Slowly, the plane turned out of its tie-down spot and started down the taxiway. Charlie used the rudder pedals to wiggle the nose from side to side so he could make sure the way was clear. From instinct Mick swiveled his head to check for possible interference. The older man was talking into his headset, obviously communicating with the tower, but Mick couldn’t make out the words over the engine.
They reached the turn-in and Charlie ran up the engine while standing on the brakes, scanning the gauges as he did so. Satisfied, he backed off on the throttle and turned the plane onto the runway.
“Okay folks, here we go,” Charlie bellowed over his shoulder and shoved the throttle forward again. The engine noise rose to a crescendo and the big biplane began to gather speed. Out his side window Mick could see a couple of police cars coming out onto the field with their red and blue lights flashing.
If those damn police cars don’t interfere, he thought.
It occurred to Mick, who hadn’t had so much as a parking ticket since he sold his sports car, that he was now involved in about half a dozen felonies. He found it was an odd sensation. He also realized he didn’t much care, not if it got him back to Karin and a place where magic and dragons ruled the skies.
The police never had a chance. In what Mick thought was a suicidally short distance, at what he was sure was an insanely low airspeed, Charlie hauled back on the wheel and the plane swooped into the air, hanging on the big prop. Lift and thrust battled drag and gravity and for a stomach-churning instant Mick was sure gravity would win. Then the plane seemed to find itself, steadied, and began to climb like a contented cow on a hilly pasture. Now the only way to stop them was to shoot them down, Mick thought.
Then he remembered that could very easily happen.
SIXTEEN – LORD OF THE FLIES AND THE LORD OF THE FLIERS
It was the flies, Peter Hanborn told himself. I’m being punished for the flies.
He was a thin, serious man with intent brown eyes behind heavy spectacles. He was not yet thirty but his increasing baldness made him look ten years older. Just now he felt about a hundred years older.
Well, damn it, an endangered species is an endangered species. And the Southern Nevada Garbage Fly was certainly endangered. He still didn’t regret his attempt to get the fly listed under the Endangered Species Act, despite the hundreds of editorials, two Congressional inquires and thousands of angry letters which had deluged his department as a result. To this day he didn’t accept the taxonomists’ opinion that his proposed endangered species was really just a sub-population of ordinary house flies with a slightly different distribution of characteristics as a result of generations of breeding in a landfill in the middle of the desert.
But that didn’t mean he was looking forward to this. He glanced over at McWilliams, the government’s counsel for the petition. The older man seemed as cool and unruffled as if this were an ordinary case instead of this, this travesty. At least I had solid population data when I made my proposal, Hanborn thought. This thing wasn’t even supported by a headline in the National Enquirer.
Not mat there wouldn’t be headlines in the Enquirer, not to mention the Weekly World News and every fringe publication from here to London. Twisting around to look at the half-dozen spectators on the hard wooden benches he wondered which of them was the stringer for the tabloids.
The state was opposing the motion, naturally. They considered it such an open-and-shut case they sent their newest attorney, a kid named Sculley, to handle it. It didn’t help that Sculley looked and acted like Jimmy Olsen from the old Superman comics.
Hanborn was so sunk in his own misery he missed the bailiff entering the courtroom and had to scramble awkwardly at his announcement.
“All rise. Court is now in session. The honorable Judge Margaret Schumann presiding.”
Judge Schumann was a tall, slender woman with iron-gray hair and a demeanor to match. “Be seated.”