Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (Illusions 1)

because you need

their gifts..

I didn't quite know why, but reading that eased my confusions. I read it over until I knew it with my eyes closed.

The name of the town was Troy and the pasture there promised to be as good to us as the hayfield in Ferris had been. But in Ferris I had felt a certain calm, and here was a tension in the air that I didn't like at all.

The flying that was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to our passengers was for me routine, overshadowed by that strange uneasiness. My adventure was this character I was flying with . . . the impossible way he made his airplane go and the odd things that he had said to explain it.

The people of Troy were no more stunned by the miracle of the Travel Air's flight than I would have been had some town bell rung at noon that hadn't rung for sixty years . . . they didn't know that it was impossible for what was happening to happen.

"Thanks for the ride!" they said, and, "Is this all you do for a living . . . don't you work somewhere?" and, "Why'd you pick a little place like Troy?" and "Jerry your farm's no bigger than a shoebox!"

We had a busy afternoon. There were lots of people coming out to fly and we were going to make a lot of money. Still, part of me began to say get out get out, get away from this place. I have ignored that before and always been sorry for it.

About three o'clock I had shut down my engine for gas, walked twice back and forth from the Skelly station with two five gallon cans of car gas, when it struck me that not once had I seen the Travel Air refuel. Shimoda hadn't put gas in his plane since sometime before Ferris, and I had watched him fly tha

t machine for seven hours now, going on eight, without another drop of gas or oil. And though I knew that he was a good man, and wouldn't hurt me, I was frightened again. If you really stretch it, throttle back to minimum revolutions and mixture dead lean in cruise, you can make a Travel Air run five hours at the outside. But not eight hours of take offs and landings.

He flew steadily on, ride after ride, while I poured the Regular into my center section tank and added a quart of oil to the engine. There was a line of people waiting to fly . . . it was as if he didn't want- to disappoint them. I caught his, though, as he helped a man and wife into the front cockpit of his plane. I tried to sound just as calm and casual as I could.

"Don, how you doin' on fuel? Need any gas ?" I stood at his wing tip with an empty five-gallon can in my hand.

He looked straight into my eyes and he frowned, puzzled, as though I had asked if he needed any air to breathe.

"No," he said, and I felt like a slow first-grader at the back of the classroom. "No, Richard, I don't need any gas."

It annoyed me. I know a little bit about airplane engines and fuel. "Well then," I flared at him, "how about some uranium ?"

He laughed and melted me at once. "No thanks. I filled it last year." And then he was in his cockpit and gone with his passengers in that supernatural slow motion take off.

I wished first that the people would go home, then that we would get out of here fast, people or not, then that I would have the sense to get out of there alone, at once. All I wanted was to take off and find a big empty field far away from any town and just sit and think and write what was happening in my journal, make some sense out of it.

I stayed out of the Fleet, resting till Shimoda landed again. I walked to his cockpit there in the propeller-blast of the big engine.

"I've flown about enough, Don, Gonna be on my way, land out from towns and be a little less busy for a while. It's been fun flying with you. See you again some time, OK?"

He didn't blink. "One more flight and I'll be with you. Guy's been waiting."

"All right."

The guy was waiting in a battered wheelchair rolled down the block to the field. He was kind of smashed down and twisted into the seat as if by some high gravity force, but he was here because he wanted to go flying. There were other people around, forty or fifty, some in, some out of their cars, watching curiously how Don would get the man from the chair into the plane.

He didn't think about it at all. "Do you want to fly?" The man in the wheelchair smiled a twisted smile and nodded sideways.

"Let's go, let's do it!" Don said quietly, as though he was talking to someone who had waited on the sidelines a long while, whose time had come to go into the game again. If there was anything strange about that moment, looking back on it, it was the intensity with which he spoke. It was casual, yes, but it was a command, too, that expected the man to get up and get into the plane, no excuses. What happened then, it was as if the man had been acting, and finished the last scene of his crippled-invalid part. It looked staged. The high-gravity broke away from him as though it was never there; he launched off the chair at a half-run, amazed at himself, toward the Travel Air.

I was standing close, and heard him. "What did you do:" he said. "What did you do to me ?" .

"Are you going to fly or not going to fly?" Don said. "The price is three dollars. Pay me before take off, please."

"I'm flying!" he said. Shimoda didn't help him into the front cockpit, the way he usually helped his passengers.

The people in the cars were out of the cars--there was an odd murmur from the watchers and then shocked silence. The man hadn't walked since his truck went off a bridge eleven years before.

Like a kid putting on bed sheet wings, he hopped to the cockpit and slid down into the seat, moving his arms a lot as though he had just been given arms to play with.

Before anybody could talk, Don Pressed the throttle and the Travel Air rolled up into the air, steep-turning around the trees and climbing like fury.