I was sitting around the restaurant at Roosevelt Field Hotel with the
rest of the unemployed pilots, smoking, talking, sipping the eternal cup
of coffee, hoping that something would turn up, when the phone rang and
the girl who answered it called for me.
"It's long distance," she added as I brushed past her on my way out to
take the call, and I couldn't help running the rest of the way. I had
put in word at a factory some time ago if anything turned up to let me
know. Maybe my luck was changing.
"Hello," I said eagerly as I grabbed the receiver, and before the
familiar voice on the other end told me I knew I was talking to the guy
who hired the pilots for the company.
"I've got a job for you," he announced, "demonstrating one of our new
airplanes for the navy."
"What kind of a demonstration?" I asked warily.
"A dive demonstration," he said. I knew what that meant all right. Ten
thousand feet straight down, just to see if it would hang together. I
wasn't so sure my luck was changing after all.
"What kind of a ship?" I asked. I hoped it wasn't too experimental. I
had dived airplanes before. The last one, six years before, I had dived
to pieces. I still remembered the exploding crack of those wings tearing
off. I remember the dazing blow of the instrument board as my head had
snapped forward against it from the sudden lurch of the midair failure,
and dimly then the slow, limp slumping into unconsciousness. I
remembered how I had come to, thousands of feet later, and leaped my way
clear, only to be threatened by the falling wreck on top and the
rushing-at-me earth beneath. I remembered the tumbling, jerking stop as
my chute had opened after the long drop, and how startlingly close the
ground had looked. I remembered how white and safe against the blue sky
those billowing folds of that chute had looked, and then immediately the
awful heart-pound, breath-stop fear that that milling wreck would take a
derelict pass at it. I remembered the acute relief of hearing the loud
report that told me the wreck had hit the ground, and then the "What if
that had clutched me!" when they told me afterward how close it really
had come.
"It's a bomber fighter, second model, first-production job, a
single-seater biplane with a seven-hundred-horsepower engine," the man
at the other end said. That was encouraging anyway. It wasn't the
experimental job.
I had heard that another free-lance test pilot like myself had recently
jumped out of a ship he had been diving. His prop had broken and torn
his motor clear out of his ship. He had got down with his chute all
right, but he had hit the fin as he had gone past the tail surfaces
getting out of the wreck. He had broken a couple of legs and an arm and
was in the hospital at that moment. I knew he had been doing some
diving.
I wondered why they didn't use one of their own men. They had a very
fine staff of test pilots right there at the factory. "What's wrong with
your pilots?" I asked.
"Well, to be frank about it," was the answer, "while we really don't
expect any trouble with this ship, because we have taken every possible
precaution that we know about, still, you never can tell. Our chief test
pilot now, you know, has done seven of these dive demonstrations. We
feel that that is about enough to ask one man to do on a salary, and he
feels that he has had about enough anyway. None of the rest of our men
have ever done any of this work before. Besides, why should we take a
chance on breaking up our organization if we can call a free lance in?"
So that was it! After all, why shouldn't they look at it that way?
I thought of the already long absence of my family. My wife and my
year-and-a-half-old son and my half-year-old daughter were still on my
father-in-law's farm in Oklahoma, where I had sent them in the spring to
make sure they would be able to eat during the summer. If I could make
enough money----
"How much is there in it for me?" I asked.
"Fifteen hundred dollars," he said. "If the job takes longer than ten
days we will pay you an additional thirty-five dollars a day. We will
insure your life for fifteen thousand dollars for the duration of the
demonstrations and provide for disability compensation. We will also pay
your expenses, of course. So, if you are still free, white, and
twenty-one--" His voice trailed off, posing the question.
"Well, I'm still free and white," I answered, "but I am no longer
twenty-one. I'm thirty now, you know. Old enough to know better. But
I'll take your job."
"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.
"I've got a job," I announced, beaming.
"What kind of a job?" they all piped up.
"Diving one of the new fighters for the navy," I replied as casually as
I could.
"Boy, you can have it!" they chorused.
"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.
Besides, I thought I could beat the game by being smart. I knew a lot of
boys who hadn't been able to, and I knew they had had good heads on
their shoulders.
-----
Two weeks later I stepped out of a taxi in front of the hangar at the
airport. Some experimental military airplanes were sitting outside. It
was good to see military airplanes again. There is something about
military airplanes--something businesslike.
I entered the hangar office. The engineers were waiting for me. I knew
most of them from working with them before. They were all still just
pink-faced kids. But I knew they were bright kids. They knew their stuff
and had all had quite a lot of experience.
They greeted me with a queer sort of smile on their faces, the way you
greet somebody you know is being played for a sucker. Maybe they were
right. Undoubtedly they were. But I resented that smile in a mild sort
of way.
Bill was there. I had known Bill since before he had become their chief
test pilot. He had that same queer smile on his face.
"Hey, Bill," I said to him, greeting him with a quizzical smile
answering his own, "why don't you dive this funny airplane?"
"I got smart and chiseled my way out of this one," he said.
"It is a sap's game," I agreed with him. "But starvation is dangerous
too." He laughed, and we all laughed.
He studied me for a minute. We hadn't seen each other in a couple of
years. Finally he said soberly, "You've grown older, Jim."
"Yeah, I've grown older, Bill," I answered him banteringly, "and I want
to grow a lot older too. I want to have a nice long white beard trailing
out in the slip stream some day. So I hope you guys are building good
airplanes for diving. By the way, let's go out in the hangar and take a
look at the crate. After all, I'm mildly interested in it, you know."
We all went out into the hangar. There was the ship, suspended from a
chain hoist with its wheels just off the cement in the middle of a large
cleared area. It was silver and gleamed even in the somewhat darkened
interior. It looked sturdy and squat and bulldoggish, as only a military
fighting ship can. I was glad it looked sturdy.
A group of mechanics were swarming around it and over it and under it.
They all looked up as we approached the ship. I knew most of them. I was
introduced to the others. You could see that they felt toward that ship
as a brood hen feels toward her eggs. They didn't want me to break it. I
didn't want to break it either.
I walked around the ship and looked it over. The engineers pointed out
special features and talked metal construction and forged fittings and
stress analysis and safety factors, and I asked questions. I was
fascinated by the wires that braced the wings. They looked big enough to
hold up the Brooklyn Bridge. I liked those wires.
I learned that a pilot had been up there and had gone over the whole
stress analysis with them and had recommended only one little change in
the ship, which had been made. I learned that he had expressed
willingness to dive the ship after that, but that he had been unable to
because another job he had contracted to do some time previously was
coming up at the same time this one was. I was glad to hear this man had
gone over the ship. He was not only one of the most, if not the most,
competent test pilots in the country, but also a very good engineer,
which I was not.
I crawled into the cockpit. There were more gadgets in it. Something for
everything except putting wings back on in the air. The racket had
changed, I decided. In the old days, dive demonstrating hadn't been so
accurate a thing. You took a ship up and did a good dive with it and
came down and everybody was happy. But now, as I could see, they had
developed a lot of recording as well as indicating instruments. You used
to be able to get away with something. You couldn't get away with
anything now. They could take a look at all those trick instruments
after you had come down and tell just what you had done. They could tell
accurately and didn't have to take your word for it.
There was one instrument there, for instance, that the pilot couldn't
see. It was called a vee-gee recorder. It made a pattern on a smoked
glass of about the size of one of those paper packets of matches. This
pattern told them, after the pilot had come down, just how fast he had
dived, what kind of a dive he had made, and what kind of a pull-out he
had done.
There was another instrument there that I had never seen before. It
looked something like a speedometer and was called an accelerometer. I
was soon to find out what that was for! Oh, they told me what it was for
then. They explained everything in the cockpit to me, and I sat there
and familiarized myself with it as best I could on the ground before
taking the ship out. But I wasn't really to find out what that
accelerometer was for until I used it. And did I find out then!
We rolled the ship out that afternoon, after last-minute adjustments had
been made on it--an airplane is like a woman that way: it always has to
have last-minute adjustments--and I made a familiarization flight in it.
I just took it off and flew it around at first. Then I began feeling it
out. I rocked it and horsed it and yanked it and pulled it and watched.
I watched the wires, the wings, the tail. Any unusual flexing? Abnormal
vibration? Any flutter? I brought the ship down and had it inspected
that night.
The next day I did the same thing. But I went a little bit further this
time. I built up some speed. I did shallow dives. I listened and felt
and watched. I did steeper dives. Anything unusual?
This went on for several days. Some minor changes and adjustments were
made. Finally I said I was ready to start the official demonstrations,
and the official naval observers were called out to watch.
I did five speed dives first. These were to demonstrate that the ship
would dive to terminal velocity. Contrary to popular opinion, a falling
object will not go faster and faster and faster and faster. It will go
faster and faster only up to a certain point. That point is reached when
the object creates by its own passage through the air enough air
resistance to that passage to equal in pounds the weight of the object.
When that point is reached, the object will not fall any faster, no
matter how much longer it falls. It is said to be at terminal velocity.
A diving airplane is only a falling object, but it is a highly
streamlined one, and therefore capable of a very high terminal velocity.
A man falling through the air cannot attain a speed greater than about a
hundred and twenty miles an hour. But the terminal velocity of an
airplane is a lot more than that.
I led up to it carefully. I went to fifteen thousand feet to start the
first dive. The ship dove smooth and steady. I pulled out at three
hundred miles an hour and climbed back up to do the next dive. I dove to
three hundred and twenty miles an hour this time. Everything was fine.
Everything was fine as far as I could tell, but when I had eased out of
the dive I brought the ship down for inspection before I did the next
two dives.
I did the next two dives to three hundred and forty miles an hour and
three hundred and sixty. I lost seven thousand feet in the last one. It
had me casting the old fish eye around to see if everything was holding
before I got through it. Everything held, but I brought the ship down
for inspection again before the final speed dive.
I went to eighteen thousand feet for the final one. It was cold up
there, and the sky was very blue. I lined all up facing down wind and
found myself checking everything very methodically. Was I in high pitch?
Was the mixture rich? Was the landing gear folded tightly? Was the
stabilizer rolled? Was the rudder tab adjusted? I was a little extra
methodical and extra deliberate. I knew that my mind wasn't normally
clear. I was breathing harder than usual. It was the altitude. There
wasn't enough oxygen. I was a little groggy.
I was a little worried about my ears. I had always had to blow my ears
out when just normally losing altitude. I had funny ears like that that
wouldn't adjust themselves. I might break an eardrum.
I eased the throttle back, rolled the ship over in a half roll, and
stuck her down. I felt the dead, still drop of the first part of the
dive. I saw the air-speed needle race around its dial, heard the roaring
of the motor mounting and the whistle of the wires rising, and felt the
increasing stress and stiffness of the gathering speed. I saw the
altimeter winding up--winding down, rather! Down to twelve thousand feet
now. Eleven and a half. Eleven. I saw the air-speed needle slowing down
its racing on its second lap around the dial. I heard the roaring motor
whining now, and the whistling wires screaming, and felt the awful
racking of the terrific speed. I glanced at the air-speed needle. It was
barely creeping around the dial. It was almost once and a half around
and was just passing the three-eighty mark. I glanced at the altimeter.
It was really winding up now! The sensitive needle was going around and
around. The other needle read ten thousand, nine and a half, nine. I
looked at the air-speed needle. It was standing still. It read three
ninety-five. You could feel it was terminal velocity. You could feel the
lack of acceleration. You could hear it too. You could hear the motor at
a peak whine, holding it. You could hear the wires at a peak scream,
holding it. I checked the altimeter. Eight and a half. At eight I would
pull out.
Suddenly something shifted on the instrument board and something hit me
in the face. I sickeningly remembered that dazing smack on the head of
six years before, and the old electric startle shock convulsed me as I
remembered the resounding crack of those wings tearing off. I
involuntarily took a fear-glazed glance at my wings and instinctively
tightened up on the stick and began to ease out of the dive. Through the
half-daze pull-out and the dawning ice-cold clearness always
aftermathing fright I dimly checked the trouble while I leveled out.
When I had got level and got things quieted down and my head had cleared
I saw that I was right. Only the glass cover had vibrated off the
manifold-pressure instrument, and the needle had popped off the dial. I
was thoroughly shaken. And I was mad because I had allowed so little a
thing to upset me so much.
I checked my altimeter. It read five thousand feet. I figured I had
dived eleven thousand and taken two for recovery.
My ears had a lot of pressure on them. I held both nostrils and blew.
The pressure inside popped my ears out easily. They were going to stand
the diving all right.
I brought the ship down to be inspected that night and decided to
celebrate the successful conclusion of the long dive. Cirrus clouds were
forming high up in the blue sky, so I figured maybe I could do it
safely. I went up to the weather bureau on the field to check on it.
"How is the weather for tomorrow?" I asked. "Terrible, I hope."
"I think it will be," the weather man said. He consulted his charts
further. "Yes, it will be," he assured me.
"Definitely?" I pressed him.
He looked his charts over again. "Yes," he reassured me, "definitely.
You won't be able to fly tomorrow."
"Swell!" I exclaimed to the mildly startled man. He didn't quite get it.
It was lousy the next morning, all right. You couldn't see across the
field. Even the birds were walking. The engineers were dismayed. They
wanted to get on with the demonstrations. I was overjoyed. I had a head.
I had celebrated a little too much.
Along about the middle of the morning it began to lift. The engineers
began to cheer up. I watched with gathering apprehension while it lifted
still further and began to break. In an incredibly short time there were
only a few clouds in the sky. I was practically sick about it, but the
engineers, with beaming faces, were having the ship pushed out.
I went up to the field lunch wagon to get a cup of coffee while the
mechanics warmed up the ship.
I went back down to the hangar and crawled into the ship to do the first
two of the next set of five dives. These were to demonstrate pull-outs
instead of speed. Here was where I found out what the accelerometer was
for.
I knew that the accelerometer was to indicate the force of the
pull-outs. I knew that it indicated them in terms of _g_, or gravity. I
knew that in level flight it registered one _g_, which meant, among
other things, that I was being pulled into my seat with a force equal to
my own weight, or one hundred and fifty pounds. I knew that when I
pulled out of a dive, the centrifugal force of the pull-out would push
the _g_ reading up in exactly the same proportion that it would pull me
down into my seat. I knew that I had to pull out of a ten-thousand-foot
dive hard enough to push the _g_ reading up to nine, and pull me down
into my seat with a force equal to nine times my own weight, or thirteen
hundred and fifty pounds. I knew that that would put a considerable
stress on the airplane, and that that was the reason the Navy wanted me
to do it; they wanted to see if it could take it. But what I didn't know
was that it would put such a terrific stress on me. I had no idea what a
nine _g_ pull-out meant to the pilot.
I decided to start the dives out at three hundred miles an hour and
increase each succeeding dive in increments of twenty miles an hour for
the first four dives, as I had in the speed dives. I decided to pull out
of the first dive to five and a half _g_, and pull out of each
succeedingly faster dive one _g_ harder, until I had pulled out of the
fourth dive of three hundred and sixty miles an hour to eight and a half
_g_. Then I would do the grand dive of ten thousand feet to terminal
velocity and pull out to nine _g_.
I took off and went up to fifteen thousand feet and stuck her down to
three hundred miles an hour. I horsed back on the stick and watched the
accelerometer. Up she went, and down into my seat I went. Centrifugal
force, like some huge invisible monster, pushed my head down into my
shoulders and squashed me into that seat so that my backbone bent and I
groaned with the force of it. It drained the blood from my head and
started to blind me. I watched the accelerometer through a deepening
haze. I dimly saw it reach five and a half. I eased up on the stick, and
the last thing I saw was the needle starting back to one. I was blind as
a bat. I was dizzy as a coot. I looked out at my wings on both sides. I
couldn't see them. I couldn't see anything. I watched where the ground
ought to be. Pretty soon it began to show up like something looming out
of a morning mist. My sight was returning, due to the eased pressure
from letting up on the stick. Soon I could see clearly again. I was
level, and probably had been for some time. But my head was hot with a
queer sort of burning sensation, and my heart was pounding like a water
ram.
"How am I going to do a nine-_g_ pull-out if I am passing out on five
and a half?" I thought. I decided that I had held it too long and that I
would get the next reading quicker and release it sooner, so I wouldn't
be under the pressure so long.
I noticed that my head was completely cleared from the night before. I
didn't know whether it was the altitude or the pull-out. One or the
other, or both, I decided, was good for hang-overs.
I climbed back to fifteen thousand feet and stuck her down to three
hundred and twenty miles an hour. I horsed back quick on the stick this
time. I overshot six and a half and hit seven before I released it. I
could feel my guts being sucked down as I fought for sight and
consciousness, but the quicker pull and the earlier release worked, and
I was able to read the instruments at the higher _g_.
I brought the ship down for inspection. Everything was all right. I went
back up again and did the next two. They sure did flatten me out, but
the ship took it fine. I brought it down for a thorough inspection that
night.
I felt like I had been beaten. My eyes felt like somebody had taken them
out and played with them and put them back in again. I was droopy tired
and had sharp shooting pains in my chest. My back ached, and that night
I blew my nose and it bled. I was a little worried about that nine-_g_
business.
The next morning was one of those crisp, golden autumn days. The sky was
as blue as indigo and as clear as a mountain stream. One of those good
days to be alive.
To my surprise, I felt fine. "Those pull-outs must be a tonic," I
thought.
I went out to do the terminal-velocity dive with the nine-_g_ pull-out.
I found that the last dive I had done the day before had flattened out
the fairing on the belly of the ship. The sudden change of attitude of
the ship in the eight-and-a-half _g_ pull-out had pushed the belly up
against that pretty solid three-hundred-and-sixty-mile-an-hour blast of
air and crushed the metal bracings that held the belly fairing in shape
as neatly as if you had gone over it with a steam roller. It was not a
structural part of the ship, however, as far as strength went, and could
be repaired that day. They decided to beef up the bracings when they
repaired it.
While I was waiting on the repair I talked with a navy commander who had
just flown up from Washington. I told him my worry about the nine _g_.
He said to yell as I horsed back and it would help. I thought he was
kidding me. It seemed so silly. But he was serious. He said it would
tense the muscles of the abdomen and the neck and preserve sight and
consciousness longer.
Somebody during that wait told me about an army pilot who, several years
before, in some tests at Wright Field, had accidentally got too much
_g_, due to a faulty accelerometer. He got some enormously high reading
like twelve or fourteen. He ruptured his intestines and broke blood
vessels in his brain. He was in the hospital about a year and finally
got out. He would never be right again, they told me. He was a little
bit goofy. I thought to myself that anybody doing this kind of work was
a little bit goofy to begin with. I decided not to get any more than
nine _g_ if I could help it.
That afternoon I went up to eighteen thousand feet again and rolled her
over and stuck her down. Again the dead, still drop and the mounting
roar. Again the flickering needles on the instruments and the job of
reading them. You never see the ground in one of those dives. You are
too busy watching things in the cockpit. Again the tensing fear for
thirty whining, screaming seconds while your life is a held breath and
the fear of your death is a crouching shadow in a dark corner. Again the
mounting racking of the ship until it seems no humanly built thing can
stand the stress of that speed much longer.
At eight thousand feet on the altimeter I shifted my gaze to the
accelerometer and horsed. I used both hands. I wanted to get the reading
as quickly as possible. That unseen violence, punishing this time,
fairly crunched me into my seat, so that I only darkly saw the needle
passing nine. I realized somehow that I was overshooting and let up on
the stick. As my head unwound and my eyes cleared up I noticed that I
was level already and that the recording needle on the accelerometer
read nine and a half. I checked my altimeter. It read six and a half
thousand feet.
When I got back on the ground the commander, who had seen a lot of those
dives, said, "Boy, I thought you were never going to pull that out. You
had me shouting out loud, 'Pull it out! Pull it out!' And when you did
pull it out, did you wrap it!"
I felt I had. I felt all torn down inside. I had forgotten to yell. My
back ached like somebody had kicked me. I was really woozy. I was glad I
didn't have to do those every day.
I wasn't through yet. During the rest of the afternoon, under a variety
of load conditions, I looped, snap-rolled, slow-rolled, spun, did true
Immelmanns, and flew upside down.
I still wasn't through. I flew the ship to Washington the next day. The
work at the factory had been only the preliminary demonstration!
At Washington I had to do three take-offs and landings, all the
maneuvers over again under the different load conditions, and two more
terminal-velocity, nine-_g_ pull-out dives by way of final
demonstration.
Just as I was getting ready to go out and do the three take-offs and
landings, the navy squadron that was going to use these ships if the
navy bought any of them showed up in a flock of fighters. About
twenty-seven of them. They landed, lined up in a neat row beside my
ship, got out and clustered around to watch me. I got stage fright. Here
was a group of the hottest experts in the country. I had paid little
attention to my landings at the factory, being too intent on the other
work. What if I bungled those landings right there in front of that
gang?
Three simple little take-offs and landings really had me buffaloed, but
I worked hard on them, and they turned out all right. Doing the
maneuvers under the different load conditions during the rest of the day
was practically fun after that.
The next day I came out to do the final two dives. I had to go to
Dahlgren to do them. So many airplanes had fallen apart over Anacostia
and gone through houses and started fires and raised hell in general
that the District of Columbia had prohibited diving in that vicinity.
Dahlgren was only about thirty miles south and just nicely took up the
climbing time.
The first dive went fine, and I had one more to go. I hated that one
more. Everything had been so all right so far, and I hated to think that
something might happen in that last dive.
I thought of the wife and kids as I climbed for altitude. It was a swell
day. I checked everything carefully. I rolled over into the dive and
started down. I caught a glimpse of the blue earth far beneath, so
remote. Then to the instruments while I crouched and hated the mounting
stress of the terrific speed. About mid-dive I saw something in front of
my face. It took me a second to recognize it. It was the Very pistol,
used for shooting flare signals at sea. It had come out of its holster
at the right side of the cockpit and was floating around in space
between my face and my knees. I grabbed it with my throttle hand and
started to throw it over my left shoulder to get rid of it, but quickly
decided that that wouldn't be such a smart thing to do. A three or four
hundred mile an hour slip stream was lurking just outside there. It
would have grabbed that pistol and dashed it into the tail surfaces, and
it would have been good-bye airplane. I fumbled it from one hand to the
other and finally kept it in my throttle hand. I noticed that I had
allowed the ship to nose up out of the dive ever so slightly during that
wrestling match, and I spent the rest of the dive nosing it ever so
slightly back in. That nose-back-in showed up as negative acceleration
on the vee-gee recorder. And in addition to that, although I pulled out
to nine and a half _g_ on the accelerometer, something had gone wrong
with it, because the pull-out turned out to be only seven and a half _g_
on the vee-gee recorder.
The navy threw that dive out, so I still had one more to do. Still one
more, and by then one more was a mental hazard difficult to overcome. I
have a morbid imagination anyway. I knew that the motor and prop had
taken a severe beating so far. Maybe one more would be just too much.
Maybe something--something that had eluded inspection, perhaps--was just
about ready to let go, and I was so damned near the finish. Besides,
although I am not superstitious, the rejected dive made that last one
the thirteenth.
They gave me a check for fifteen hundred dollars the next day and
canceled my insurance. My old car wouldn't have got as far as Oklahoma,
and wasn't big enough anyway, so I had to break a new one in on the way
down. I was back with the family in good shape, but they still had to
eat, and fifteen hundred dollars wouldn't last forever, so I was looking
for another job. I thought I had one coming up ... a diving job!