Free Fallen Star by James Blish Page A

flying, and we had no sooner broken through the cloud-cover than I forgot all the imbroglios
     of the past months. That flight still sticks in my mind as one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me.
     We emerged over a vast, still sea of cloudsflooded with dawn-pink, rolling all the way north to the horizon; after a while I got out of my belt and went forward to watch
     from the control cabin—a privilege sternly denied passengers on a commercial airliner.
    Farnsworth was still piloting, though he could have put the ship on autopilot much earlier had he wanted to. It was evident
     from his expression that he simply liked flying a plane, and would take a long time further to become bored enough to relinquish
     manual control. Dr. Hanchett, one of the astronomers, was doing the navigating; he was of course qualified for it, but I rather
     doubted that he was also properly licensed. Farnsworth was gloriously negligent about little legal details like that; still,
     who could catch Hanchett operating without a licence up here? He was just saving Farnsworth the trouble.
    When the cloud-cover finally thinned and vanished, a little over an hour later, we were over Canada by a hair, and forests
     were rolling away under us. Our air speed was pushing 275, which is good cruising for a B-29; we seemed to be quartering into
     a strong southeasterly wind. The Commodore was holding us straight-and-level at 13,000 feet—whether zeroed at sea level or-at
     Teterboro I couldn’t tell, but it could hardly have made more than 50 feet of difference, not enough to throw off a contact
     landing for a plane that size. Behind us and to the left was our other plane, cruising just below 10,000—the maximum height
     at which it’s safe to fly without masks in an unpressurized plane.
    Farnsworth shot a glance at me and caught me looking at the altimeter. “We’ll have to begin climbing for it tomorrow,” he
     said. “There are mountains all along the D. E. W. line here in the east—not as high as the Baffin range, but plenty high enough
     for these crates.”
    The plane dipped one wing and he corrected for it, watching the horizon contentedly. I could hardly believe that he was the
     same man. He seemed almost gentle. All the flamboyance and boisterousness was gone: he was quiet, preoccupied, intense, and
     yet without a trace of complacence —a man going quietly about a business he knew well.
    Abashed, I left him alone. Obviously he could do without being distracted by sightseers like me. I was even beginning to become
     convinced that he might have managed better if he’d been allowed to have the Flying Tail.
    Unused to such an access of humility, I went back to my seat prepared for any self-abasement, even if it involved being polite
     to Dr. Wollheim. The potato-masher, however, was looking rigidly out the window and needed no help from me. So was Harriet,
     with a kind of frightened resignation; air travel was old stuff to her, of course, but the destination to which she had committed
     herself this time was obviously beginning to bulk larger and larger to her. I couldn’t help her, either. As for Dr. Wentz,
     our other astronomer, he had produced a fifth of bourbon from his kit and was getting quietly fried. This was perfectly in
     character—I had yet to see him sober—and it was obvious that he would be happiest left alone. I knew nothing about him, anyhow,
     except what I had been able to find in Vol. I of
American Men of Science
—which noted, in cryptic abbreviationese, that his honorary doctorate from the University of Lisbon had been revoked, in
     the same year that he had been granted it. As for Elvers, he was sleeping with the dogs.
    I sat down, feeling perfectly and completely useless. The rest of the human staff was flying behind us with Jayne Wynn. I
     wondered who was actually piloting that plane. Perhaps she was, considering the broad spectrum of talents I already knew her
     to have. If so,