"Over there," he said. "Thought I saw a flash of light. Guess it was a falling star."
"Probably was an airways beacon," Colonel Welsh spoke up. "There's one up that way a bit, I believe. That was all right, Farmer. Now it's your turn, Dawson. See if you can match it."
"Fat chance, but I can try," Dave said with a grin. "Well, up to that never to be forgotten May Tenth, when Hitler really started to try and drown the world in human blood, I too had led pretty much the average boy's kind of life. But May Tenth changed everything for me, too. In a different way, though. Up to then I had all kinds of ideas about fighting my way through life and maybe up to the top in whatever profession I chose to follow. No soap, though. That meeting with Farmer on May Tenth changed everything. Since then I've had to carry him on my back, and try to make the grade for two people instead of just for myself. However—"
"That is some kind of a light over there!" Colonel Welsh interrupted sharply. "And it isn't the flash from any beacon. Sort of a blue kind of light. Saw it for a second, just now, and it was slanting upwards."
"Could be another plane," Freddy Farmer opined. "Engine exhausts show blue in the dark, you know. Might be one of your transport planes."
Colonel Welsh glanced at his wrist watch in the glow of the cabin light, and shook his head.
"No," he said. "At least, not one of the scheduled planes. Besides, we'd see the red and green navigation lights."
On impulse Dave reached out his hand and switched off all of his own lights, save the wing-tip navigation lights. Then all three of them stared hard off to the right. For a full two minutes nobody spoke. The three of them simply strained their eyes at the vast array of night shadows in the heavens. But all that it got them was aching eyes.
"Nothing there evidently," Colonel Welsh eventually broke the silence. "Perhaps it was just a falling star, but I never saw a star fall up."
"Maybe it was some of that Saint Elmo's Fire," Dave said with a chuckle. "I never heard of it being seen in this part of the country, though."