altitude. He helped Gale with her face protection and goggles and removed her oxygen mask. Her lips were still trembling. He looked sternly at her.
'Put your goggles back on,' he ordered. 'The wind is wild through the bullet holes in the cockpit. Now, get up there.'
Her eyes went wide. 'I . . . I can't. I—'
'Yes, you can. And you will. You're a pilot! Will needs help up front. We're coming down with two engines and the right wing chewed up, and we've got a busted airplane on our hands. So get up there and fly.'
For a long moment she stared at Indy. She rose slowly, stood before him.
'You know something, Professor Jones?
I think I love you.'
She brushed her lips against his, and was gone.
Indy leaned against the cabin wall. He looked sadly at Foulois.
'He was a very good man,' Indy said. 'An ace in the war against the Germans. Strange for him to die here, like this.'
'Not so strange,' said Jose Syme Chino. 'All things have their special time.
This also was a war. A battle between good and evil. As are all great struggles.
This man,
who had wings, there is a special place for his kind with the Great Spirits.'
Indy nodded slowly as they continued their return to earth.
'Amen,' he said.
THE END
Afterword
OF COURSE IT'S REAL!
Recently—the summer of 1991—I was a guest speaker at the Institute of Advanced Learning in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the subject that raised the greatest interest and brought in a standingroomonly crowd was, not unexpectedly, a serious study of UFO's. During the questionandanswer period which gave the audience free rein to ask anything they wanted to ask, and likely never before had the opportunity to get an answer, I was asked the inevitable question. Had I ever seen a UFO? And if I had, what did it look like and what did it do?
I admit to tweaking my audience. Like most people I've seen UFO's through a lifetime, but in this instance I am being very specific. In other words, I had seen at different times something in the sky I could not identify: a flash of light, a colorful ray, a physical object too distant to make out any details. The object I saw was simply impossible to identify.
Hardly very exciting.
So I told my audience about an absolutely incredible sighting of many years past, a sighting in broad daylight, under perfect visual conditions, with thunder rolling like the end of the world from the heavens.
'It was a vessel utterly alien to me,' I related. 'It was absolutely incredible.
Nearly a thousand feet long! It sailed across the earth maybe fifteen hundred, perhaps two thousand feet high. It was so huge it partially blocked out the sun. Its deep groaning roar sent birds fleeing and animals dashing for safety. It was silvery, splendid, magnificent as it passed over, and I watched it until it vanished beyond the horizon.'
Well, not many people believed me. In fact, I doubt if anybody in that crowd believed a word of what I'd told them. I asked for a show of hands from anyone who believed that what I'd told them was absolutely, unquestionably real.
Not one hand went up. I'd struck out. Zero belief. Then I dropped my 'belief bomb.'
'I don't know why you find what I just described to you as too fantastic to believe. What I was seeing was also witnessed by millions of other people. I was standing beneath the USS Akron, sister ship to the equally huge USS
Macon, the two enormous dirigibles of the United States Navy that were in service in the early 1930's. And, of course, never having seen such a sight before, or having known of these two massive sky vessels, the ship blocking out the sun was alien to me!'
Even if it was some sixty years ago.
It was another wonderful moment of fact being stranger than fiction. And remembering that moment, and others like it—such as those times when I flew a jet fighter in pursuit of other objects in the sky that I never caught up with and never did identify—helped me decide that in INDIANA JONES AND THE SKY PIRATES, everything that seems exotic, wonderful, marvelous— and impossible—is all based on hard, provable, reality.
Airships, the bloated, clumsy cigar-shapes put together from bedsheets, ropes, and clumsy rigging first carried men into the air more than a hundred years ago. Some maneuvered through the skies by men pedaling madly on bicycles that turned propellers instead of wheels. Others used dangerous engines powered with benzine, dangerous because they often burned and exploded in flight, ending promising careers with a fiery finality. Huge dirigibles, notably those from the Zeppelin works in Germany, performed from 1914 to 1918 with astonishing success. They bombed British cities, and in turn they were blasted from the skies by antiaircraft fire and fighter planes. The German L35 began a new era by carrying aloft an Albatross Dlll fighter plane, and releasing it for protection, like a swift hawk covering a giant plump chicken in the sky. Soon British dirigibles were carrying fighter planes, releasing them in flight and recovering them as well—the predecessors to the huge dirigible in our own story in this book. And nearly seventyfive years ago, Germany's L53 had already climbed to more than 21,000 feet above the earth.
After that war ended in 1918, dirigibles became ever larger, faster, more powerful, and amazingly reliable— again setting the stage for the mighty airship in our story. Even today, it is difficult to believe the splendid record of certain airships of past times, such as Germany's Graf Zeppelin, which in the time span of nine years flew a total of 17,179 hours in 590 separate flights! The famed Graf flew from Europe to America, to South America and the Middle East, crossed the Arctic on an exciting adventure for its passengers, and then flew around the world on a leisurely tour that even today seems like a dream. Before the Graf Zeppelin was retired after its nine years of service, it had taken aloft, in luxury and perfect safety, more than 34,000 people.
