EMERGENCE (29 page)

But immediate options exhausted.

Have decided, following discussion, to follow AA trail up West Coast, loop over northern end of Rockies, touch base throughout Midwest, finally concluding initial search back home . . .

Shucks, by this time, after posting all those leaflets, lovely little town, surrounding area, probably completely repopulated—with AAs themselves, likely as not, having stumbled across advertisements. On arrival will surely find thriving, industrious, cheerful little farming community—all wondering what's keeping me. . . .

Here we are in Fresno—what's left of it—and here we seem to be stuck. Despite distance from San Andreas Fault, earthquake must have been humdinger: Roads—even open country!—impassable north and west. Terrain broken, fissured, stepped, generally messed up something awful. Unless backtrack, loop all the way around Rockies, seems to be no way to get from here to San Francisco, Sacramento, etc., next AA addresses.

Kim keeps looking around, Giving Thanks lived no closer to epicenter—ride was quite rough enough 300 miles away in Riverside. Assuming managed to survive immediate tectonic violence (slim odds, judging by conditions hereabouts), unlikely would have had place to live. Not much left standing.

We poked up every road on USGS map, even set out across open country, cutting fences as necessary—got nowhere. Repeatedly. Every road and/or off-road compass bearing blocked by fault damage. Major displacements involved, too: Haven't found passage for even van alone, never mind with trailer. Rock shelves just 50, 100 feet high; bottomless fissures gape 100 yards wide or more—both running miles across terrain, usually intersecting with others to form impassable barriers, culs-de-sac.

Adam started grumbling about finding bulldozer, making own road; quit when couldn't find one sufficiently intact to operate.

All of which finally led ("O bliss!") to scouting by air. Just returned from second survey flight. News to west, north, all gloom: Simply no way through. Devastation astonishing. Would be difficult even afoot. Tomorrow will head east; perhaps find logging/fire road around mess through Sierra Nevadas.

This is Kim reporting: Candy is missing. She was close to eighty miles out, having traced a series of apparently usable fire trails well into Sequoia National Park, when she reported that her engine had lost power and she was losing altitude. She triangulated her location for us as well as she could by taking compass bearings on landmarks in the few moments before intervening mountains cut off her signal. Adam managed to get a bearing on her, as well, during that time, using the RDF processor incorporated into that amazing electronics wall of his, so we have a fairly good fix on her location.

However, if the coordinates are correct, she went down in an area that is both rugged and heavily forested with mature sequoias.

Jason was a Civil Air Patrol volunteer and participated in many high-country air searches. I have seen the CAP's film on recommended techniques for ditching in trees. The theory is that if you land in the treetops in a full stall, impacting at about a forty-five-degree nose-up attitude, you touch down at the slowest possible speed, and present as broad an area as possible to the foliage, so that kinetic energy is used up in smashing through the branches on the way down. It is not uncommon for trees' resistance alone to stop the descent, the ship ending up trapped in the branches. This is preferable to falling all the way to the unyielding ground, which entails a substantial impact even after deducting the retarding effects of the foliage. But either way, chances for surviving such a landing are better than one might expect.

Unfortunately, the film dealt with normal forest conditions, with trees between fifty to eighty feet tall. A mature stand of sequoias ranges between two and three hundred feet in height. Sequoias generally resemble enormously outsized pines: Trunks are massively thick, as much as forty feet in diameter, and lower halves are usually bare of branches. Top halves are sparse Christmas-tree parodies, with gnarled limbs immensely thick for their length, and little secondary and tertiary branching.

The structure of a sequoia forest offers little hope for a successful treetop ditching: There is nothing resembling the approximately level "roof" of an ordinary forest; a stand of sequoias is a sea of huge, upward-jutting cones. And as bigger trees crowd out lesser neighbors by blocking their sunlight, victors in the competition are usually less closely spaced than normal trees. Foliage generally overlaps, obscuring the sky from the ground and vice versa, but only down in the mid and lower reaches; and the branches which accomplish this are far too thick to break and absorb energy from impact with so light and fragile an object as a falling ultralight, except out at the very tips.

If Candy manages to locate a relatively closely-spaced stand of sequoias and achieves a letter-perfect pancake landing in the upper-middle branches, and if they slow and trap her plane without undue damage—and they might, as light as it is for its size—she has a chance.

Of course, that will strand her at least a hundred feet above the ground, at whatever point the branches cease. Her survival kit includes many things; but rope is heavy, and when dealing with ultralights, compromises must be made. So even if she is uninjured, getting down will be a challenge.

If she did not succeed in remaining in the treetops, however, I see no likelihood that she could have survived the passage through the branches, or the final free-fall to the ground. Repeated collisions with those huge, unyielding limbs on the way down would have demolished her miniature airplane like a balsa model. What remained would have plunged the last hundred feet like a stone.

I don't know how much of this Adam is aware of. I have not discussed it with him yet. I can't even think about it without crying.

Besides, this has not been a good time to discuss anything with Adam. Since this morning I have helped where I could and remained quiet and out of the way otherwise. Adam has been an absolute wild man: I have never seen anyone so quietly, intensely, efficiently, and constructively hysterical.

In the space of two furiously busy hours he located a generally undamaged private airfield, found an old Cessna 180 still intact, and, working like a one-armed tornado, with my small assistance, got it running.

During the next hour, operating the control yoke with his good arm and the rudder pedals with his feet, with me serving as his other hand to operate the mixture, throttle, prop-pitch, trim, and flap controls, he taught himself to fly the big old taildragger, accustoming himself to the considerable handling differences between it and the tricycle-geared ultralight. Then we assembled provisions, medical supplies, and survival equipment, including lots of rope, loaded it aboard, topped up the tanks, and took off—all five of us; we couldn't leave the animals.

We found the location that Candy had triangulated for us. From that point we extended a ten-mile radius, and within that area we began a careful search, flying slowly only a few hundred feet above the treetops.

At the outset I risked suggesting to Adam that he not waste time trying to make out anything on the ground. Chances of spotting her there were minimal to nonexistent. From the air we could see only a fraction of the actual surface; the trees were just too thick. More likely was picking up a flash of color from that brilliantly rainbow-hued wing fabric snagged in a treetop.

Adam nodded absently. He was flying by conditioned reflex, his entire concentration below us, but I think he heard me.

We crisscrossed the area repeatedly, the three of us scanning the terrain until our eyes smarted, endlessly trying to raise her on the radio. After scouring the initial twenty-mile circle without detecting a sign of her, we doubled the radius. Later we tripled it.

I think Adam would have had us out there yet, peering down through the darkness, had we not begun to run low on fuel at about the same time that we ran out of daylight. As it was, even I forgot that it was going to take close to half an hour to get back to the field, and that sunlight lasts longer at altitude than on the ground. It was still possible to make out landmarks below us, but I was glad the old plane's landing lights worked. We touched down in a gloom hardly distinguishable from dead of night. Utilities are out in this area so the runway lights no longer work, even if someone had been here to turn them on.

While I made dinner, Adam sat and glared unseeing into space. The intensity of his feelings was almost palpable. I have never seen an expression so bleakly, ragingly frustrated. His features contained no remnant of boyishness.

He ate what I put in front of him without, I think, knowing that he did so, and with no change in expression.

After dinner, Tora-chan vaulted into his lap and butted him in the stomach. When that failed to produce the desired chin-scratch, the cat upgraded his effort to a full formal head-dive. Still nothing. Then he sat down in Adam's lap, gazed up at his face with a puzzled expression, and said, "Mee-
ow
-oo. . . . !" But the boy never twitched; he remained where he was, immobile, unresponsive to outside stimuli.

I debated jolting him out of it physically, and was on the verge of giving it a try, when suddenly, unexpectedly, he stood and, in a firm, decisive, completely rational tone, said, "Come on, let's break camp. We can be at park headquarters by midnight, if those roads Candy reported really are passable."

I was caught completely by surprise. I thought he was in shock withdrawal, but he was
thinking,
furiously, accurately; evaluating every facet of the situation, together with our options.

Almost incidentally, as we prepared to leave, he brought me up-to-date on his thinking: "Searching by air is a waste of time. It would take a miracle to spot her in those trees. And even if we did, we couldn't help her from the air, anyway. So we'll save time by getting there on the ground as quickly as possible. The landmarks she used are unmistakable, and my RDF line hits the intersection of her compass bearings dead center, so we have an accurate fix on where she went down. We'll get right up there and conduct a ground search.

"We'll get some bullhorns at a police station—there are bound to be some still operational—and pick up trail bikes from a motorcycle shop. We'll pull the trailer in as close as we can get it; then push on in the van. If necessary, we switch to the trail bikes. Or we walk—

"
Oh
. . ." Adam broke off, looking concerned in a preoccupied sort of way. Obviously this was the first time all day that my presence had even partly registered, beyond my potential usefulness in prosecuting his search-and-rescue mission. "This is going to be rough. I can't drag you and Lisa into it. I'll leave you at the park headquarters in the trailer, and come back for you as soon as I find her."

He was still only half-aware of whom he was talking to or he never would have suggested anything so stupidly sexist. My reply put a stop to that right then, and got his full attention, as well:

"You and what SWAT team are going to leave us behind . . . !"
I snapped.

Adam's eyes focused suddenly. He
saw
me. I heard Lisa giggle behind my back.

"What . . . ? Oh, no-no, I didn't mean—"

"I know you 'didn't mean,' " I replied more gently. "But Candy's my friend, too. I'm entitled to help."

"What about Lisa?"

Adam tends to be a little conservative, not to say naïve, when judging the fragility of those whom he considers "children." Lisa was only slightly less forthright than I was about correcting him. "You'll never find her without me," she announced solemnly.

Adam stared. Then he smiled wanly. He interpreted her declaration to mean that he'd better not try to leave us behind, and thought she was trying to cheer him up.

But I know my daughter. That was not bravado or sloppy syntax; Lisa meant it literally. I found myself studying her thoughtfully. She pretended not to notice. She and I will have to talk about this, very soon.

We did arrive at the park headquarters shortly after midnight; Candy's advice about the roads was accurate.

I ordered Adam to bed as soon as we stopped. He didn't argue, and he let me put him under, using the trance-induction formula that Candy had implanted. Once the trance had taken hold, I converted it to normal, deep sleep.

I wish someone could do that for me. One reason I'm making this entry is that I can't sleep. I keep seeing Candy, riding that gossamer-and-toothpicks ultralight down into the sequoias, the airframe breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces as it bounces off those huge upper branches, one after another—finally plummeting unimpeded to the ground.

Another reason is that I write a pretty fair Pitman.

But the main reason I'm doing it is common decency: Adam can hardly be allowed in Candy's journal while a chance remains that she's alive. It wouldn't be fair to let him peek at her intimate reflections, especially her opinions of him, when she may have to face him again. Yes, he would swear never to violate her confidence by looking anywhere but the page on which he's writing, and he'd mean it and believe it himself as he promised. But I'm curious myself about what she's written about me, and I'm not In Love with her; though I doubt if I could feel any closer to my own sister, if I had one.

Dear God—
please
let her be all right . . . !

VOLUME IV

Destiny

 
Hello,
Posterity . . . ! Great life, isn't it?

Sorry; being silly. Please excuse. Euphoria betrays intensity of relief on
finding
self still alive.

Quite unexpectedly so: Surviving events of this morning brings new depth to expression "cheating odds."

Granted, details of flirtation with Grim Reaper, viewed objectively, probably of interest to participant only (was indeed; heart surely stopped couple times from thrill factor alone). But data valuable to Adam; understanding cause of problem key to preventing repetition—and truly in favor of that: Airplane engine failure contains potential for more than passing inconvenience!