A Gift of Wings

“What’s going on here?” I asked. “What is this?”

“Quiet, over there.”

“What do you mean, quiet? This is illegal! HELP! F.A.A.! OUTLAWS!”

When I woke up, I was lying on a cot in a cave of rock, well lit and apparently part of a vast complex, a hidden community. My airplane was chocked in a stone T-hangar cut opposite a huge sliding wall, and a black-clad outlaw had just changed the engine oil. He was removing a magneto contact-breaker assembly now, and it jarred me to action.

“Stop! You can’t do that! You’re not a licensed mechanic! Put that back on!”

“If I’m not a licensed mechanic, I can’t put it back on, can I?” He spoke quietly, without looking at me. “Sorry we had to bring you along, but Pharisee had more data than we planned on taking, and we had to borrow your airplane to help carry the load. We figured you wouldn’t want to be left behind. And your left magneto dropped fifty rpm on run-up.”

You don’t reason with people like that, but I was still confused, not thinking clearly. “What’s the matter with fifty rpm? I can have a seventy-five rpm drop and still be legal.”

“Sure you can, but being legal doesn’t make it right.” He was quiet for a moment. “Just like being right doesn’t make it legal. This magneto misses fire every minute and a half in the air. You never noticed that?”

“How could I notice it? I never fly on one magneto in the air. I check them both before takeoff and if there is less than a seventy-five rpm drop …”

“… you go ahead and fly.”

“Of course I do. I learned by the book and I fly by the book.” I have always been proud of that.

“Heaven help us,” was the only reply from the outlaw.

A few minutes later, as he worked, I gathered courage, and spoke. “What are you going to do with me?”

“Let you go. As soon as we pay you for the use of your airplane. Price of replacing this breaker spring will just about cover it.”

“Pay me? But you’re outlaws! That’s not a legal repair! Who will sign it off in the logbook?”

The black-clad desperado laughed, low in his throat. “That’s your problem, friend. All that matters to us is that an airplane works as it was designed to work. The paperwork is up to you.”

“What about all that technical data you took?” My words cut like razors. “Were you so noble as to pay for that?”

“Overpaid, if you ask me. But that’s the way Drake has to have it. We left a zero-since-major engine at Pharisee … tolerance to a ten-thousandth all the way through, all our own best work. Drake’s personal guarantee for three thousand hours flying. Man. The things we give to get more technical information …”

“But if you outlaws overhauled it here, it has no logs, it hasn’t been signed off!”

He laughed again, setting a timing disc on the propeller shaft. “You’re right. It hasn’t been signed off. We have left them the best-overhauled engine in the world today, and it isn’t legal. They’ll have to tear it down, won’t they?… change the tolerances, break the guarantee. When they get it back together, it will be just another engine, with a fifty-hour warranty. But legal, friend, legal!”

He touched a set of buttons beneath a dial on the wall. “Looks as if you might be staying the night. Wind’s twenty miles per hour on the north strip here. Twenty-three on the south.”

The finality of his words frightened me. “There’s nothing wrong with twenty miles per hour,” I said. “That’s less than half the stalling speed of my airplane, and according to the book, if the wind is less than …”

“That much wind in these mountains will blow you to pieces with what you know about your airplane.”

“If you had taken the time to examine my logbook,” I said icily, “you would have seen that …”

“… that you have 2648 hours and 29 minutes total flying time. Our computers have analyzed the kind of flying you’ve done. A thousand of your hours are logged on autopilot, and the rest of it was spent trying to fly like one. You have the equivalent of sixteen hours and sixteen minutes real flying time, our kind of flying time. That’s not enough to fly out of here safely in a twenty-mile breeze.” He turned the propeller slightly.

“Now just a minute. I don’t know what kind of screwy computer you have, but I know I can fly my own airplane.”

“Sure you can. You have logged 2648 hours in your little book.” He turned so suddenly I jumped, and his words slammed rapid-fire into the rock walls. “How much altitude do you lose in a one-eighty downwind turn, if the engine stops on takeoff? How long does it take your gear to extend on battery power only? What happens when you land with the wheels only partly down? How do you make a minimum-damaged forced landing? If you have to fly through power lines, where should you hit them?”

It was quiet for a long moment. “Well, you never turn back to the runway if the engine stops on takeoff; that’s in the book …”

“And the book lies!” He was immediately sorry for his outburst. “Excuse me. Let’s say that the engine stops on takeoff after you have climbed to five thousan

d feet and circled so that you were over the end of the runway?”