“We will wire you as soon as the ship is ready,” he said and hung up.
I came back to the gang at the table. They were still sipping their coffee, smoking, talking, and undoubtedly hoping for an odd job to come in.
“Diving one of the new fighters for the navy,” I replied as casually as I could.
“I’ve got it,” I snapped. “And anyway,” I added, “I won’t be dropping dead of starvation around here this winter.”
They razzed me for a while, and I razzed them back. They wanted to know what kind of flowers I wanted. I wanted to know if they were planning on just breakfast or just dinner when they got down to that one meal a day this winter.
After a while, as soon as my elation in contemplation of the fifteen hundred bucks wore off, I didn’t feel so cocky. I really might get bumped off in that crate. Maybe I could have got by without taking the job.
I remembered that dive of six years before. It had been different then. It hadn’t occurred to me at that time that airplanes would fall apart. Oh, I knew they would. I knew they had. It was something, however, that had happened to other test pilots and might happen to some more, but not to me.
I remembered the times I had jumped, startled wide awake from sleep in the nights, not immediately after that failure, but some months later. No special dreams of horror. Just the delayed action of some subterranean mechanism of fright in my subconscious brain. I had been honestly convinced during my waking hours up to that time that that failure had not made much of an impression on me.
I remembered the subconscious fear of just normal excess speed that had grown on me since then. I wouldn’t nose an airplane down very much from level cruising speed and open the throttle coming in from a cross-country, for instance. A couple of times when I had done it without thinking, I had found myself practically bending the throttle backwards to kill the speed when I had suddenly become aware of it.
These things convinced me that that failure had made a deeper impression on me than I had thought. I realized it the more when I contemplated these new dives I was about to do. I knew I was more afraid of them than I would admit.
“Death in the Afternoon, or Reunion in Oklahoma,” I thought. You’ve got to take some chances. I didn’t see how I was going to get the money to bring the family back any other way.