The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

"Well, there are going to be two bodies right quick if you spend our grocery-money buying old copyrights!"

"We'll manage. We can't let seven of your books go without even trying to save them!"

Around midnight, we compromised. We'd offer every penny we had, and borrow money from Leslie's parents to live on. The next morning before I could convince her it was too much, she sent the bid to the trustee.

The trustee sent notices to other prospects: Can you top this offer, for these copyrights?

The suspense, in our rented house, you could have cut it with an axe.

Weeks later, a telephone call.

She ran breathless up the stairs. "Wookie!" she cried. "We got 'em! We got 'em! The books, they're ours again!"

I hugged the air out of her, we screeched and shouted and jumped and laughed. I hadn't known it would matter so much to me, that our paper children had come home.

"What was the next closest bid?" I said.

She looked sheepish. "There were no other bids."

"Nobody else even BID? Ever?"

"No."

"Not even close! Hurray!"

"Not hurray," she said.

"Not hurray?"

"You were right! We shouldn't have bid so high. I've squandered our grocery money for the next hundred years!"

I hugged her again. "Not at all, little wookie. Your offer was so intimidating, nobody else even dared to bid, that's what happened! Had you bid lower, they would have moved right in and topped you by a nickel!"

At this she brightened, and so did a strange light over our future.

forty-five

M. N THOSE months aviation was bursting with the revolution of low-cost aircraft, and the first story I wrote on my clean slate was one that earned just enough money to buy us some food and an ultralight airplane kit, a flying machine from a company called Pterodactyl, Ltd. Soon as I heard its name, I liked the company, but it turned out Pterodactyl made the best ultralight for what I wanted to do: fly once more from hayfields and pastures, look down on clouds from the open air, for the fun of it.

What a delight to work with my hands again, building that machine! Aluminum tube and steel cable, bolts and rivets and fabric, an engine one-quarter the size of the Fleet's old Kinner. I finished it in a month, reading the instruction book step by step, following the photos and drawings in the box from the factory.

"What a cute little thing," Leslie had said when she first saw pictures of the Pterodactyl.

She said it again, in bigger letters, when ours stood completed on the grass, a giant edition of a child's model airplane, teetering like a silk-and-metal dragonfly on its lilypad.

It's so simple, I thought, why wasn't this machine invented forty years ago? No matter. It had been invented now, just in time for people shy of money and eager to get off the ground again.

With great respect for the unknown thing, and after much practice taxiing and many a ten-second flight skimming a borrowed pasture, I finally pushed full throttle and the power-kite launched up out of the grass, colors like a flame-and-sunshine Spirit of Flight, going home. Pterodactyl's president gave me a snowmobile suit to match the airplane . . . that season of year, without a cockpit, it was cold indeed.

There in the sky, the air! Wind and calm, mountains and valleys, grass and earth and rain and sweet ice air through me for the first time ever once again! I had stopped counting flying-hours at 8,000, stopped keeping record of the airplane-types I had flown at 125, yet this one gave me a pure pleasure of being in the air like no other I had flown.

It did require special cautions-by no means was it for flying in heavy weather, for instance-but in a calm there was nothing that could match it for delight. Flying done for the day, the Pterodactyl folded its wings, slipped into a long bag lifted on top of the car, came home to sleep in the yard.

The only thing wrong with the machine was that it carried one person only; I couldn't share the flying with Leslie.

"It's OK," she said. "I'm up there, too, when you fly. I can look down and see me waving when you fly over!"

She sat in the framework cockpit, ran its engine, tucked her hair into a crash-helmet and ta