I’d heard about the squadron of negro-only fighters in the sky, heard that bombers were asking for the Red Tails because of their record of flying close and protecting.
The Red Tails were breaking records in their section of the sky. I was secretly doing it over here. And one day I’d reveal myself. And it would be known that I was as good as any other pilot.
Only I was a ghost. A shadow person. A secret with my one drop of different blood.
And now I, Charles Stewart with my mixed blood, would die on the surface of Venus in a spectacular crash and no one would ever know what I’d truly accomplished, would they? No one would know I’d been as good as any white astronaut, and they hadn’t even known about me in their midst.
I’d flown too high.
No. That was the blood squeezing against my brain. I’d flown high. I was proud to have flown high!
We plunged through the thick clouds of Venus, and for a brief second I saw lush green vegetation and wide expanses of ocean.
Commander James cut himself free of his restraints, slamming into a bulkhead and cutting his head open.
“Keep calling out elevation, Davis,” he shouted back at the navigator, Tad Davis.
Tad began shouting out the numbers as we fell. Heston pulled Shepard Jefferson out of his chair and dragged him back on hands and knees deeper into the heart of the craft. I could hear banging and swearing.
Eric Smith, our geologist and general scientist, grabbed my arm from his position strapped in on my left. “I know communications is down, but patch me in anyway.” He stared out of the porthole. “I’m going to broadcast what I can make out as we go down, for the benefit of whoever might hear something.”
The ears of the world might be straining to hear us. And Eric was a scientist to the last. I linked his microphone to the radio. “You’re on, if we’re able to transmit,” I told him through gritted teeth.
“We’re spinning wildly,” Eric narrated, “but I’m sure I can see jungle out on the land we’re far above. There are great oceans in between the main sections of land we’re over, and there appear to be cloudbursts all around us. This is a rainy world. A wet world. A humid world.”
He continued on in that manner as the details grew, and Eric described mountains rising toward us. A lake. Highlands, thick with jungle.
I had a wristband with a cyanide pill in it, in case things went bad. I idly wondered if it made sense to take it before we hit the ground. I didn’t want to feel the moment of impact.
“Shep: hold on!” Commander James shouted from back behind us.
We slammed in our restraints as the craft suddenly decelerated. For a moment I was cheered. We’d gotten the rocket back on and would descend on our tail in fire and triumph to the surface of this new world.
But that wasn’t it, we still yawed and swung. The descent was slow, but the thundering roar of the rocket was absent.
“Parachutes!” Tad said. “They got the emergency parachutes open.”
A wall of green flung itself at the portholes. My chair broke loose from its bolts and I spun across the cabin in a sudden cartwheel as the rocket ship struck trees and marsh in a grinding screech.
2.
THE AIR OUTSIDE WAS THICK WITH MOISTURE AND THE SMELLS of exotic, alien plants. Dark purple fronds filled the steep hills all around us, and just a few miles ahead stony mountains jutted up into the air.
We’d been just split seconds away from dashing ourselves against them, I realized.
All five of us gathered outside to walk the hull at Commander James’s insistence. “We need to know how bad the damage is,” he said.
I just wanted to stand outside. We’d been cooped in a metal tube for almost an entire month, eating pills and squeezing food out of tubes. I wanted to just stand in the open copse created when the rocket ship slammed through the palmlike fronds.
But we all nodded and followed orders.
“How bad is it, Shep?” Heston asked, once we’d all walked a circuit around the silvered ship. We’d all paused near the water tanks that had saved our lives. Had the Nazi missile struck anywhere else, we likely would have died right then and there.
“We didn’t just lose water,” Shepard reported. “We vented fuel, and the hull probably won’t survive taking us back up into orbit. The stress of firing the engine might well just cause the whole thing to crumple.”
Heston looked thoughtful. Thinking about all the variables. Working on a plan of action. He looked out over the vegetation around us with a grimace. “Then we’re not here to explore and return. The mission parameters have just changed. We’re here to survive until we can be rescued by another mission. Stewart: where are we with comms?”
I looked up from staring at massive yellow lily pad–like leaves on a nearby plant. “I sent out distress signals the moment we knew the missile was there, sir. And all the way down. But the equipment’s broken. I can look at the spare parts, see what I can cobble up. But I can’t do anything until Shepard gets the power back on.”
Heston turned back to Shepard. “Shep?”
“I’ll get to work on it. A couple hours?” Shep wiped his hands, then jumped back up to the doors and hauled himself into our broken ship.
“In the meantime,” Heston said, “I need you and Eric to take some bottles and hunt for a clean source of water. Eric: get what you need to test the water, make sure it’s safe.”
“Yes, sir!” we said, and I moved to help Eric get a couple of machetes and some large containers.
We’d landed in the high foothills near a natural plateau. The ground was muddy, and at first the closest thing we found to water was several pools of swampy muck as we chopped through the jungle.
Eric was quiet, no doubt as a result of being a bit shook-up. But I was also out of sorts myself. I was happy to be by his side, though. A bookish type, Eric was the crew member I’d always liked the most. Of all the crew, he had yet to make a random comment about Italians, Jews, Poles, Blacks, or Hispanics that left me secretly angry but outwardly carefully neutral.
I could relax a little near him, not expecting some sudden verbal explosion that would wing me.
The heat and humidity caused me to sweat heavily as we hacked our way onward, and I pulled my long-sleeved shirt off to wrap it around my waist.
“I’d keep that on,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
Eric pointed the machete at fist-sized black marks on the feathered leaves of nearby fronds. “They’re not exactly like mosquitoes, but they’re giant bugs. Probably because of the denser air, I imagine.”
I pulled my shirt back on. “Will a shirt stop a supermosquito?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Don’t know, but maybe it’ll help.” There were large gnats, clouds of which burst out from the ground like jittery dark thunderclouds when we disturbed them.
Eric perked up after a while and began examining the vegetation, trying to pin down what it might be analogous to back on Earth. “Very Mesozoic,” he kept saying. And all I knew about that was that it had something to do with dinosaurs.
We stopped at the edge of two fetid pools of water while Eric examined them. “Stagnant,” he pronounced, and we kept on.
The ground grew muddier, but Eric found a ridge of rock to scramble on that poked over the worst of it, and we began to skirt over the jungle. Occasionally he stopped to draw landmarks on a pad of paper. “There’s no sun, or stars, or compass we can use here,” he said. “We have to be careful not to get lost.”
He also stopped twice to make quick sketches of brightly colored, long-tailed, birdlike creatures that burst out of the treetops and glided through the air.
Eventually we took a break near another flat plain by more swamp. By now, Eric was grinning, our predicament taking a backseat to his scientific wonderment at the flora and fauna of an alien world. “There are tracks here. There seem to be large animals. And we should be able to follow them to a source of water,” he said.