give orders to anybody, not even his wife. Well, those were
usually the boys who let rank go to their heads, even in a
volunteer outfit. He got to work.
Voices sounded from the shack, and then Andy Persons,
the commanding officer, came bounding over the sill, followed
by two sleepy-eyed cadets. “What’s up?” he shouted. “That
you, Martinson?”
“It’s me. One of you cadets, pass me up that can. Andy,
get the doors open, hey? “There’s a Russki bomber down north
of us, somewhere near Howells. Part of a flight that was
making a run on Schenectady.”
“Did they get it?”
“No, they overshot, way overtook out Kingston instead.
Stewart Field hit them just as they turned to regroup, and
knocked this baby down on the first pass. We’re supposed
The rest of the adjutant’s reply was lost in a growing,
echoing roar, as though they were all standing underneath a
vast trestle over which all the railroad trains in the world
were crossing at once. The sixty-four-foot organ reeds of jets
were being blown in the night zenith above the fieldanother
hunting pack, come from Stewart Field to avenge the hydro-
gen agony that had been Kingston.
His head still inside the plane’s greenhouse, McDonough
listened transfixed. Like most CAP officers, he was too old to
be a jet pilot, his reflexes too slow, his eyesight too far over
the line, his belly muscles too soft to take the five-gravity
turns; but now and then he thought about what it might be
like to ride one of those flying blowtorches, cruising at six
hundred miles an hour before a thin black wake of kerosene