"Who Needs Insurance by Robin Scott" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 2)

prop was roaring like an insane lion and chewing great
chunks of air with each revolution, but it didn't slow. It took
all my strength with both feet on the left rudder pedal to keep
us from crabbing around into a flat turn. I figured out later
that strange engine had an effective power boost equivalent to
an extra eight hundred horsepower, and that in a twelve
hundred horsepower engine! Right then, though, twenty-five
hundred feet over Yugoslavia, I didn't do any figuring. I was
just too shook to be anything but properly grateful.
So we went bucketing and yawing down across the Balkans,
down through the Ionian Sea and across the Mediterranean to
Libya. I was into the slot for an upwind approach when both
outboard engines went bang, and I mean exploded. I could
understand Number One going. It had roared long enough
and K&d earned the honor of a decent burial. But old Number
Four had been loafing on full feather and hadn't turned a lick
for almost five hours. Anyway, both went bang, Number One
deserting us entirely, whistling down to bury itself in the sand
off the end of the Four-Five runway, while Number Four
burned merrily in its cowling, although with no oil and only a
carburetor full of gas, without much real malice.
Despite everything, it was a satisfactory landing, and like
/ the rest of the slobs who had visited sunny Rumania that day,
I was too thankful to be back in one piece to speculate much
about the nature of my good luck. It wasn't until a couple of
days later, after a very alcoholic evening in Major Bricks'
tent, that I began to get really curious about that Number
One engine and its evident ability to do full RPM's at full
high pitch.
I can't stand being curious. It's like an itch, a painful
irritation somewhere deep inside, and I have to scratch. I
went to see Mcdougal, the Chief of Maintenance for the
389th. Like me, Mcdougal had been pulled into the Army Air
Corps from college. But, while I had put in only two years at
Indiana, Mac was doing graduate work in Fluid Mechanics
when he was offered a choice between civilian work on some
highly classified project in a little Tennessee town named Oak
Ridge or a direct commission in the Air Corps. Mac is a little
unconventional and a little nuts, and he thought he'd have a
better time in the war if he could smell gunpowder. He was
the sort of Maintenance Chief who used to sneak rides as
gunner, radioman, flight engineer, what-have-you. He could
even fly passably well.
It was after ten in the evening when I caught up with Mac.
The desert heat had been sucked off into a series of towering
thunderheads which instead of shedding their favors on Lib-
yan soil wou'd undoubtedly move out into the Mediterran-
.ean and kick hell out of some poor Greek SPOPTO fishermen.
It was cool even inside the silver corrugations of the R & M
hangar, and Mac was relaxing with one of those thin little