Conquerors of the Sky by Thomas Fleming Page A

science of flight, instead of merely tinkering with ailerons and controls like a clever mechanic, which was all Craig had been. He would care about planes in Craig’s memory. He would abandon his mother’s dream of proving the survival of the soul after death. That was a job for a momma’s boy. Building planes was a job for a man.
    Craig’s spirit entered Frank with that word, care. He did not know whether it partook of darkness or of light. It did not matter. Part of Frank became the swaggering older brother who loved and left women as casually as he risked death in the air. Part of shy, studious Frank Buchanan was abandoned that day in 1912 so life could triumph over death.
    Muriel Halsey had sobbed beside the hospital bed as Craig died. She took Frank home to her villa in the Hollywood hills overlooking Los Angeles and fixed him something powerful to drink. Frank gulped it in Craig’s memory, as part of his determination to keep him alive in his mind and body.
    They had several drinks in Craig’s memory. Pretty soon Muriel was telling him how much he looked like Craig. His hair was redder but he had the same build. The same big heart. Muriel joined him on the couch and began kissing him. She said she wanted to give him something to remember Craig by, something Craig liked even more than flying. Frank did not object. He did not
worry about Muriel’s emanations. It was another way of becoming Craig.
    In the bedroom, Frank marveled at the design of a woman’s body. All those fascinating curves and cunning concavities and fragile bones. It made him wonder if his mother was right when she contended that Eve, the Creator’s second attempt, was an improvement on the first clumsy model, Adam. As Muriel slithered up his chest to slide her tongue into his mouth, Frank decided the answer was yes yes yes. Women and planes—two aspects of beauty in space and time—two ascents to bliss.

THE FUTURE IN THE SKY
    â€œHere he comes!”
    â€œWe’re in the perfect spot!”
    Nine-year-old Adrian Van Ness stood beside his mother and her English friends on Shakespeare Cliff at Dover, where King Lear once raved against malignant fate. They were watching an incredible sight—a man flying an airplane from France to England. Hundreds of people had flocked to the white chalk bluffs to witness this sensation of the new century.
    â€œBy jove, it makes my blood boil to think a frog’s doing it first,” said a husky English voice above Adrian’s head. Geoffrey Tillotson had broad shoulders and hooded eyes. His black bowler seemed to blot out the sky.
    â€œIt’s glorious nonetheless, Geoffrey.”
    That silken American voice belonged to Adrian’s mother, Clarissa Ames Van Ness. She was almost as tall as Geoffrey Tillotson. She wore a wide-brimmed black straw hat with a spume of white aigrettes. The hat was tilted on her beautiful head like a Jules Verne spaceship.
    â€œYou’re right about that. Keep your eye on him, young fellows. You’re seeing the future overhead. Everyone’s future!” Geoffrey Tillotson said.
    The white monoplane sailed over their heads, its motor clattering. At first it looked more like an insect than a bird, with the whirring propeller in its snout. But the outspread wings, the wheels jutting below the fuselage, recaptured a resemblance to the gulls that glided overhead, shrilling excitedly at this intruder in their sky.
    â€œWhat keeps him up?” Adrian’s mother asked.
    â€œAerodynamics,” Geoffrey said.
    The plane was so low you could see the pilot at the controls, wearing a helmet and goggles. “I say, Father, I’m going to learn to fly one of those things straightaway,” said Peter Tillotson, Geoffrey’s fourteen-year-old son. He was thick-bodied and muscular like his father.
    Adrian did not like Peter very much. At the Tillotson house in Kent, not far from Dover, he had insisted on teaching