After a while, as soon as my elation in contemplation of the fifteen hundred bucks wore off, I didn’t feel so cocky. I really might get bumped off in that crate. Maybe I could have got by without taking the job.
I remembered that dive of six years before. It had been different then. It hadn’t occurred to me at that time that airplanes would fall apart. Oh, I knew they would. I knew they had. It was something, however, that had happened to other test pilots and might happen to some more, but not to me.
I remembered the times I had jumped, startled wide awake from sleep in the nights, not immediately after that failure, but some months later. No special dreams of horror. Just the delayed action of some subterranean mechanism of fright in my subconscious brain. I had been honestly convinced during my waking hours up to that time that that failure had not made much of an impression on me.
I remembered the subconscious fear of just normal excess speed that had grown on me since then. I wouldn’t nose an airplane down very much from level cruising speed and open the throttle coming in from a cross-country, for instance. A couple of times when I had done it without thinking, I had found myself practically bending the throttle backwards to kill the speed when I had suddenly become aware of it.
These things convinced me that that failure had made a deeper impression on me than I had thought. I realized it the more when I contemplated these new dives I was about to do. I knew I was more afraid of them than I would admit.
“Death in the Afternoon, or Reunion in Oklahoma,” I thought. You’ve got to take some chances. I didn’t see how I was going to get the money to bring the family back any other way.
Besides, I thought I could beat the game by being smart. I knew a lot of boys who hadn’t been able to, and I knew they had had good heads on their shoulders.
Two weeks later I stepped out of a taxi in front of the hangar at the airport. Some experimental military airplanes were sitting outside. It was good to see military airplanes again. There is something about military airplanes—something businesslike.
I entered the hangar office. The engineers were waiting for me. I knew most of them from working with them before. They were all still just pink-faced kids. But I knew they were bright kids. They knew their stuff and had all had quite a lot of experience.