The Second Place: Retrostep 2 by Simon Winstanley

Author:Simon Winstanley [Winstanley, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Futurewords
Published: 2024-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

FLIGHT

The telephone operator headset they’d given him seemed to work by magic. It had no wires to connect to a switchboard, and yet he could hear the voice of a translator speaking to him with crystal clarity.

When he asked his mother why she needed to speak English instead of German, he saw her lips stop moving and the translator spoke to him again.

Apparently, she had been learning English and wanted his help to test both the translator and the wireless headset.

He politely thanked the translator and told his mother that he would love to help her.

Smiling, she extended her hand, and he took hold of it. Together, they walked out of the building and into the open air.

His first thought was that he must have slept for an awfully long time before waking up in the small room. He remembered going into the museum just after the day had dawned, but now it was darkest night.

The air was clean.

He couldn’t smell even the faintest whiff of dust or smoke. He couldn’t hear any air raid sirens. There were no distant shouts on the wind.

Perhaps he was already in the place where the war was over.

As he glanced up at his mother, he saw that her eyes were focused ahead of her. He followed her gaze and saw a wondrous and terrifying sight: a shiny machine with slowly turning rotorblades.

He’d once seen a helicopter flying above the Kiel dockyards. The thin-bodied aircraft, with exposed metalwork in its legs and tail, had looked like a stick insect wearing a wide spiderweb hat.

In contrast, the machine they were walking toward was as muscular as a dragonfly. Behind its curved glass eyes, two pilots were checking controls and toggling switches. In the side of the massive beast, a door stood open and he could see at least half a dozen seats. Two men were seated inside, but he saw that Grant was standing waiting for them.

“Willkommen an Bord, Arnold,” he gestured to the seats.

It seemed that they were all going to take a flight, though how such a heavy machine would ever leave the ground was a complete mystery to him.

Aided by his mother, he climbed up into the rear cabin of the helicopter, then she put a belt across his waist. As she sat and clipped her own belt into place, the translator relayed her words.

“Das wird schon werden.”

Hoping that everything would be fine, he held her hand tightly.

As Grant closed the door and took his seat, the helicopter seemed to growl and whine at the same time. Outside the window, he saw that the rotors were moving at tremendous speed. A few seconds later, they were a spiderweb blur. Suddenly, the noise swelled and it felt like he was being pushed down into his seat.

The dark view through the window persisted, but instinctively it felt like something was changing. It was like rising on the seat of a swing; the heavy downward force that gave way to a feeling of lightness near the top.

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