A Sky Full of Stars


They tell me Mermoz is dead, or as good as dead to us now, lost in a timestorm over the lands that history called the Mid-West.

Perhaps he managed to set down on rolling prairie, or risked a parachute as his plane aged around him, the voices on his radio lapsing into a stutter of Morse code; his instrument panel dwindling to just a compass and a few crude dials; buffeted by the sudden gale of an open cockpit, the struts and wires of an ancient biplane strumming in the wind.

I imagine him, brave and resourceful, continuing westwards on foot, undaunted by Plains Indians or the Spanish, or if he landed in earlier times, by that huge emptiness given over to the buffalo and silence.

“Mermoz didn't land at San Francisco last night.”

“Ah!” someone would say. “Ah.”

We waited to hear more, but what could be said? Mermoz had not landed at San Francisco, nor any of the fields in between, and now he would never land anywhere again.

Pilots take it for granted that we meet together only rarely, dispersed over the face of the continent, rolling to a solitary halt on remote runways. It needs the accident of journeyings to gather members of our fellowship together.

Round a table in the evening at Calgary, at Twin Falls, at Jacksonville, we take up conversations interrupted by time, we resume stories, we learn of comrades lost, and when our paths cross, we clamber down from our planes and shake hands as if we were brothers.

Like weather reports before take-off, we check on timestorms as best we can. Mermoz must have listened to short wave from Portland or Winnipeg, faint reassurances from airfields in faraway communities, all that remains of us now, linked by aeroplanes that bring mail and news.

People have become fearful of travelling, of leaving home and finding nothing when they return. Wasn’t it just last year that the famous Lindbergh, flying to Chicago, arrived to discover only settlements huddled round a wooden fort in the wilderness? Afoot, there would have been no coming back, yet in the skies above we are insulated from these catastrophes. Who can explain what has befallen us?

A young pilot asks about Jean Mermoz, so we tell her old stories.

In those days, I was newly qualified, familiar with the controls, but still ignorant of the life I had chosen to live. Mermoz had pioneered the mail-route down the East Coast to Florida, and because it was routine now, easy hops in good weather, I was to take it over.

“I will take you under my wing,” Mermoz repeated, delighted at his grasp of English, offering to co-pilot my first flight. He exuded confidence the way a fire gives off heat.

He had escaped from Europe, crossing the Atlantic in a plane I would not have trusted to circle an airfield. This was the man who had ventured over Africa, a continent haunted by deep time, emptied of mankind except for roaming bands of hominids. And perhaps it was the future we glimpsed over China. Pilots spoke of endless miles of black glass. We do not go there.

Only these Americas endure in some semblance of before, connected by those familiar with their skies, though we did not cross the vastness of the continent easily back then. Jean Mermoz would be the first to fly across that quilt of times direct to the West Coast.

I spread out my maps and asked him if he would go over the route. And there in the lamplight, what a lesson in geography I learned! He did not mention states, or towns, or radio beacons and airfields. He spoke instead of the strangeness he had glimpsed beneath his wings.

His finger tapped the map. Here, between Charleston and Savannah, there was only blackness at night, no lights from towns to help a lost pilot, not even a campfire, though flying low at dawn he swore he witnessed herds of long-necked behemoths in the wetlands.

And here, round Norfolk and Chesapeake, was a place to be avoided. Once he was shadowed by warplanes, sleek silver machines that could have shot him from the skies, though they had wavered and turned back, as if in the end they had doubted his existence. He advised flying inland instead, skirting Richmond, though it would mean relying on dead reckoning after dark.

As for the rest, he just shrugged. Droning down the Carolinas coastline to Miami, my problem, he said, would be staying awake. So of course, over Florida, we flew into a timestorm that came from nowhere.

Pilots learn to treat the inexplicable like a kind of hurricane, with winds and gradients of time, where strange physics spills over and bad weather follows like gulls after the plough. It was the way timestorms announced their existence.

“So you turned back?” the young pilot wanted to know.

This was how you learned what was expected of you, what pilots did. In her pride and youth, she might have pressed onwards, but tomorrow she would remember that Mermoz had only shrugged when I asked the same question. It had come upon us suddenly, we were already engulfed. Who knew where safety lay?

The plane staggered and lurched as if our engines had lost all strength and the propellers churned the air uselessly. Mermoz took over the controls, saying nothing. It had begun as a storm, just weather, but already we were haunted by ghosts of histories that were not our own.

With no practicalities to occupy me, my thoughts filled with memories of cosmonauts fêted through a vanished New York in blizzards of ticker-tape, and the launching of Apollo 20 on its fatal mission to the moon. Yet at the same time I was certain that below the clouds lay Canaveral, and the rusted gantries of a rocket age gone the way of Zeppelins.

The instruments in front of us rippled and changed, the cockpit growing sleek and crammed with gadgetry. All pilots know that the plane they take off in may not be the one they land. But Mermoz flew on, resolute, even as I faltered, bewildered by other times, each as real as my own.

Then afterwards, safely down, as our mechanics scratched their heads at our plane, he smiled the most heartening of smiles, and said to me simply:

“Being a pilot is not just flying a plane; practice and good engineering are enough for that. It is the struggle to hold onto our own self that matters.”

The timestorm had tossed Florida back into the years after the Great War. There were airfields and planes, automobiles and sunshine. There were worse times to find oneself cast away.

“We could have ended there,” Mermoz said. “And all this would have seemed a dream. But you must hold on to what you know, what we were flying back to. People depend on us and we on them, a radio voice to guide you at night, the welcome glimpse of runway lights when all seems lost. If you do not have the strength to hold on to who you are, then this world will not hear from you again.”

When he vanished, flying westwards to San Francisco, I must believe it was just bad engineering or bad luck, a blocked fuel line, ice on the wings, something that even Mermoz could not overcome as he tumbled into the storm of time.

And in the years since, I too have criss-crossed the continent, barely scraping over its mountain peaks, casting the shadow of my wings on endless desert and forest, welcomed in the remote settlements that we still cling to, though days spent on the ground, refuelling, or waiting for weather to pass, seemed a burden and days wasted. I was always glad to fly onwards.

The young pilot nodded at what Mermoz said, though I do not know if she understood. Perhaps it was something she must learn for herself.

I have not been tested as he was. Time has not made me choose. Though sometimes, flying at night, with just the glow of instruments in the darkness to anchor you, I find myself remembering other times; von Braun’s winged and shiny spacecraft docking with the Big Wheel, before setting out for the red planet and adventure; and once, the firing of a vast Space Gun, and spotting a lonely spark sailing outwards across a sky filled with stars.