ship-from my home town, at the Academy with me, shipmates before then in USS UTAH,
shoreleave drinking companion, only other officer in the ship who believed in
rocketry and space flight and read ‘those crazy magazines.” My number-one pa/And I
was forced to tell him: “Bud, you’re either somewhere northeast of us, give or take
twenty or thirty degrees, or somewhere southwest, same wide range of error, and
signal strength shows that you must be at least fifty miles over the horizon,
probably more; I’ve got no way to scale the reception.”
Bud chuckled. “That’s a lot of ocean.”
“How much gas do you have?”
“Maybe forty minutes. Most of the fighters don’t have as much. Hold the
phone; the skipper’s calling me.”
So I tried again for a minimum-no luck-swung back. “Lex loop to Victor Fox
Two guard.”
“Gotcha, boy. Skipper says we all ditch before the sun goes down. First I
land, then they ditch as close to me as possible. I’ll have hitchhikers clinging to
the float a/l night long-be lucky if they don’t swamp me.”
“What sea?”
“Beaufort three, crowding four.”
“Cripes. No white water here at all. Just long swells.”
“She’ll take it, she’s tough. But I’m glad not to have to dead-stick a
galloping goose. Gotta sign off,~ skipper wants me, it’s time. Been nice knowing
you.”
So at last I knew-too late-which lobe they were in, as it was already dark
with the suddenness of the tropics where I was, whereas the sun was still to set
where they were. That eliminated perhaps five hundred square miles. But it placed
them still farther away. . . which added at least a thousand square miles.
Suddenly out of the darkness endless searchlights shot straight up; the
Fleet C-in-C had canceled war-condition darken-ship rather than let Victor Fox Two
ditch- which was pretty nice of him because all those battleship admirals were
veterans of World War One, not one of them had wings, and (with no exceptions worth
noting) they hated airplanes, did not believe that planes were good for anything but
scouting (if that), and despised pilots, especially those who had not attended the
Academy (i.e., most of them).
I was still listening on Bud’s frequency and heard some most prayerful
profanity. At once Bud had a bearing on the battle line; our navigator had our
bearing and distance to the battle line; my talker to the bridge gave me the course
and distance VF-2 needed to home on, and I passed it to Bud. End of crisis-
-but not quite the end of tension. The squadron just barely had enough gas
to get home, and more than half of those pilots had never checked out on night
carrier landings.. . with no margin of fuel to let the landing officer wave a man
off for poor approach if there was any possible chance that his tail hook could
catch a wire. I am happy to report that every pilot got down safely although one did
sort of bend his prop around the crash barrier.
Page 189
Bud did almost have to make a dead-stick landing with a galloping goose. As
he was the only one who could land on water if necessary, he had to come in last.. .
and his engine coughed and died just as his tail hook caught the wire.
In one of Jack Williamson’s stories a character goes back in time and makes
a very slight change in order to effect a major change in later history.
Bud is Albert Buddy Scoles, then a lieutenant (junior grade), now a retired
rear admiral, and is the officer who in 1942 gathered me, Isaac Asimov, and L.
Sprague de Camp into his R&D labs at Mustin Field, Philadelphia, later solicited
help from all technically trained SF writers and, still later, just after World War
Two, set up the Navy’s first guided missile range at Point Mugu.
I do not assume that history would have changed appreciably had VF-2 been
forced to ditch.
But let’s assume a change in Buddy Scoles’ career just sufficient that he
would not have been in charge of those labs on 7 December 1941. It would not have to