In the afternoon Joe watched the landings, while the young lieutenant
followed him patiently about. A pushpot landing was quite unlike the
landing of any other air-borne thing. It came flying down with
incredible clumsiness, making an uproar out of all proportion to its
landing speed. Pushpots came in with their tail ends low, crudely and
cruelly clumsy in their handling. They had no wings or fins. They had to
be balanced by their jet blasts. They had to be steered the same way.
When a jet motor conked out there was no control. The pushpot fell.
He carefully watched one landing now. It came down low, and swung in
toward the field, and seemed to reach its stern down tentatively to
slide on the earth, and the flame of its exhaust scorched the field, and
it hesitated, pointing up at an ever steeper angle--and it touched and
its nose tilted forward--and leaped up as the jet roared more loudly,
and then touched again....
The goal was for pushpots to touch ground finally with the whole weight
of the flying monstrosity supported by the vertical thrust of the jet,
and while it was moving forward at the lowest possible rate of speed.
When that goal was achieved, they flopped solidly flat, slid a few feet
on their metal bellies, and lay still. Some hit hard and tried to dig
into the earth with their blunt noses. Joe finally saw one touch with no
forward speed at all. It seemed to try to settle down vertically, as a
rocket takes off. That one fell over backward and wallowed with its
belly plates in the air before it rolled over on its side and rocked
there.
The last of a flight touched down and flopped, and the memory of the
wreckage had been overlaid by these other sights and Joe could think of
his next meal without aversion. When it was evening-mess time he went
doggedly back to the mess hall. There was a sort of itchy feeling in his
mind. He knew something he didn't know he knew. There was something in
his memory that he couldn't recall.
Talley and Walton were again at mess. Joe went to their table. Talley
looked at him inquiringly.
"Yes, I saw both crashes," said Joe gloomily, "and I didn't want any
lunch. It was sabotage, though. Only it was different in kind--it was
different in principle--from the other tricks. But I can't figure out
what it is!"
"Mmmmmm," said Talley, amiably. "You'd learn something if you could talk
to the Resistance fighters and saboteurs in Europe. The Poles were
wonderful at it! They had one chap who could get at the tank cars that
took aviation gasoline from the refinery to the various Nazi airfields.
He used to dump some chemical compound--just a tiny bit--into each
carload of gas. It looked all right, smelled all right, and worked all
right. But at odd moments Hitler's planes would crash. The valves would
stick and the engine'd conk out."
Joe stared at him. And it was just as simple as that. He saw.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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