Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

One of the instructors had said, “Following the landing officer’s directions is the most important thing you can do- the most important. Have you got that? You’d better have it, gentlemen. If you don’t, you’ll kill yourselves and you’ll cost the country thirty-one grand for a Wildcat-twice that and then some for one of the new Hellcats, if you happen to draw them-and that’s not even adding in the five cents you’re worth. When you fly up to the stern of your carrier, you are a machine. He is the man in charge of the machine. You are under his control. He can see your approach much better than you can. He can correct it much better than you can. If you trust your own judgment instead of his, you’ll be sorry-but not for long.”

Some guys knew better. Some guys always knew better. You didn’t get to be a pilot training for carrier operations if you didn’t think pretty well of your own judgment. So far, this squadron had had one guy crash on the Wolverine ’s wooden flight deck, one guy slam head-on into the training carrier’s stern, and one guy fly his F3F into Lake Erie because they did what they wanted to do and not what the landing officer told them to do. Two of them were dead. The fellow they’d fished out of the drink was still training with the rest of the cadets. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Whether he’d make some different mistake… Well, at least he had the chance to find out.

Joe lined his biplane fighter up on the carrier’s stern. They’d even built a little island on the port side, to give her smoke-belching stacks somewhere to go and to make her seem more like the warships she was impersonating. And-also portside-they’d built the little platform at the stern from which the landing officer directed traffic.

Another F3F was in front of Joe. The obsolescent fighter touched down on the flight deck, tires smoking for a moment, then taxied along to the far end and roared up into the sky again. Getting everybody as many repetitions as possible was the point of the exercise.

Seeing that spurt of smoke made Joe check his own landing gear again. Yes, he’d lowered it. The landing officer would have waved him off if he’d tried anything dumb like landing with it up. He knew that. Even so… “It’s my neck,” he muttered.

There were the wigwag flags-for him this time. The landing officer dipped the flags to the left. Joe straightened out the F3F. The landing officer straightened, too, and held out both flags level with his shoulders. Joe was going the way the other man wanted him to.

I am a machine, the naval air cadet told himself. The landing officer runs me. I do what he says. It wasn’t easy. He wanted to fly the way he wanted to fly. He’d spent all this time learning to do that. Now he had to suppress a lot of the trained reflexes he’d acquired in the past months.

The wigwag flags moved in tiny circles in the landing officer’s hands: speed up. Joe obediently gave the Grumman biplane a little more throttle. Those circles stopped. The landing officer urged him up a little. The F3F’s stick went back; its nose rose.

Then, suddenly, the flags dropped. Joe dove for the Wolverine ’s deck. Any carrier landing was a controlled crash. The trick was making controlled the key word, not crash. The F3F’s tires hit the timbers of the flight deck. On a real carrier, a working carrier, the plane’s tailhook would have snagged a wire and brought it to a halt.

Here, Joe bounced down the deck and then off again. He gunned the engine and rose into the sky yet once more. Officers on the training carrier would be grading his performance. He thought he’d done pretty well that time. They didn’t always agree with him.

After three more landings and takeoffs, he got orders to return to the land base. Regretfully, he obeyed. He thought-he hoped-he improved every time. He wanted as much practice as he could get-this was as close as he could come to the real McCoy.

Finding his way across the gray waters of Lake Erie also proved… interesting. The Wolverine steamed well out of sight of land. He needed to use some of what he’d learned in navigation before he found New York again. He hoped it was New York, anyway. If he’d fouled up, it might be Pennsylvania or Ontario. Ending up not just in the wrong state but the wrong country would have damaged his career. It probably would have meant he didn’t have one.

But no-he hadn’t screwed the pooch this time. That was the shoreline south of Buffalo, where he belonged. He breathed a sigh of relief. He also tried to suppress the little stab of worry that went through him whenever he did this. Out in the Pacific, he wouldn’t have a shoreline to recognize. If he was going to find the enemy and find his way back to his own carrier again, he’d have to be able to use the navigation they were trying to pound into his head.

Can I? he wondered. He hoped so. He thought so-as long as he had a little while to think while he was doing it. “The Japs may not give you that kind of time, Joe,” he said in the cockpit. “Are you sure you want to go on with this?”

But that had only one possible answer. He nodded. He didn’t need to speak. He’d been doing this for most of a year now. He’d torn his life to pieces to do this. He wasn’t about to back away from it now.

And if that meant he had to take a few chances once he got up there… He shrugged. Then it did, that was all. His commissioning wasn’t very far away. He didn’t give a damn about becoming an officer for the sake of becoming an officer-though that would have his immigrant parents walking on air.

What he gave a damn about was that becoming an officer, becoming a pilot, would give him the chance to fly off a real carrier and take the war to the Japs. He’d been waiting for that chance ever since Pearl Harbor. It was so close these days, he could taste it. He wanted it bad.

By now, coming down on dry land seemed routine. Instructors had talked to the cadets about stuff like that, warning them against overconfidence. Joe had heard about guys who flew their planes into the ground just out of carelessness. He watched what he was doing, but he had to make himself watch it. That probably wasn’t so good.

No landing officer with wigwag flags here-just him and the F3F and the runway. He landed smoothly enough and taxied to a stop. As he killed the engine, he laughed at himself. Three years earlier, this plane had been on a carrier. If war had broken out then, say over the sinking of the Panay, it would have been in the front line against the Japs. Nowadays… Nowadays, it was good enough to train in.

Of course, Japan probably hadn’t had Zeros three years earlier, either. Things happened in a hurry nowadays, and that was that.

Another Grumman biplane came in and taxied up right behind Joe’s. Orson Sharp climbed out of it.

“Way to go, roomie,” he said. “You made those circuits and bumps look mighty good.”

“Yeah?” Joe still sometimes had trouble believing his roommate was pulling for him as hard as he seemed to.

But Sharp nodded. “Oh, yeah. We do ’em here, we can do ’em anywhere.” He didn’t ask about his own performance. Part of that was because Joe had been in front of him in the queue and couldn’t have seen him. And the other part was that the Mormon kid, unlike Joe, was confident about everything he did up there. He wasn’t a showoff or anything, but he was good, and he knew it.

Groundcrew men took charge of the fighters. Joe and Sharp walked side by side to the administration building next to the field. By now, Joe was used to having his roommate tower over him. Once you got up in the air, size didn’t matter any more anyway.