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Show 139 god of truth and beauty and sudden death. I felt like a minor god myself: I had wanted to fly and here I was. It seemed only natural to me that society should train its young men to kill, whether with target practice with a bow and arrow, or in sword play, or shoot out the bull's eye and win for Company A, and I was just learning to kill in a slightly more complicated fashion, with a Gruman F6F fighter plane. We would be stacked up in formation in that blue Florida sky, with the blue Atlantic below, and the blue-winged leader would peel off and one by one we would go, following him down, roll belly-up to the sun and pull the nose down, straight down with all those horses and that weight pulling, plummeting down. Pull out not too late, with not too many Gs to black you out, yet with maximum speed and heading for the beach so fast that a patch of rough air is an instantaneous solid jar, over the tops of trees so closely that the prop wash stirs them into life, approaching the target, pulling up fifty feet to see it better and aiming the plane itself, there it is in your sights and you let the 50s go, tracers darting out to finger the target, sinking softly in as into batter. Then you are past and you fishtail evasively and then pull the nose up, push the throttle to the firewall and head for the sun. Getting the target was like killing the Chimaera. Power! Indeed, on my good days it seemed perfectly natural to me that learning how to kill should be pure joy. And it often was, me sitting high there in my fighter among the clouds and feeling that I could fly around the world, westward following the sun, even westward keeping up with the chariot of the sun so that it was as if stopped, never to set but fixed brightly at its zenith while both of us sailed around the globe, the world's beauty forever displayed. For while that huge precision machine thrummed comfortably in my ear, my fingers happy on its healthful pulse, I gazed with lifted heart upon the blue |
