Clifford Simak - No Life of Their Own And Other Stories

For the first time, he realized he couldn’t see. His eyes seemed to be puffed shut. His hands and face were flaming balls of fire and when he tried to talk, he couldn’t, for his lips were wrong and his throat was too dry to work.

Three months later the hospital released him as cured and perhaps the hospital knew what it was about. His hands no longer were clenched talons, held in closed-fist positions by seared muscle and flesh. His face was whole again except for a few scars that in time would disappear.

But hands and face weren’t all there was to it, Douglas thought, brooding in a corner of the mess over a double brandy. Three were other things the doctors couldn’t know about. For instance, the things that happened to a man’s brain when he has seen his brother shot down in flames, when he himself is trapped in a blazing plane.

He hadn’t slowed up. He was still bringing down the Jerries. He was still, he knew, as good a pilot as ever. But the doubt that he was as good a fighter as ever was creeping in upon him. The old dash and daring was gone. He no longer took those chances he had taken in the old days. Now he found himself fighting a grim and cautious fight, efficient and calculating … but cautious. Someday that caution would be the end of him. Someday when he needed to take a chance, he wouldn’t take it …

They talked about him a little, he suspected, when he wasn’t about when he was out of hearing.

The door to the briefing room swung open and Flight Lieutenant Grant came in.

“Hi, Grant,” yelled one of them, “come over and have one.”

“Who was that cutie you had last night?” yelled another.

“You chaps are off the beam,” said Grant. “I was in quarters last night.”

“You mean you weren’t down to London?”

“That,” Grant said, “is exactly what I mean.”

Douglas grimaced. Grant was popular. Fifty-three Jerries to his credit … probably the actual toll was even greater, for that was only the official score. The younger men, especially, looked up to him. He was an old-timer, an ace, one of those deadly fighting men who lived a charmed life.

Douglas wiped the scene at the bar from his mind, stared into the brandy glass, his memory leaping back to the day above the channel, the day Bob’s machine streaked for the cliffs of Dover. Again he felt his own ship diving, felt the terror rising in him, was reaching for the emergency boost …

Boots tramped across the floor and Douglas looked up. Grant, glass in hand, stood before him.

“I want to talk to you, Douglas,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Douglas replied, quietly. “I have to talk to you up in the air. That’s quite enough.”

Grant flushed but held his ground. “We once were friends.”

“We aren’t any more,” Douglas stated flatly.

“You’re eating out your heart,” Grant told him. “You have to break it up.”

“Is that as fight leader?” asked Douglas. “Afraid I’m endangering someone else? Hinting my flying’s not so good?”

“Lord, no,” said Grant. “It’s merely as a friend. I hate to watch what’s happening to you.”

“In that case,” Douglas declared, “you’re concerning yourself with something that’s none of your damn business.”

Grant turned, but Douglas halted him.

“Did I hear you say you were in quarters last night?”

“Why, yes,” said Grant, “perhaps you did.”

Douglas said nothing.

“Why do you ask?”

“Impulse,” Douglas explained. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have. You see, I knew you weren’t.”

“Just why do you hate me?” Grant demanded. “I know the general reasons, of course, although I don’t agree with them. But what is the basic reason?”

“You worked too hard at your career,” said Douglas. “You thought too much about piling up the score. You were so busy getting that … twenty-eight, wasn’t it? … Jerry, that you couldn’t help a friend.”

“I explained about that,” protested Grant.

“You forget I saw it,” Douglas snapped.

“Look, Douglas, I like you … in spite of all you say, the way you act. I asked that you be reassigned to the flight.”

“Anytime you care to ask that I be reassigned again,” said Douglas, “it’ll be agreeable.”

The fields of Holland were green and gold, with little canal ribbons running through them. The sweep was almost over and the R.A.F. was flying home again, leaving behind a trail of blasted ruin.

Douglas settled comfortably down to the job of piloting the Hurricane across the channel and back to base. There had been little excitement. With the Jerries busy in Russia, there was seldom much excitement these days.

Grant flew ahead and to his right was Shorty Cave. Above and behind roared the other flights that had made the sweep.

Douglas’ earphones barked a single word. “Tallyhoo!” Grant’s voice.

Douglas started, the shout jerking him to swift attention.

Diving at them, straight out of the sun, were the roaring shapes of M.E. 110’s. How many there were, Douglas could not be sure, for there was no time to count. The Jerries had been waiting for them, lurking high up in the blue. Now they were shrieking down for a hit and run attack.

Douglas hauled back the stick, threw his ship into a climb. A black shape flickered across his line of vision and he pressed the firing button, but the Nazi was going too fast and the tracer missed. It had, at the best, been a snap shot.

Guns were hammering now as the Nazi planes slashed into the British formation. Smoke bloomed out in the sky and a ship was screaming down.

A Messerschmitt dived at him and Douglas swung his Hurricane over in a tight loop. The tracer caught his wing tip and then the Nazi was past. A second later, loop completed, Douglas was on his tail.

The M.E. was trying to pull out of the dive and Douglas found his brain clicking coolly, calculating … like a man sitting at a chess board, planning his attack many moves ahead.

That was the thing that terrified him at times when he sat with his brandy back at base. A smart way to fight, perhaps, but someday it would get him in a jam. No more recklessness, no more fire, no more enthusiasm. Just a grim playing of something that added up to no more than a deadly game.

He hauled back the stick deliberately to match the Messerschmitt’s maneuver. The Jerry came into the ring sight, started to cross it, pulling out of the dive. Bullets slashed into the wing of the Hurricane as the Nazi rear gunner got his weapon into action.

Then the Messerschmitt hatch was in sight and Douglas opened with his guns. A short burst … four seconds, no more, but enough to fill the cockpit and gunnery position with screaming steel.

The Messerschmitt wobbled and skipped, heeled over, side-slipped and fell. It was always like that, Douglas thought. Take no chances, hold the guns until the correct moment, then put the bullets where they counted.

But someday. Perhaps, someday …

He shivered as he hauled the Hurricane around, sent it zooming into the blue. There were no more Messerschmitts in sight. The Hurricanes and Blenheims were reforming.

It had, Douglas told himself, been another typical Nazi hit-and-run affair, with the Jerries diving, hoping to gain by the element of surprise, and then streaking away before the British fighters could get in their licks.

He tilted the ship and looked over the side and as he did his heart skipped a beat. Far below a Hurricane was gliding down to earth, engine apparently dead, for Douglas could not see the slow swirl of the prop gleaming in the sun.

No parachute. That meant the pilot was taking a chance on riding the crippled ship to earth. Faster that way … if you lived. More time to get into hiding before a Nazi patrol swooped down.