"Gene Wolfe - Against the Lafayette Escadrille" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

and lifting it like a kite before we had gone a hundred feet. I did a slow turn then, getting a good look at
the field with all the new, green grass starting to show, and adjusting my goggles.

Have you ever looked from an open cockpit to see the wing struts trembling and the ground swinging far
below? There is nothing like it. I pulled back on the stick and gave it more throttle and rose and rose until
I was looking down on the backs of all the birds and I could not be certain which of the tiny roofs I saw
was the house where I live or the factory where I work. Then I forgot looking down, and looked up and
out, always remembering to look over my shoulder especially, and to watch the sun where the S.E. 5a's
of the Royal Flying Corps love to hang like dragonflies, invisible against the glare.

Then I looked away and I saw it, almost on the horizon, an orange dot. I did not, of course, know then
what it was; but I waved to the other members of the Jagstaffel I command and turned toward it, the
Fokker thrilling to the challenge. It was moving with the wind, which meant almost directly away from
me, but that only gave the Fokker a tailwind, and we came at it--rising all the time.

It was not really orange-red as I had first thought. Rather it was a thousand colors and shades, with reds
and yellows and white predominating. I climbed toward it steeply with the stick drawn far back, almost at
a stall. Because of that I failed, at first, to see the basket hanging from it. Then I leveled out and circled it
at a distance. That was when I realized it was a balloon. After a moment I saw, too, that it was of very
old-fashioned design with a wicker basket for the passengers and that someone was in it. At the moment
the profusion of colors interested me more, and I went slowly spiraling in until I could see them better, the
Easter egg blues and the blacks as well as the reds and whites and yellows.

It wasn't until I looked at the girl that I understood. She was the passenger, a very beautiful girl, and she
wore crinolines and had her hair in long chestnut curls that hung down over her bare shoulders. She
waved to me, and then I understood.

The ladies of Richmond had sewn it for the Confederate army, making it from their silk dresses. I
remembered reading about it. The girl in the basket blew me a kiss and I waved to her, trying to convey
with my wave that none of the men of my command would ever be allowed to harm her; that we had at
first thought that her craft might be a French or Italian observation balloon, but that for the future she
need fear no gun in the service of the Kaiser's Flugzeugmeisterei.

I circled her for some time then, she turning slowly in the basket to follow the motion of my plane, and we
talked as well as we could with gestures and smiles. At last when my fuel was running low I signaled her
that I must leave. She took, from a container hidden by the rim of the basket, a badly shaped, corked
brown bottle. I circled even closer, in a tight bank, until I could see the yellow, crumbling label. It was
one of the very early soft drinks, an original bottle. While I watched she drew the cork, drank some, and
held it out symbolically to me.

Then I had to go. I made it back to the field, but I landed dead stick with my last drop of fuel exhausted
when I was half a kilometer away. Naturally I had the Fokker refueled at once and went up again, but I
could not find her balloon.

I have never been able to find it again, although I go up almost every day when the weather makes it
possible. There is nothing but an empty sky and a few jets. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I have wondered
if things would not have been different if, in finishing the Fokker, I had used the original, flammable dope.
She was so authentic. Sometimes toward evening I think I see her in the distance, above the clouds, and
I follow as fast as I can across the silent vault with the Fokker trembling around me and the throttle all the
way out; but it is only the sun.