On the northwest corner, the Bailey house sent up chimney smoke. Kit dived fast, pulled out hard, and blew the smoke into the yard. He climbed at full power and came down in a series of loops. He took all of Walnut in a roaring run, at the end of which he zoomed and came back-upside down.
These antics attracted a large and almost unanimously indignant audience among which he could not spot Lenore. People ran out of their thunder-stricken houses—mothers with babies in their arms, housewives with sudsy hands; carrying dish towels, waving pans and pots, and irate businessmen who lunched at home, with shaking fists and tucked napkins. Netta Bailey appeared, in a kimona and hair curlers, which the pilot could not discern; Beau was not there. He did not practice the economical but plebian custom of lunching at home. And Lenore was downtown shopping.
When he could not spot the girl, but only her mother, Kit made one last run over the bare treetops of Walnut Street, flying at crop-duster’s altitude, and winged back toward the airport.
On the way, he dived through the low-hanging drift of yellowish smoke which was being blown by a west wind from the Hobart Metal Products plant across the center of the two downtown regions. He whipped the smoke into satisfying patterns and took a tum above the skyscrapers of Green Prairie and River City. They rose magically out of the factory smoke and stood above them in a single cluster at what seemed the heart of one great metropolis.
His last trick was a pass at the steel stack of the refining plant beyond the metalworks—a tall column topped by a flame which consumed waste gases and sent a horizontal smoke-trail of its own across the city. Not realizing that the blaze was self-illumined, Kit tried to extinguish it with his prop-wash much in the same way he had once diverted buzz bombs from their courses.
But after three passes at the flame he gave up and left both the stack and the plant foreman burning.
He drove back to town, played brilliantly for an hour and a half at squash with Freddie Perkman, took assorted baths and then, in a terry-cloth robe, went out in the solarium of the River City A.C. for his massage. The glass-enclosed summit of the skyscraper building furnished a three hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the cities, obstructed only here and there by the few taller structures. Kit, having just had an even better view from the air, didn’t even glance through the enormous windows of the square-sided roof garden. He lay down on a table and submitted to the attentions of the masseur, who had greeted him with, “Glad to see you in the club.”
“Had to come back, Taps; getting fat.”
“Taps” Flaugherty, accustomed to the truly overweight bodies of River City’s well-to-do, grinned at the near-perfect specimen on the table. “Can’t see an ounce, Mr. Sloan.”
“The scales can,” Kit grunted.