Sure you won’t have another? The evening chill is coming now, and that machine of yours don’t keep the air off you, or so it looks to me. Still, you know best, and if you must go, you must; sorry Nor and me couldn’t be of more help.

  I’ve got her—set easy, Nor.

  Ma’am, you’ve got to be careful of your footing in here. These floorboards are uneven, and a lot of our furniture has those little spindly legs on it, just like that table. They can be tricksy, as you found out.

  There’s no good ending to that story of Pim’s—no more than I told already. He dropped out of sight a while afterward, but he’d done that before. Old Wolter, down to the Center, says he looked out one night, and there was another house setting beside his, and in at the window of it he could see Pim laying there with someone else beside him; he said he couldn’t be certain if either of them was dead or not. But Wolter ain’t to be believed, if you know what I mean.

  I didn’t feel no shifting, ma’am. I oughtn’t to have given you what I did out of my flask. You’re not used to it, and it’s not for the ladies anyhow. I helped build this place, though, and it’s solid as a rock.

  Not that way, ma’am. The door’s over—

  Sure, I see your gun, and I know what it will do, too. I think you ought to put it away, ma’am. I don’t believe you’re feeling quite yourself, and you might harm Nor with that thing. You wouldn’t want to do that. Still, I don’t think you ought to open that door.

  There! No, I won’t give it back; it’s safer, I think, with me. I doubt that you’ll remember; and if you was to, you couldn’t find us.

  I didn’t want you to see her—that’s all. You’d have been happier, I think, without it—and it would’ve saved you that yell. Nor’s grandmother’s sister, she was. Still is, I guess. Great-aunt Enid. She talks to us still—there’s mouths, you see, in various places; would you credit she remembers people that was born before the first transporter left? That far back. Didn’t you ever wonder how different it was—

  · · · ·

  Old Woman: Well, Todd, that’s the last of her—at least, for now. Hear that machine kick gravel. She expected you’d try to stop her when she ran for it, and she’ll be disappointed you didn’t, once she gets away down the road. Hope she don’t run that thing into a tree.

  We’ll move on now, Enid.

  You’re right, she’s not ready yet; but someday—I suppose it might be possible. Look at that other one. Someday this one will be ready to seek her peace. Come into a woman. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—that’s why we’re all so comfortable here: we’ve been here before. Feel the motion of her, Todd. How easy she goes!

  Against the Lafayette Escadrille

  Armistice Day

  I have built a perfect replica of a Fokker triplane, except for the flammable dope. It is five meters, seventy-seven centimeters long and has a wing span of seven meters, nineteen centimeters, just like the original. The engine is an authentic copy of an Oberursel UR II. I have a lathe and a milling machine and I made most of the parts for the engine myself, but some had to be farmed out to a company in Cleveland, and most of the electrical parts were done in Louisville, Kentucky.

  In the beginning I had hoped to get an original engine, and I wrote my first letters to Germany with that in mind, but it just wasn’t possible; there are only a very few left, and as nearly as I could find out none in private hands. The Oberursel Worke is no longer in existence. I was able to secure plans though, through the cooperation of some German hobbyists. I redrew them myself translating the German when they had to be sent to Cleveland. A man from the newspaper came to take pictures when the Fokker was nearly ready to fly, and I estimated then that I had put more than three thousand hours into building it. I did all the airframe and the fabric work myself, and carved the propeller.

  Throughout the project I have tried to keep everything as realistic as possible, and I even have two 7.92 mm Maxim “Spandau” machine-guns mounted just ahead of the cockpit. They are not loaded of course, but they are coupled to the engine with the Fokker Zentralsteuerung interrupter gear.

  The question of dope came up because of a man in Oregon I used to correspond with who flies a Nieuport Scout. The authentic dope, as you’re probably aware, was extremely flammable. He wanted to know if I’d used it, and when I told him I had not he became critical. As I said then, I love the Fokker too much to want to see it burn authentically, and if Antony Fokker and Reinhold Platz had had fireproof dope they would have used it. This didn’t satisfy the Oregon man and he finally became so abusive I stopped replying to his letters. I still believe what I did was correct, and if I had it to do over my decision would be the same.

  I have had a trailer specially built to move the Fokker, and I traded my car in on a truck to tow it and carry parts and extra gear, but mostly I leave it at a small field near here where I have rented hangar space, and move it as little as possible on the roads. When I do because of the wide load I have to drive very slowly and only use certain roads. People always stop to look when we pass, and sometimes I can hear them on their front porches calling to others inside to come and see. I think the three wings of the Fokker interest them particularly, and once in a rare while a veteran of the war will see it—almost always a man who smokes a pipe and has a cane. If I can hear what they say it is often pretty foolish, but a light comes into their eyes that I enjoy.

  Mostly the Fokker is just in its hangar out at the field and you wouldn’t know me from anyone else as I drive out to fly. There is a black cross painted on the door of my truck, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. I suppose it wouldn’t have meant anything even if you had seen me on my way out the day I saw the balloon.

  It was one of the earliest days of spring, with a very fresh, really indescribable feeling in the air. Three days before I had gone up for the first time that year, coming after work and flying in weather that was a little too bad with not quite enough light left; winter flying, really. Now it was Saturday and everything was changed. I remember how my scarf streamed out while I was just standing on the field talking to the mechanic.

  The wind was good, coming right down the length of the field to me, getting under the Fokker’s wings and lifting it like a kite before we had gone a hundred feet. I did a slow turn then, getting a good look at the field with all the new, green grass starting to show, and adjusting my goggles.

  Have you ever looked from an open cockpit to see the wing struts trembling and the ground swinging far below? There is nothing like it. I pulled back on the stick and gave it more throttle and rose and rose until I was looking down on the backs of all the birds and I could not be certain which of the tiny roofs I saw was the house where I live or the factory where I work. Then I forgot looking down, and looked up and out, always remembering to look over my shoulder especially, and to watch the sun where the S.E. 5a’s of the Royal Flying Corps love to hang like dragonflies, invisible against the glare.

  Then I looked away and I saw it, almost on the horizon, an orange dot. I did not, of course, know then what it was; but I waved to the other members of the Jagstaffel I command and turned toward it, the Fokker thrilling to the challenge. It was moving with the wind, which meant almost directly away from me, but that only gave the Fokker a tailwind, and we came at it—rising all the time.

  It was not really orange-red as I had first thought. Rather it was a thousand colors and shades, with reds and yellows and white predominating. I climbed toward it steeply with the stick drawn far back, almost at a stall. Because of that I failed, at first, to see the basket hanging from it. Then I leveled out and circled it at a distance. That was when I realized it was a balloon. After a moment I saw, too, that it was of very old-fashioned design with a wicker basket for the passengers and that someone was in it. At the moment the profusion of colors interested me more, and I went slowly spiraling in until I could see them better, the Easter egg blues and the blacks as well as the reds and whites and yellows.

  It wasn’t until I looked at the girl that I understood. She was the passenger, a very beautiful girl, and she wore crinolines and had her hair in long chestnut curls that hung down over her bare shoulders. She waved to me, and then I understood.

  The ladies of Richmond had sewn it for the Confederate army, making it from their silk dresses. I remembered reading about it. The girl in the basket blew me a kiss and I waved to her, trying to convey with my wave that none of the men of my command would ever be allowed to harm her; that we had at first thought that her craft might be a French or Italian observation balloon, but that for the future she need fear no gun in the service of the Kaiser’s Flugzeugmeisterei.

  I circled her for some time then, she turning slowly in the basket to follow the motion of my plane, and we talked as well as we could with gestures and smiles. At last when my fuel was running low I signaled her that I must leave. She took, from a container hidden by the rim of the basket, a badly shaped, corked brown bottle. I circled even closer, in a tight bank, until I could see the yellow, crumbling label. It was one of the very early soft drinks, an original bottle. While I watched she drew the cork, drank some, and held it out symbolically to me.

  Then I had to go. I made it back to the field, but I landed dead stick with my last drop of fuel exhausted when I was half a kilometer away. Naturally I had the Fokker refueled at once and went up again, but I could not find her balloon.

  I have never been able to find it again, although I go up almost every day when the weather makes it possible. There is nothing but an empty sky and a few jets. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I have wondered if things would not have been different if, in finishing the Fokker, I had used the original, flammable dope. She was so authentic. Sometimes toward evening I think I see her in the distance, above the clouds, and I follow as fast as I can across the silent vault with the Fokker trembling around me and the throttle all the way out; but it is only the sun.

  Three Million Square Miles

  Thanksgiving

  “Hey,” Richard Marquer said to his wife Betty one August afternoon. “Hey, ninety percent of the United States is uninhabited.” They were reading the Sunday paper.

  “That’s right,” Betty said, “it’s parking lots.”

  “No, really. It says so right here: ‘At least ninety percent of the land area of the United States is employed neither in agriculture nor as sites for roads and buildings.’”

  “I didn’t know Texas was that big.”

  “Listen, this is serious. Where the hell is it all?”

  “Dick, you don’t really believe that junk.”

  “It says so.”

  “It says the department store is selling percale sheets twenty percent under cost too.”

  Richard put down his part of the paper and went to the bookcase.

  After five minutes work with pencil and paper he said, “Bet?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been making some calculations. According to the almanac—”

  “That’s an old one. Nineteen sixty-eight.”

  “It still ought to be pretty accurate, and it says there are—get this—two hundred and ninety-six million eight hundred and thirty-six thousand harvested acres in the United States. Now there’s six hundred and forty acres in a square mile, so that means about four hundred and sixty-three thousand harvested square miles. Only the gross area of the United States is three million six hundred and twenty-eight thousand one hundred and fifty square miles.”

  “So it isn’t ninety percent. You just proved it yourself.”

  “I’m not arguing about the exact figure, but look at the size of the thing. Say that half as much is taken up for buildings and backyards as for all the farms. That still leaves over three million square miles unaccounted for. More than three quarters of the country.”

  “Richard?”

  “Yes?”

  “Richard, do you really think that’s really there? That everybody wouldn’t go out and grab it?”

  “The facts—”

  “Dick, those are talking facts—they’re not real. It’s like what you were telling me when we bought the car, about the miles on the little thing—”

  “Odometer.”

  “You remember? You said they didn’t mean anything. It said thirteen thousand but you said it might be fifteen or twenty thousand really. Anything. Or like when they raised the city income tax. They said it was inflation, but if it was inflation everybody’s pay would go up too so the city’d get more—only they took another half percent anyway, remember? You could prove they didn’t need it, but it didn’t mean anything.”

  “But it has to be somewhere.”

  “You really think it’s out there? With deer on it, and bears? Dick, it’s silly.”

  “Three million square miles.”

  “When we drove to Baltimore last summer to see my mother, did you see any of it?”

  Richard shook his head.

  “When you flew to Cleveland for the company—”

  “It was so foggy. Everything was socked in, and you couldn’t see anything but haze.”

  “From factories! See?” Betty went back to her paper.

  That night The Wizard of Oz was shown on television for the two hundredth time. Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow.”

  Richard took to going on drives. He drove, sometimes for two or three or four hours, before coming home from work. He drove weekends, and once when Betty spent a weekend with her mother he drove from six A.M. Saturday until twelve P.M. Sunday and put sixteen hundred miles on the car. He knew all the best ways into and out of the city, and the best places for food and coffee. Once he was the first person to report an accident to the state highway patrol; once he helped college girls change a tire.

  At a roadside zoo he made friends with three deer in a pen—a buck with fine antlers nuzzled his hand for popcorn, and Richard said softly, “I bet if they’d let you out you’d find some of them.” Later he asked the operator of the zoo if any animals ever escaped.

  “Don’t worry about that.” (He was a desiccated man of fifty who wore checked sports shirts.) “We keep everything secure here. Look at it from my angle—those animals are valuable to me. You think I’d let them get out where they could hurt people?”

  Richard said, “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything. I just wondered if any of them ever got loose.”

  “Not long as I’ve had the place, and I been here eight years.”

  Later Richard asked the boy who pitched hay into the deer’s pen, and he said, “Last year. The little buck. I guess the big one was giving him a rough time, and he jumped the fence.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He got out on the highway and got hit by a car.”

  Richard began measuring the farm woodlots he passed, and the little acres of waste ground. He carried a hundred-foot tape in the car and picked up hitchhikers—mostly college boys with beaded headbands and fringed buckskin shirts—who would help him, holding one end of the tape while Richard trotted past five or six trees to put the other at the margin of a county road.

  He stopped more and more often to examine the bodies of dead animals. Betty asked for a trial separation, and he agreed.

  He bought four new tires and had his wheel bearings repacked.

  At a roadhouse he paid a three-dollar cover and seventy-five cents for beer to watch a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with a feather in her hair being undressed by a trained raccoon. The girl was called Princess Running Bare, and after Richard had given the waitress five dollars more she sat at his table and sipped coffee royal for half an hour. “All us Indians are alcoholics,” Princess Running Bare said, and she said she was half French Canadian and half Cree, and had been born in a Montreal slum. Richard tried to call Betty’s mother’s from a telephone booth next to the bar, but no one answered. He left the roadhouse and drove all night.

  Outside a steel-making town he took the wrong lane of a three-pronged freeway fork and found himself rushing, with a hundred other cars, in a direction in which he had no wish to go. He pulled off at a service park and asked the attendant.

  “Lots of them does that,” the attendant said, pulling at the bill of his green cap. “You want to go—” and he waved in the direction from which Richard had come.

  “Yes,” Richard said. He named the Interstate he wished to use, which was not the one he was on. “Southeast.” For some reason he added, “I want to go home.” It was about nine o’clock.

  “Yeah,” the attendant said. He looked around conspiratorially. “Tell you what. Out that way ’bout three-quarters of a mile is the eastbound lanes.” He waved an arm toward the back of the service park, where uneven, down-sloping ground was thick with dead grass. “Know what I mean? See, this here is four lanes goin’ west and over there is where they come back. Now if you keep going the way you are it’s seventeen miles until you can get off and cross over. But sometimes people just jump their tires over that little curb at the back of the station and drive across.”

  “I see,” Richard said.

  “Only when you come in you come into the fast lane, naturally. Course it’s against the law.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “And if I was you I’d walk out a little way first to make sure it isn’t too swampy. Usually dry enough, but you wouldn’t want to get stuck.”

  It felt soft under his feet, but not dangerously so. The eastbound lanes, presumably a thousand yards or so ahead, were not visible, and as he walked the gentle slope buried the westbound lanes behind him, and at last even the red roof of the service park. The distant noises of traffic mingled with the sound of the wind. “Here,” he said to himself. “Here.”

  His shoes crushed the soft tunnels of moles. He looked up and saw a bird that might have been a hawk circling. An old, rusted hubcap lying on its face held a cup of water, and mosquito larvae, and he thought of it springing from the wheel of its car and rolling, rolling all this distance across the empty ground. It seemed a long way.