I woke feeling penned up, and with a vibrating noise rattling in my ear. Upon opening my eyes, I saw a black doctor’s bag at my feet, and canvas walls framed by bamboo all about me. It took a bit of awkwardness to set up, and then force my face into the slipstream.

“You’ll never get away with this!” I heard a very attractive voice from behind me say.

“No? Well, I have a plan which should resolve all of my supposed difficulties. Too bad you chose not to be part of it.” The creepy voice trying to pass for suave irritated my ears.

“Never. I’d rather die.” Her clarion voice jerked me alert with its vibrant sincerity, and I finally got fully sat up and turned around to see a three-seater bi-plane with a beauty tied up in the front seat by a lariat rope about her manicured hands, and a leather-capped and Luger wielding jerk in the seat behind her.

“Your choice, doll.” He sounded regretful, but not too much so. I pegged him as a man who had killed women before, and had not been overly traumatized by the experience. Grinning because he had no idea I was behind him about to land a karate chop to his neck, I caught the girl’s eye.

She looked startled, and then said.

“Look behind you.”

“Please, not that one, Miss Carlyle.” He groaned. She shrugged having done her duty by honor, and her complacency must have alerted him. Before my blow could land, he flipped the plane, and we all fell out. Miss Carlyle and I hung onto the edge of the cockpits by our fingers, and the villain just let himself drop away to sprout a big white mushroom of a parachute that drifted toward earth.
But we flew upside down, and started to tilt downward. I feared we would arrive on the ground first in a vertical dive into the ranchlands below us. I started to lift myself back into the plane intending to try something with the controls, but the fabric I held started to rip.

“Wait, just wait!” Miss Carlyle shrieked over the battering wind, and I did, and soon the plane had gone vertical, and it was much easier to step sideways into the plane than to pull ourselves in from below. It unnerved me to see her loose a black leather pump, and have it drop six inches into the propeller blade. But she pulled her legs up, and we both got in.

“I can’t fly.” She told me, and I gulped, and climbed forward across the exterior of the fuselage to the second seat where a control lay. This shouldn’t be too hard, I told myself ignoring the sarcastic comments of the instructor who had first trained me on a crop duster which could not be too different than this, I hoped. I’d managed to land without help at least half the time. I would have gotten better, but some nastiness had intervened and cut short my practice.

Pulling back on the stick had the opposite effect I wanted. We went inverted to the ground again, and I realized that this reality had their airplane controls rigged the opposite way from most worlds. Shouting to hang on, I took it further inverted trying by main strength and luck to force the open biplane to do an outside loop.

In my peripheral vision, I kept seeing the ground getting closer, and I heard Miss Carlyle praying the Lord’s Prayer at high volume. At “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who…” we leveled off, and shot straight across a field low enough to throw rocks at cows if we’d had a rock.

My passenger was jabbing a finger forward, and I could not see what got her so excited, but she had to know the countryside better than me. Sure enough a telegraph line ran straight across our path at the field’s end. I could try to flip the plane over, but I’d likely get caught in the ground effect, or a wingtip would hit a cow (yes, we were that close to the ground.), and that jerk would win. Or I could try to pull up straight, but I was not at all sure this biplane had the power to climb inverted.

The biplane wobbled and tried to skitter out of control as I raised it a little to be sure of clearing a bush at the edge of the field, and yet go under the telegraph line. A gust of wind hit us at the last second, and I could not alter its course because I lacked the delicate touch needed. I could only spare a thought for help from God, and we skimmed close enough to the telegraph wires that I was sure we had hit, but we did not.

With shaking hands, I urged the vehicle into the sky, and then flipped it.

Phew.

Beneath us, Miss Carlyle pointed out her father’s humongous ranch (about the size of an Easterner county she said), and the airstrip, and a giant zeppelin moored next to it by an anchor tossed around a lodgepole pine left there for that purpose. It looked extra difficult to land with the zeppelin blocking my preferred path, but I had no choice but to try unless I chose to fail utterly.

So I began to bring it in, and we wobbled over the sky like a kindergartener scrawling on a piece of paper with his crayon. Someone on horseback waved us off, and grimacing, and tired, I pulled up to have another go at it. The second time, he waved us off even more sternly pulling a gun out and firing it in front of us. Then he made these odd charades with his hands that left me puzzled but increasingly worried.

“Oh, I know, I got it.” Miss Carlyle said with good student glee, and then her voice sunk. “He’s saying we don’t have any wheels.”

Both of us looked over the side, and sure enough, we had only the stubs of spars. Miss Carlyle began to curse the villain for nearly a minute, after which she apologized for her unladylike behavior.

I nodded, and studied the field. It was rocky, and I was afraid if I tried a belly landing that I’d rip things open, and kill us both.

I gave the wheel to the lady, and asked for her makeup compact. Taking a pencil and a notepad, I sketched out a plan, and put it in the compact. Then I climbed high, and dive-bombed the man on his horse hoping that he would be able to control his horse, but I need to get this thing as close to him as possible without any wasted time. We had a lot of fuel, but my plan required quite a bit of time.

Dive-bombing, like the dam-busters in the Royal Air Force in WWII, was probably the most accurate method of delivering a bomb short of having a really good bombsight, or a GPS guided system, or an expert system trained to analyze the battlefield in picoseconds and choose its own target.

The “bomb” landed about twenty feet in front of him with a puff of makeup dust, and the horse started, but he was an expert horseman who kept his mount under control.

Soon enough, within thirty minutes, I saw the zeppelin rising into the air with a small crew aboard, and push its speed to a maximum. The found a wind current, and I saw the great beast jolt as five more critical miles per hour were added to its speed.

I came up from below it trying not to fly the plane, but to be the plane, and let my intent guide the plane rather than a conscious plan. A weighted rope ladder fluttered from above as I climbed at a fourty -five degree angle losing speed as I went.

The plan was simple, I’d climb slowing to near stalling and matching speed with the ladder fluttering in the air, and they would push to their maximum speed, and Miss Carlyle would get off.

There was a problem. Some people, particularly female people, have a tendency to get scared and freeze up which heightens the danger. I would have no time to talk her into the good sense of doing this; it would have a very tiny window of maybe twenty seconds.

So I expressed my concerns to her. She turned around and stuck her tongue out at me.

“Perhaps, I should tell you about the seven-foot rattler someone, couldn’t have been a girl, killed with her butter knife and soup spoon while her brother froze with fear.”

I looked properly chagrinned.

“Men are such pigs.” She flounced back around, and I grinned to myself. One way to motivate a man is to call him a girl; and one way to motivate a woman is to suggest that females are constitutionally incapable compared to men. Gender rivalry runs deep.

She would do.

The slow trip upwards kept getting slower as adrenaline surged and distorted our time senses, and as the plane fluttered approaching stalling too early. I gave it some more gas, and the ladder fluttered madly out of our reach, but a prayer to the Almighty, and it nearly fell across her hands. She grabbed it like life itself, and scrambled up the ladder with a ferocious enthusiasm only matched by her athletic grace.

My plane’s engine conked out, and we fell groundward while I uselessly wondered if a biplane could stall. I knew a Rutan canard could not, but this? Meanwhile, my fingers and hands kept punching the start switch until reason pointed out that I needed a spinning propeller to get the engine going again.

So I nose-dived it again. Punching it did nothing. And I began to worry. Maybe, I had flooded the engine. So I waited really long, and the whole plane started to sing as we exceeded its design limits for speed.

I could literally tear the wings off doing this, I remembered from a book. Still, forcing my self not to touch the start button, until the ground had gotten awful close and the whole plane wailed, I jammed it as authoritatively as I could.

Sweet music. The cranky thing started, and now I began the difficult balancing act between pulling it out quickly enough to keep me from diving into the ground, and ripping the wings off so that I could go plop into the ground.

Wires snapped, and an aileron stopped working, and I think the whole wing frame bent very slightly, but I pulled it out. Heading back up, I saw Miss Carlyle being pulled into the cabin attached to the underside of the zeppelin.

A grin split my face.

Now to see if I could rescue myself. I pulled upward, and had to make adjustments since my aileron did not work, and the whole plane handled badly. But fluttering and dancing about like a fallen leaf in a parking lot, I got close.

But I could not get the plane to get close enough to the ladder. Finally, I decided that Miss Carlyle’s experience had been a subtle miracle, and none seemed in store for me. I almost heard a slyly amused voice in my head suggest that I did not need one, I was perfectly capable of handling this with the gifts I already had.

I took the plane above the bottom of the ladder, and flipped the plane like that jerk had. This time I did not grab on, and I flipped it slowly. I fell headfirst straight for the rope ladder, and it did not flutter aside at the last second of my twenty foot fall.

Wrenchingly, I caught the ladder, and it jerked me up tight. This universe receded for several seconds, as I got back my nerve and my wind, and various body parts reported back in to my brain. These body parts seemed to say in a very surprised tone that “they were okay.” Even my own body had thought that a lame brain stunt, I informed myself. My self snapped back that it had the greatest virtue of any plan. It worked.

Now could I get up, and get moving?

Groaning and whipping about in the wind, I began to climb the ladder. By the time, I arrived at the top, I was quite tired.

After being lifted inside, I did not meet the enthusiasm I expected. Instead, I saw the horseman with a black eye, and Miss Carlyle tied to a chair, and a .38 revolver pointed at me.

“No funny stuff, buster, or I’ll ventilate you.”

“What’s this?” I cried to the encircling crowd of mistrustful faces.

“They, a bunch of misbegotten louts, my father just hired claim that I am not Miss Carlyle. They say she is down at the ranch now, and I am obviously some dolled up impostor involved in some evil scheme.”

I looked about, and saw a rough, but fundamentally honest and decent crowd. They were not part of some conspiracy, and neither was Miss Carlyle for she would consider such beneath her dignity. So someone had duped them, and we needed to find out who. The cowboy stirred, and it looked like he had given better than he got considering the signs of swollen jaws, and bloodied noses. That made the cowboy, a likely ally.

“How do you know this is not the real Miss Carlyle?” I asked as part of my campaign to win them over.

“Because her father is with her now. He’d know his own daughter wouldn’t he?” The man with the .38 spoke. “Now no need to get desperate, we’re going to drop you folks off who we rescued so I figure you owe us something. We’ll drop you off in Salt Lake City.”

“That’s a good couple hundred miles away.” Miss Carlyle protested.

“Yep. I mean, yes, ma’am, it is.” The spokesman said. I asked for a drink, and sat down to wait it out.

Tadeusz