When she used that tone of voice, it was supposed to make Tom shut up and knuckle under. It always had in the past. It didn't any more. "Everybody says the same thing-till they get their noses rubbed in it," he told her. "A plantation this size, if there's not a Red cell somewhere on it, I'll eat my hat." He pointed to the brown felt he'd hung just inside the door, and turned a hard and thoughtful gaze on Scipio.
That was too much for Anne. "Tom, stop this at once, or you'll make me sorry you've come home," she said. "Scipio has raised both of us since we were babies. The idea that he could be a Red-it's disgusting. That's the only word I can find for it."
"Things change." Tom Colleton swung back toward her. He leaned forward a little. The implied threat of attack made Anne take half a step back before she realized what she'd done. And her brother did attack, though only with words: "You're the one who's always going on about change. It's not as much fun as you make it out to be, not all the time it isn't. And if you think it can't happen right here at Marshlands, you're deliberately blinding yourself."
Anne stared, first at him, then at Scipio. Her brother's face was grim and intent. Scipio showed nothing of what he thought, but then, he never did. Anne finished her whiskey, then, even harder than her brother had done, slammed the tumbler down onto the tray the butler was holding. A chunk of ice jumped out, leaving a little wet trail as it skidded across the polished silver surface.
"Get me another drink, Scipio." She kept her voice low, but it was brittle with fury even so. The butler hurried away. When he came back a moment later with the second whiskey, she drank it fast, too. She could feel the liquor building a transparent wall between her and the world, but even that numbing could not disguise the fact that her kid brother's homecoming, far from being the celebration she'd expected, looked more like a disaster.
Percy Stone was dressed in his flying togs and had his camera by his side, but that hadn't kept him from sitting in on a poker game while he waited for Jonathan Moss to finish getting ready to fly. By the expression on his face, it hadn't kept him from losing money to Lefty the mechanic, either. He was in good company there; almost everybody rash enough to sit down with Lefty ended up sadder, if not necessarily wiser.
"Oh, thank God-duty calls," Stone said when Moss came in. "I think I'd sooner go up there and get shot at than stay here and get skinned." Amid laughter, he studied his cards, then tossed a big silver coin into the pot. "Raise a dollar."
"And other one." The mechanic named Byron tossed in a folded bill.
Two other players threw in their hands with various noises of disgust. Lefty said, "I'll see those and bump it another three." He made his five dollars with a gold half-eagle.
"That's enough for me," Stone said, and folded. Byron looked harassed, but called-and promptly regretted it. Chuckling, Lefty scooped up the pot.
"I could have told you not to play cards with Lefty," Moss said as Stone picked up the camera and the two fliers walked out to their Wright 17. "As a matter of fact, I have told you not to play cards with Lefty."
"It's the Socialist in me," Stone answered. Moss let out a questioning grunt. The observer explained: "I make more money than Lefty does, but at the poker table we redistribute the wealth." He shook his head. "I wouldn't mind it so much if the redistribution went my way a little more often."
Moss blew air out through his lips with a snuffling noise, like a horse. "I'm a Democrat," he said. "Always have been, probably always will be. If I earn something, I figure it's mine, and I want to keep it. I don't much like riots, either, so Socialism was a hard sell for me even before the Remembrance Day horrors."
"That was pretty bad, if you believe what you read in the newspapers," Stone agreed. He lifted the camera into his cockpit, then climbed in after it. Once he'd set it in the mount, though, he added, "Of course, if you believe what you read in the newspapers, we've already won the war four or five times by now, which does make me wonder what the two of us are doing, going up in this contraption." He slapped the doped linen fabric covering the side of the fuselage. It was taut, and thumped like a drum.
He had such a disarming manner to him that even political arguments that could have turned hot and heavy in a hurry got defused. "Earning our salaries, so you can give yours to the ground crew," Moss replied, scrambling into the forward cockpit.
"You have less faith in my card-playing than I do, and I didn't think that was possible," Stone said. He whacked the pilot on the shoulder with a length of rubber tubing to which a cheap tin funnel had been attached. "Stick this up to your ear and let's see how it does."
The rubber tubing was of the sort that ran from the speedometer to the pitot tube out at the far end of the wing. Moss undid the funnel and stuck it through one ear hole of his flying helmet, then fixed it to the tube again. Stone tossed him another length of rubber tubing with funnel. That one Moss left in his lap; his observer would have the other end pressed to one ear.
Stone's voice sounded metallically in his ear: "Can you hear me all right?"
Moss spoke into the funnel of the second tube: "Yeah, sure, down here when it's quiet. How we'll do at eight thousand feet with the engine going is liable to be a different ball of wax." He chuckled. "This isn't a whole hell of a lot fancier than tying a couple of tin cans to a string, the way we did when we were kids."
"Sure isn't," Stone agreed. "They don't pay off for looks, though, not in this man's army they don't. If we can make it work, somebody else'll make it pretty, sooner or later."
The ground crew men came out to help them get the two-seater started. Lefty grinned through gibes about bulges in his trousers that had more to do with his financial endowments than his masculine ones. He spun the prop. The Wright's motor buzzed to life at once.
Tachometer, gasoline gauge, gasoline-flow indicator, gasoline feed system pressure indicator, oil gauge, oil-pressure gauge, radiator temperature indicator-all the instruments were good. Moss waved to the ground crew men. Byron and another mechanic, a fellow named Edwin, pulled the chocks away from the wheels. Moss advanced the throttle. The Wright 17 bounced down the airstrip. After enough bounces, it didn't come back to earth.
Percy Stone's voice sounded in his ear: "Can you hear me?"
He shifted the other tube to his mouth. "I sure can. Can you hear me?" When the observer assured him he could, Moss went on, "Say, this is great. We can really talk to each other now." Percy Stone promptly started singing " America the Beautiful." Moss made a hasty amendment: "Maybe it's not so great after all."
Both young men laughed, pleased with their ingenuity. More seriously now, Stone said, "We have to spread the word about this. Biggest problem two-seaters have is that the pilot and observer can't talk back and forth."
"I've seen that with us working together," Moss agreed. "Now that we know pitot tubing makes a good speaking tube, we could come up with better earpieces and mouthpieces than these funnels, I bet. Playing with them makes me feel like I'm home from school on summer vacation."
"That's not bad," Stone said. "Better than thinking about this like it is school, anyway. If you flunk here, they don't make you take the class over. You get expelled-for good."
"Yeah," Moss said; it wasn't anything on which he cared to dwell. He peered ahead. "Front's coming up. Get ready for some hate."
Land over which the American and Canadian armies had already fought was barren, chewed to shreds, as if an insane giant had gnawed on it for a while and then, deciding it wasn't to his taste, spit it out again. Over the front itself, smoke and dust rose high into the air, a legacy of the shelling the two sides kept trading. Percy Stone said, "You'd think we'd have fired enough shells by now to kill all the Canadians there are, by hitting them over the head if no other way."