ground. It scuttled along like a demented gnat, minute engine buzzing up a storm, its wired wings strung around an open fuselage.
A white-haired man sat astride the miniature controls, naked except for the aviator’s goggles tied around his head. He handled the plane in an erratic but stylish way, exploiting the sky to display his showy physique.
Ursula tried to steady her father, but the old man broke away from her and tottered off among the mirrors, his clenched fists pummelling the air. Seeing him, the pilot banked steeply around the sun-tower, then dived straight towards him, pulling up at the last moment in a blare of noise and dust. As Franklin ran forward and pressed Trippett to the ground the plane banked and came round again in a wide turn. The pilot steered the craft with his bare knees, arms trailing at his sides as if mimicking Franklin’s image in the dish above the tower.
‘Slade! Calm down, for once…’ Franklin wiped the stinging grit from his mouth. He had seen the man up to too many extravagant tricks ever to be sure what he would do next. This former air force pilot and would-be astronaut, whose application Franklin had rejected three years earlier when he was chairman of the medical appeals board, had now returned to plague him with these absurd antics — spraying flocks of swallows with gold paint, erecting a circle of towers out in the desert (‘my private space programme,’ he termed it proudly), building a cargo cult airport with wooden control tower and planes in the air base car park, a cruel parody intended to punish the few remaining servicemen.
And this incessant stunt flying. Had Slade recognized Franklin’s distant reflection as he sped across the desert in the inverted aircraft, then decided to buzz the Mercedes for the fun of it, impress Trippett and Ursula, even himself, perhaps?
The plane was coming back at them, engine wound up to a scream. Franklin saw Ursula shouting at him soundlessly. The old astronaut was shaking like an unstuffed scarecrow, one hand pointing to the mirrors. Reflected in the metal panes were the multiple images of the black aircraft, hundreds of vulture-like birds that hungrily circled the ground.
‘Ursula, into the car!’ Franklin took off his jacket and ran through the mirrors, hoping to draw the aircraft away from Trippett. But Slade had decided to land. Cutting the engine, he let the microlight die in the air, then stalled the flapping machine on to the service road. As it trundled towards the Mercedes with its still spinning propeller, Franklin held off the starboard wing, almost tearing the doped fabric.
‘Doctor! You’ve already grounded me once too often…’ Slade inspected the dented fabric, then pointed to Franklin’s trembling fingers. ‘Those hands… I hope you aren’t allowed to operate on your patients.’
Franklin looked down at the white-haired pilot. His own hands were shaking, an understandable reflex of alarm. For all Slade’s ironic drawl, his naked body was as taut as a trap, every muscle tense with hostility. His eyes surveyed Franklin with the ever-alert but curiously dead gaze of a psychopath. His pallid skin was almost luminous, as if after ending his career as an astronaut he had made some private pact with the sun. A narrow lap belt held him to the seat, but his shoulders bore the scars of a strange harness — the restraining straps of a psychiatric unit, Franklin guessed, or some kind of sexual fetishism.
‘My hands, yes. They’re always the first to let me down. You’ll be glad to hear that I retire this week.’ Quietly, Franklin added: ‘I didn’t ground you.’
Slade pondered this, shaking his head. ‘Doctor, you practically closed the entire space programme down singlehanded. It must have provoked you in a special way. Don’t worry, though, I’ve started my own space programme now, another one.’ He pointed to Trippett, who was being soothed by Ursula in the car. ‘Why are you still bothering the old man? He won’t buy off any unease.’
‘He enjoys the drives — speed seems to do him good. And you too, I take it. Be careful of those fugues. If you want to, visit me at the clinic.’
‘Franklin…’ Controlling his irritation, Slade carefully relaxed his jaw and mouth, as if dismantling an offensive weapon. ‘I don’t have the fugues any longer. I found a way of… dealing with them.’
‘All this flying around? You frightened the old boy.’
‘I doubt it.’ He watched Trippett nodding to himself. ‘In fact, I’d like to take him with me — we’ll fly out into space again, one day. Just for him I’ll build a gentle space-craft, made of rice paper and bamboo..
‘That sounds your best idea yet.’
‘It is.’ Slade stared at Franklin with sudden concern and the almost boyish smile of a pupil before a favourite teacher. ‘There is a way out, doctor, a way out of time.’
‘Show me, Slade. I haven’t much time left.’
‘I know that, doctor. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Together, Marion and I are going to help you.’
‘Marion -?’ But before Franklin could speak, the aircraft’s engine racketed into life. Fanning the tailplane, Slade deftly turned the craft within its own length. He replaced the goggles over his eyes, and took off in a funnel of dust that blanched the paintwork of the Mercedes. Safely airborne, he made a final circuit, gave a curious underhand salute and soared away.
Franklin walked to the car and leaned against the roof, catching his breath. The old man was quiet again, his brief fit forgotten.
‘That was Slade. Do you know him, Ursula?’
‘Everyone does. Sometimes he works on our computer at Soleri, or just starts a fight. He’s a bit crazy, trying all the time not to fugue.’
Franklin nodded, watching the plane disappear towards Las Vegas, lost among the hotel towers. ‘He was a trainee astronaut once. My wife thinks he’s trying to kill me.’
‘Perhaps she’s right. I remember now — he said that except for you he would have gone to the moon.’
‘We all went to the moon. That was the trouble…’
Franklin reversed the Mercedes along the service road. As they set off along the highway he thought of Slade’s puzzling reference to Marion. It was time to be wary. Slade’s fugues should have been lengthening for months, yet somehow he kept them at bay. All that violent energy contained in his skull would one day push apart the sutures, burst out in some ugly act of revenge.
‘Dr Franklin! Listen!’
Franklin felt Ursula’s hands on his shoulder. In a panic he slowed down and began to search the sky for the returning microlight.
‘It’s Dad, doctor! Look!’
The old man had sat up, and was peering through the window in a surprisingly alert way. The slack musculature of his face had drilled itself into the brisk profile of a sometime naval officer. He seemed uninterested in his daughter or Franklin, but stared sharply at a threadbare palm tree beside a wayside motel, and at the tepid water in the partly drained pool.
As the car swayed across the camber Trippett nodded to himself, thoroughly approving of the whole arid landscape. He took his daughter’s hand, emphasizing some conversational point that had been interrupted by a pot-hole.
‘…it’s green here, more like Texas than Nevada. Peaceful, too. Plenty of cool trees and pasturage, all these fields and sweet lakes. I’d like to stop and sleep for a while. We’ll come out and swim, dear, perhaps tomorrow. Would you like that?’
He squeezed his daughter’s hand with sudden affection. But before he could speak again, a door closed within his face and he had gone.
They reached the clinic and returned Trippett to his darkened ward. Later, while Ursula cycled away down the silent runways, Franklin sat at his desk in the dismantled laboratory. His fingers sparred with each other as he thought of Trippett’s curious utterance. In some way Slade’s appearance in the sky had set it off. The old astronaut’s brief emergence into the world of time, those few lucid seconds, gave him hope. Was it possible that the fugues could be reversed? He was tempted to go back to the ward, and bundle Trippett into the car for another drive.
Then he remembered Slade’s aircraft speeding towards him across the solar mirrors, the small, vicious propeller that shredded the light and air, time and space. This failed astronaut had first come to the clinic seven months earlier. While Franklin was away at a conference, Slade arrived by air force ambulance, posing as a terminal patient. With his white hair and obsessive gaze, he had instantly charmed the clinic’s director, Dr Rachel Vaisey, into giving him the complete run of the place. Moving about the laboratories and corridors, Slade took over any disused cupboards and desk drawers, where he constructed a series of little tableaux, psychosexual shrines to the strange gods inside his head.
