sailplane,” he said.

“I thought they were called gliders,” said Syd.

“That too.”

She steadied one wing while he lifted the tail boom, and together they pushed the red-and-white sailplane out from the tie-down area onto the grassy berm of the airstrip. Ken, flying his Cessna towplane, was making frequent touchdowns, tying onto other gliders, and towing them skyward.

“It’s light,” said Syd, moving the wing easily up and down. “But it’s made of metal. I thought gliders were canvas over wood or something, like the old biplanes.”

“This is an L-33 Solo,” said Dar, “designed by Marian Meciar and manufactured at the LET factory in the Czech Republic. It’s almost all aluminum alloy except for the fabric on the rudder part of the tail. It weighs only four hundred and seventy-eight pounds empty.”

“Do the Czechs make good gliders…sailplanes?” asked Syd as Dar opened the cockpit and dropped the seat-cushion-parachute in place.

“With this one they sure did,” said Dar. “I had to sand down some original paint ridges that were creating a high drag knee in the polar at about fifty-nine kts, and this model does have a tendency to stall without any prestall warning buffet, but for someone with enough experience it’s a nice craft.”