“I’ve got a job for you,” he announced, “demonstrating one of our new airplanes for the navy.”
“What kind of a demonstration?” I asked warily.
“A dive demonstration,” he said. I knew what that meant all right. Ten thousand feet straight down, just to see if it would hang together. I wasn’t so sure my luck was changing after all.
“What kind of a ship?” I asked. I hoped it wasn’t too experimental. I had dived airplanes before. The last one, six years before, I had dived to pieces. I still remembered the exploding crack of those wings tearing off. I remember the dazing blow of the instrument board as my head had snapped forward against it from the sudden lurch of the midair failure, and dimly then the slow, limp slumping into unconsciousness. I remembered how I had come to, thousands of feet later, and leaped my way clear, only to be threatened by the falling wreck on top and the rushing-at-me earth beneath. I remembered the tumbling, jerking stop as my chute had opened after the long drop, and how startlingly close the ground had looked. I remembered how white and safe against the blue sky those billowing folds of that chute had looked, and then immediately the awful heart-pound, breath-stop fear that that milling wreck would take a derelict pass at it. I remembered the acute relief of hearing the loud report that told me the wreck had hit the ground, and then the “What if that had clutched me!” when they told me afterward how close it really had come.
“It’s a bomber fighter, second model, first-production job, a single-seater biplane with a seven-hundred-horsepower engine,” the man at the other end said. That was encouraging anyway. It wasn’t the experimental job.
I had heard that another free-lance test pilot like myself had recently jumped out of a ship he had been diving. His prop had broken and torn his motor clear out of his ship. He had got down with his chute all right, but he had hit the fin as he had gone past the tail surfaces getting out of the wreck. He had broken a couple of legs and an arm and was in the hospital at that moment. I knew he had been doing some diving.
I wondered why they didn’t use one of their own men. They had a very fine staff of test pilots right there at the factory. “What’s wrong with your pilots?” I asked.
“Well, to be frank about it,” was the answer, “while we really don’t expect any trouble with this ship, because we have taken every possible precaution that we know about, still, you never can tell. Our chief test pilot now, you know, has done seven of these dive demonstrations. We feel that that is about enough to ask one man to do on a salary, and he feels that he has had about enough anyway. None of the rest of our men have ever done any of this work before. Besides, why should we take a chance on breaking up our organization if we can call a free lance in?” So that was it! After all, why shouldn’t they look at it that way?
I thought of the already long absence of my family. My wife and my year-and-a-half-old son and my half-year-old daughter were still on my father-in-law’s farm in Oklahoma, where I had sent them in the spring to make sure they would be able to eat during the summer. If I could make enough money——
“How much is there in it for me?” I asked.