the cockpit and say to Stahr: If I ever saw love, its in that girls eyes.
The pilot might help: Man, are you blind? Why dont you go back there?
Wylie White might help instead of standing in the aisle looking at me doubtfully, wondering whether I was awake or asleep.
Sit down, I said. Whats new? where are we?
Up in the air.
Oh, so thats it. Sit down. I tried to show a cheerful interest: What are you writing?
Heaven help me, I am writing about a Boy Scout The Boy Scout.
Is it Stahrs idea?
I dont know he told me to look into it. He may have ten writers working ahead of me or behind me, a system which he so thoughtfully invented. So youre in love with him?
I should say not, I said indignantly. Ive known him all my life.
Desperate, eh? Well, Ill arrange it if youll use all your influence to advance me. I want a unit of my own.
I closed my eyes again and drifted off. When I woke up, the stewardess was putting a blanket over me.
Almost there, she said.
Out the window I could see by the sunset that we were in a greener land.
I just heard something funny, she volunteered, up in the cockpit that Mr. Smith or Mr. Stahr I never remember seeing his name
Its never on any pictures , I said.
Oh. Well, hes been asking the pilots a lot about flying I mean hes interested? You know?
I know.
I mean one of them told me he bet he could teach Mr. Stahr solo flying in ten minutes. He has such a fine mentality, thats what he said.
I was getting impatient.
Well, what was so funny?
Well, finally one of the pilots asked Mr. Smith if he liked his business, and Mr. Smith said, Sure. Sure I like it. Its nice being the only sound nut in a hatful of cracked ones .
The stewardess doubled up with laughter and I could have spit at her.
I mean calling all those people a hatful of nuts. I mean cracked nuts. Her laughter stopped with unexpected suddenness, and her face was grave as she stood up. Well, Ive got to finish my chart.
Goodbye.
Obviously Stahr had put the pilots right up on the throne with him and let them rule with him for awhile. Years later I travelled with one of those same pilots and he told me one thing Stahr had said.
He was looking down at the mountains.
Suppose you were a railroad man, he said. You have to send a train through there somewhere. Well, you get your surveyors reports, and you find theres three or four or half a dozen gaps, and not one is better than the other. Youve got to decide on what basis? You cant test the best way except by doing it. So you just do it.
The pilot thought he had missed something.
How do you mean?
You choose some one way for no reason at all because that mountains pink or the blueprint is a better blue. You see?
The pilot considered that this was very valuable advice. But he doubted if hed ever be in a position to apply it.
What I wanted to know, he told me ruefully, is how he ever got to be Mr. Stahr.
Im afraid Stahr could never have answered that one; for the embryo is not equipped with a memory. But I could answer a little. He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously finally frantically and keeping on beating them, he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth.
The motors were off, and all our five senses began to readjust themselves for landing. I could see a line of lights for the Long Beach Naval Station ahead and to the left, and on the right a twinkling blur for Santa Monica. The California moon was out, huge and orange over the Pacific. However I happened to feel about these things and they were home, after all I know that Stahr must have felt much more. These were the things I had first opened my eyes on, like the sheep on the back lot of the old Laemmle studio; but this was where Stahr had come to earth after that extraordinary illuminating flight where he saw which way we were going, and how we looked doing it, and how much of it mattered. You could say that this was where an accidental wind blew him, but I dont think so. I would rather think that in a long shot he saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and that he came here from choice to be with us to the end. Like the plane coming
down into the Glendale airport, into the warm darkness.
Chapter II
There is never a time when a studio is absolutely quiet. There is always a night shift of technicians in the laboratories and dubbing rooms and people on the maintenance staff dropping in at the commissary. But the sounds are all different the padded hush of tires, the quiet tick of a motor running idle, the naked cry of a soprano singing into a nightbound microphone. Around a corner I came upon a man in rubber boots washing down a car in a wonderful white light a fountain among the dead industrial shadows. I slowed up as I saw Mr. Marcus being hoisted into his car in front of the administration building, because he took so long to say anything, even good night and while I waited I realized that the soprano was singing, Come, come, I love you only over and over; I remember this because she kept singing the same line during the earthquake. That didnt come for five minutes yet.