Moss caught Lyman Baum's eye. Both men shook their heads, just a little. They hadn't run for home when they faced Avros-very much the reverse. A Curtiss machine could turn inside the circle of which the British-made aeroplanes were capable, but the Wilbur was a bus as big as a bus itself, and 'Sir?' Moss stuck up a hand.
'What is it?' Franklin asked, a bit testy at being interrupted before his spiel was done. He had a pinched, narrow face, and looked as if his stomach pained him all the time. It probably did. That didn't keep him from drinking like a fish when he wasn't flying.
'Sir, one of the biggest advantages we had in the Curtiss was a forward-facing machine gun,' Moss said. 'This is a tractor machine, with the prop in front. Now we're going to be limited to observer fire, just like the Canucks. If I see a target, I want to be able to aim at it and shoot it straight on, not wiggle around so the observer gets to fire off at an angle.'
Everybody in the squadron spoke up, loudly agreeing with him. Franklin stood quiet, perhaps waiting to see if the hubbub would die away. When it didn't, he held up a hand. Little by little, he got quiet. Into it, he said, 'They're working on that,' and then clammed up again.
The terse announcement produced more hubbub. Through it, Jonathan Moss called, 'You mean somebody has finally made a working interrupter gear, sir?'
If you could synchronize the speed at which your machine gun fired with that at which your prop revolved, you could mount a forward-facing gun on a tractor aeroplane and not shoot yourself down faster than the enemy. Moss had heard of a couple of people who'd shod their wooden propellor blades with steel to deflect ill-timed bullets, but sooner or later a ricochet was going to come straight back at you, so that wasn't the ideal solution. An interrupter gear, though Then Captain Franklin said, 'No, they don't have one yet,' and dashed his hopes. But the squadron commander went on, 'They are getting close, though, or at least they think they are. And when they do get one, they promise the front-line squadrons will have it first thing.'
'They promise Santa Claus brings you toys, too, and the Easter Bunny hides eggs,' Stanley McClintock said. 'They promised we'd be in Toronto before the snow fell, and Winnipeg, and Richmond, and Guaymas-though I don't know that it ever snows down there. But I believe that kind of story when it comes true, and not a minute before then.'
'If you're a defeatist,' Franklin said coldly, 'you can take off your wings right now. I'll give you a white feather instead, the way the limey girls do when their boyfriends don't want to go off and fight.'
McClintock stomped toward the squadron commander, of whom he made close to two. Franklin moved not an inch. It wasn't his rank armouring him, Jonathan Moss knew, just a stubborn determination not to back down to anybody. McClintock shouted, 'God damn it, Captain, you know I'm no coward. But when I switch buses, I want to have a pretty good idea that I'm doing it for a reason, that the new bus'-he jerked a thumb toward a Wilbur-'is likelier to keep me in one piece than the old one was.'
'You've flown it,' Franklin said. 'We've all flown it. It performs a damn sight better than a Curtiss. Is that so, or isn't it?'
'It doesn't turn as well,' Moss said.
'That's true,' Franklin admitted, 'but it climbs better and it dives better and it accelerates better. One of the reasons the Super Hudson turned so tight was that it couldn't go fast enough to take up a lot of space in a turn. Is that so, or isn't it?'
Moss kept quiet. It was so. You didn't want the Canadians or British chasing you, because they'd damn well catch you. But he'd got comfortable with his old machine. It was, he supposed, like a marriage: you knew what your partner was going to do. Now he was going to a partner he didn't know nearly so well.
Franklin said, 'Enough of this nonsense. We've got them and we're damn well going to use them till we get something better. They've shipped the Super Hudsons off to… Colorado, I think they said, or maybe Utah. Someplace where they can do reconnaissance and not have to go up against anybody's varsity, anyway. We do. That's another reason we get the Wilburs-you men can do your job as pilots, and the observers you'll have with you can observe. Life's getting too complicated for one man to do both jobs up there at the same time.'
But for a sigh, Moss remained quiet. Again, the squadron commander was probably right. Again, Moss found the truth unpalatable.
Lyman Baum said, 'Other thing is, sir, I don't like trusting my neck to the observer. I'd rather have my own gun now instead of waiting to get one in the great by-and-by. Observers-'
He let that hang there. Most observers who were just observers and not pilot-observers like the members of the squadron were guys who had been through flight school and hadn't made it as pilots. That made everybody suspect there was something second-rate about them. If you knew darn well you were first-rate and you'd got used to being your own gunner, how were you going to shout 'Hurrah!' at the idea of turning over the shooting to somebody you didn't figure could match you?
As if Baum's question had been a cue, a truck chugged up to the aerodrome and started disgorging men in khaki with overladen duffel bags and with flight badges that had only one wing, not a pilot's two. Captain Franklin nodded; he'd expected them. 'Gentlemen, your observers,' he said while the newcomers were still getting out. 'Does anyone care to express any further ill-founded opinions?… No? Good.'
Moss kicked at the dirt. The captain had a point. You couldn't condemn out of hand a man you'd never met. But Baum had a point, too. If a fellow was liable to be a lemon, did you really want to meet him?
Whether you did or not, you were going to. From a breast pocket, Franklin pulled out a sheet of stationery folded in quarters. Before he unfolded it, he waved the observers over to him. They came, some with their bags slung over a shoulder, some carrying them in front, some dragging them along the ground. 'We have the following pairings,' Franklin announced, unfolding the paper: 'Pilot Baum and Observer van Zandt; Pilot Henderson and Observer Mattigan…' On and on he went, till he said, 'Pilot Moss and Observer Stone.'
'Oh, for Christ's sake!' Moss burst out amid laughter. 'You did that on purpose, Captain, and don't try to tell me different.'
'Well, that tells me who you are,' the newly teamed observer said, stepping forward. 'I'm Percy Stone.' He let his duffel bag fall from his shoulder to the ground and stuck out his right hand.
'Jonathan Moss,' Moss said, shaking it, and studied Captain Franklin's idea of a joke. Stone was a couple of years younger than he, he guessed, with a long, ruddy face, a brown Kaiser Bill mustache, and a disarming grin underneath it. He didn't look like a loser or a washout. 'What did you do before the war started?' Moss asked him.
'I had a little photography studio in Ohio,' Stone answered. 'You?'
'I was studying the law,' Moss said. He waved that aside, as he would have any question both irrelevant and immaterial, and stared at Percy Stone. Maybe Captain Franklin's idea of a joke had given him something a good deal better than your average One-Wing Wonder. 'A photographer, were you? No wonder they turned you into an observer.'
'No wonder at all,' Stone agreed. 'I wanted to be a pilot. They told me if I kept squawking about it they'd stick me in the infantry, and I could see how I liked that. You know what, Lieutenant Moss? I believed 'em.'
'Good thing you did,' Moss said. 'I don't have any doubt the powers that be meant every bit of it.' He kicked Stone's duffel bag, then picked it up himself. 'Come on; let's get you settled in. Tomorrow, if the weather's decent, we'll get up there and you can take some pretty pictures of the enemy line. How does that sound?'
'Better than a poke in the eye with a carrot,' Stone said, and both young men grinned. The observer waved toward the tents. 'Lead on, Macduff!' It was a misquotation, but Moss wasn't about to ruffle any feathers by saying so.
As if the arrival of the observers had changed the squadron's luck, the weather, which had been cold and foggy and drizzly, turned something close to springlike the next morning. Of course, by the calendar spring was only a week and a half away, but, up till now, Ontario had shown no signs of paying attention to the calendar. As far as Moss could see, blizzards were liable to keep coming all the way through July.
The next morning, Percy Stone exclaimed with pleasure when he saw the camera he was to use. 'Ah, one of the new models,' he said. 'They're the next thing to foolproof. In fact, they're the next thing to moron proof.' He exclaimed again when he discovered the Wright in which he was to fly had a conical recess in which the camera would fit built into the fuselage floor in the observer's cockpit. 'Someone was awake during the design work here.'
Moss shrugged as he climbed into the forward cockpit. A ground crew man spun the prop. The engine started to roar, seemingly right in his lap. He didn't like that. The slipstream blew the noise to him now, not away from him
