"If you fire it, just before, you slide the filters over the ends of your binoculars like so. Or better still, turn your back."
Turn my back? I wanted to see what was going to happen.
"All right, but make sure you get those filters down in time." He cocked an ear as someone shouted something that was carried away in the freshening breeze. "Must have picked it up with radar. Let's see if we can find it," and together we set to sweeping the northern horizon.
Radar must have been sharp that day, because the drone, a battered B-24, was right on top of us before we picked it up, a mote in the sun's brazen eye. A flurry of orders relayed to the control ship sent it soaring back into the distance, a mile or so high. Just at the limit of visibility I used the corner of my mouth to Smith.
"Hold your breath and help me out." Maybe he did, at that. "Motors. I'll try to get the motors first."
The slapping of the salty waves against the cruiser's armored hull seemed to pause in midstride. Nothing happened—nothing, until the waves, with a frustrated sigh, gave in and began again their toppling roll and hiss. Then slowly, ever so slowly, so faintly that it was only a speck in the sky, the distant dot tilted and hung suspended on a wingtip, hung, hung, hung.... A jerk, and a warped spiral. My ears rang, and the falling leaf, now swooping and sailing in agonized humpbacked scallops, seemed to double and triple in my tear-swimming eyes. Then I tried—
There was no sound. There was no booming roar, no thunder. But I forgot to yank down those dark filters over the ends of the Zeiss. They had told me that it would be like looking at the sun. Well, the sun won't throw you flat on your back, or maybe I fell. Not quite flat; Smith threw a block as I reeled, and held me upright. I tried to tell him that I was all right, that it was just the sudden glare that paralyzed me, and to get his arms off my neck before I strangled. No attention did I get from him at all in that respect, but plenty of other unneeded help. Wriggle and swear as I might, with that helmet scoring a raw groove in my neck, I was toted below and dropped on my bunk with, I suppose, what whoever carried me would call gentleness.
The anxious officer in front of me, when the action was over, had the physician's harried look. He liked my language not one little bit, and only Smith's authority kept him from calling corpsmen to muzzle me while he examined my eyes. When my sore eyes had accustomed themselves to the dim light in the cabin, Smith led the officer to the door of the hatch or whatever they call it, explaining that the recalcitrant patient would doubtless be later in a more receptive mood.
"If you think so," I yelled at his indignant ramrod back, "you must try sticking in your head and see what happens." I don't like anyone to poke anything in my eyes anytime.