Chapter 1 The Airshipman

Note to readers: This is the first chapter of a novel about a machine that could really be built. It is a kind of book-length advertisement for a technology that I want investors to embrace, but it’s also a swashbuckling tale of adventure. The whole novel— the first edition— is published on Kindle here (https://a.co/d/5PkRPXX) or you can download a PDF here (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ygdb8FrAzQHzf1fzGK3u5TiSJBNHwI9c/view?usp=share_link). I’m hoping to write a second edition after the novel has been vetted by engineers for maximum technological realism and then adapted to remove any technological impossibilities I may have accidentally introduced. Posted here for ease of feedback.)

Note: This post has been edited in response to some feedback. Thank you!

Everyone nowadays loves my cousin Captain Jake Munro, but when I was a kid, I felt like I was the only one. He was the black sheep of the family, ditching school and fighting, with a cool demeanor that seemed to disdain responsibility, order, and our whole way of life. He always found a way to do something dangerous, like climbing into class through the window on the third floor, or speeding while hanging one leg out the car window, or making his own fireworks. He didn't want a conventional life, and we didn't understand what was calling him instead. But for me, his vague dreams were a window on a bigger world, and wherever his restless heart led him, I wanted to follow. To what a lot of adventures, rollicking around the globe on the famous outlaw airship Jove's Chariot, that took us in the end! 

It was on big family camping trips that I first got to know Jake well. He was around twenty then, but for some reason, bless his heart, he still had time for us kids, especially me. He played games, and told ghost stories, and took us on hikes and swims and rock climbs and other adventures. Long afterwards, the thirteen years that Jake and I spent together on Jove's Chariot, the years full of meandering voyages over Africa and Antarctica and Russia and the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean and Argentina and so many other places, they still seem in memory almost like a long camping trip with friends. More often than not, we were in remote, wild places. And we kept the windows open almost all the time when we weren't in the polar regions, so the palatial deck was full of fresh air, and the sounds and smells of a thousand places poured in. We heard the cries of seagulls, the crashing of waves, the hubbub of village markets, the roaring of waterfalls, the trumpeting of elephants, the howling of wolves, the crowing of roosters, the throbbing music of insects in a green forest. We smelled hay being cut, salt sea air, wild spices… and, well, a few less pleasant things. Fortunately, we could close the windows if we wanted to. We were practically living in a nature show, and we got so desperate with curiosity to understand what we were seeing that we hired our own naturalist, Drew Keats, to narrate all Earth's wild landscapes to us. Knowing something about it all only made it more beautiful. To be out in it like that, with that magical feeling of oneness with nature… Ah, those were the days!

I have a theory that every new technology needs to have its own heroes before it's really arrived, really come home to the human imagination and been accepted as part of the human experience. The sailing ship needed its Columbus and its Francis Drake. The airplane needed its Red Baron and its Charles Lindbergh. And the 21st-century giant airship needed its Captain Jake Munro, before airships became, once and for all, not only part of the way we live, but of the way we dream, and not only part of our experience, but part of our stories and imaginations. Before that, there was a lot of hype, and there was a lot of disillusionment and cynicism, and no matter how much was accomplished, how many first-time feats were performed, most people couldn't really make up their minds what it was all about and whether it was any good. Captain Jake defined airships, made them real, and made people love them, so that it's a travesty, now, to think of a world without them.

To see what I mean, think back to the 2020s. I was just a kid then, so these are some of my earliest memories. In the middle of that decade, you'll recall, the first of the new generation of giant airships began to wander the skies. By the end of it, probably everyone had read a headline about "world's largest aircraft launches in…" someplace like Bedfordshire or Mountain View or Akron or Quebec or France or wherever; the record was always being broken. People didn't understand what it about in detail, but I think most had a notion that airships flew on a different principle from airplanes, and had some connection with the old Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg history. The headlines talked, above all, about their enormous size. Journalists wore out the superlatives of size as they tried to find new words for each world's largest airship that floated out of a hangar. "World's most gigantic!" "World's most humongous!" In that respect, the airships did not disappoint. Every airship that flew over a big city drew admiring crowds back then, and their size, three hundred feet long, five hundred feet long, then in the 2030s, a thousand feet long, 1200 feet long, 1500 feet long, 2000 feet long, boggled people's minds. Most of the world's billionaires were involved, starting with Sergey Brin, then Elon Musk, who briefly became the first paper trillionaire in history on the strength of his airship companies during the Airshipmania stock market bubble. Jeff Bezos was a player, sporting vague promises of using an airship as an aircraft carrier for a drone fleet, and as a floating warehouse for Amazon products to be delivered on demand to a 50-mile radius within 20 minutes. That never happened, but Amazon did build some cool airships. The Waltons decided airships were cool and invested a couple billion, then Bill Gates discovered airships, coming late to the party, as he had once been late to realize the power of the emerging internet, but then moving in so aggressively that he briefly threatened to monopolize the emerging industry. His notion was that a fleet of giant airships was the perfect way to achieve the Gates Foundation's twin goals of reducing carbon emissions and aiding the development of Africa. 

Then for a brief moment in the mid-2030s it looked like idealistic crowdfunded airship projects were going to succeed, and maybe even dominate the future of the airship. They, in turn, were overtaken by the sovereign wealth funds as the main investors and militaries as the main customers. That was possibly less ominous than it might sound, since the headline applications at which the militaries aimed were humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and also to catalyze a technology the civilian uses that would promote national security in the West by reducing demand for fossil fuels. However, we also heard dark rumors about airships as aircraft carriers for fleets of killer drones, scouring a landscape to destroy enemy tanks or even enemy guerrilla fighters. I'm sure glad that never really happened! What with one thing and another, by the mid-2030s, the race was truly on.

Meanwhile, the actual flight performance of all these much-hyped, expensive airships was less impressive. There was plenty of scoffing every time a seemingly easy operation had to be abandoned because of some technical failure that seemed so basic you couldn't understand how the engineers failed to think of it. And how those airships had to run away from weather! There'd be some mild cold front with a little snow and rain and a small risk of high winds, and all the airplanes would still be flying unconcernedly, but some billionaire's sky yacht would have to dash a thousand miles away into the Caribbean to get out of its way. Hangars were scarce. Refueling was a problem. Nothing seemed to go smoothly. 

Once-eager customers got fed up and backed away. Even when big feats were achieved, they came years after they had been promised, were more difficult and hazard prone than promoters had led people to expect, and were slow to become standard operating procedure. The first African airship safari took place in 2031, and some of the reviews were spectacular, but high ticket prices and perceived risks kept most African safari tourism on the ground in Jeeps. The first manufactured home was installed from above by airship in 2032, but even twenty years later, most new residential neighborhoods were site-built or delivered by truck. The first airship-access-only mine, in Canada, was constructed in 2033, but there were only three more by the end of the 2030s, and by then the first one was no longer an airship access mine, for a road to it was completed in 2037, to the considerable relief of the miners and owners, who had found airships a scarce and unreliable means of resupply.

There were always more investors and customers to take the place of the many who quit in disgust. Too many, indeed. Any airship venture could pull in dollars from scores of suckers, and financial regulators had a wretched time sorting out the bona fide ventures, even if many were a little crazy, from the outright scams. And as operations that would have been inconceivable before now seemed like they just might be possible thanks to airships, companies dreamed them up and blabbed to journalists and fed the airship hype. By the mid-2030s, that hype was having its way. There were still only forty to sixty giant airships actually flying, depending on how you count some that were only borderline competitive in transportation functions (smaller airships worked in surveillance and advertising) or were frequently under repair. There were four hundred more under construction, but how many would ever be finished was anyone's guess. It was common for airships to become obsolete while they were being built. There were a hundred airship companies, most of which had never built an airship, and four hundred or so other companies that had more or less staked their futures on the rising airship industry, with plans to feed into the airship construction supply chain or else to apply airships to creative new endeavors. 

Even the pope helped inflate the Airshipmania bubble, when he urged the faithful to assist Catholic Relief Services to buy ten airships for their campaign against world hunger. They raised $3.7 billion, only to find that, at the height of the helium crisis in the late 2030s, none of the brave-talking airship builders could sell them anything. There was much snickering then about His Holiness becoming the latest sucker to buy into the airship bubble, but my perspective is different. Some idealistic young Catholics who were fired up by the pope's dream of airships relieving world hunger became my colleagues, and really did get a chance, on Jove's Chariot, to live that dream. Still, I agree that he looked a little silly at the time.

My hometown of Portland, Maine should have had a major claim to fame because it was the scene of the first fully operational cargo airship airline, Milt Whickutt's Skywalker Airlines, running every day except Sundays between Maine and France. But somehow poor old Milt became nothing but the butt of jokes outside Portland. Skywalker Airlines worked, sort of, but it didn't live up to the ever-accelerating hype. Weather-related intermittency, in particular, was mercilessly mocked. Why did one airship flight out of three get canceled or rescheduled?

In vain did Milt explain to journalists again and again that we knew about this, we planned for it, we wrote it into shipper's contracts. If the airship couldn't fly, shippers could upgrade to airplane freight, downgrade to waterborne, or wait for the weather to clear. We were very transparent about their place in the queue. Some shippers hadn't understood this and got upset, but most had planned for it and didn't mind. They chose us, partly for the lower carbon footprint of their logistics, but mostly because we were cheaper per ton. It worked. It was profitable. Weather-related intermittency was an inherent limitation of airship technology, but not a debilitating one, and we had implemented appropriate workarounds. But out-of-state journalists just couldn't get that. They kept asking when the problem would be fixed. And of course, there were fifty smooth-talking startups in Silicon Valley and Manhattan telling venture capital investors that they had a way to fix the weather-related intermittency problem, and scoffing at the incompetence of old Milt Whickutt, so you can see why the journalists wouldn't take out word for it that this was the best airships could do.

I say "we" because I work for the grand old man now, and it's hard to take off my Skywalker Airlines hat when writing about the times when I was just a kid. Yet even then, the whole town of Portland, Maine felt invested in Skywalker Airlines and Milt Whickutt. We liked him, and we couldn't understand why no one else did. True, he was no pretty boy with his thinning hair and two chipped teeth, but we thought his bow ties were dapper, his grandfatherly demeanor charming, and his life story rather wonderful. The Whickutts had been prominent citizens of Portland for 150 years, distinguishing themselves with three ship captains, a mayor of Portland, and four judges. Milt's father took a fancy to being a country gentleman, and there on his estate 30 miles out of town, Milt met, and took pity on, a hard-working, pretty, somewhat clueless girl who became his neighbor while she chased a dream of running an organic farm. While Milt, overeducated and balding in his late 30s, was being groomed during the day to run one of the family businesses, he kept looking over the fence every evening and finding opportunities for stealthy bits of charity. Like "I've been wanting to upgrade my tractor, do you want to use my old one?" Or "I'd be obliged to you if you took this roll of hose off my hands, I don't have room for it in the shed." When she caught him sneaking around in the light of dawn to replace hens that a fox has carried off to Milt's woods, the game was up, and by the time she was done treating him to breakfast, they were in love.

And then she turned out to be the runaway daughter of a Silicon Valley billionaire! She couldn't stand the ultra-sophistication and subtle greed and fascination with the future of Silicon Valley. She longed to get back to nature, to put down roots, to leave behind the treadmill of technology. So she ran away, and her father didn't even know where she was. Milt sympathized, yet he didn't quite approve. He thought parents and children should get along. So he made it his mission to reconcile the girl he loved with her estranged father, and so began the weird journey but eventually made him the proprietor of Skywalker Airlines. It was a way of living up to his own family traditions, following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather the ship captain, but above all, it was calculated to impress his new father-in-law as an endeavor worthy of a Silicon Valley dynasty, and to give him something to brag about back home, so that his daughter would seem like a credit to him rather than an embarrassment. Milt said that the day his father-in-law came to his wedding was the proudest of his life. Of course, Skywalker Airlines was started mostly with a little bit of Mrs. Whickutt's daddy's money, though Milt started trying to diversify his investors right away. But daddy's money came back to haunt him during the helium crisis. 

Anyway, the point is that we thought old Milt was wonderful, and we knew that he was doing it as much for Portland, Maine as for anything else. But to the rest of the industry, he wasn't the kind of futuristic visionary who ought to have been running the world's first working airship airline. And his returns on investment were terrible. If he had been making losses, but expanding, that would have been fine. But Skywalker Airlines seemed mature, running its eight-airship fleet on just one route, year after year, and paying dividends, which amounted to just a 10% return or so for investors who had got in right at the beginning. And Milt wanted to do it for the rest of his life. To startup founders pitching to venture capitalists, a 10% ROI was a disaster. So the whole industry was talking about Milt as a failure, an embarrassment, a cautionary tale, and in a way, they had a good reason. They had a vision of a glorious future for giant airships dominating intercontinental shipping and ecotourism and mining support and even eclipsing land-based trucking and enabling whole new lifestyles and reviving international trade growth and globalization and cutting carbon emissions to save the environment and rescuing wild nature from clear cutting and road building… well, in short, you might say they had a vision of the world that we're all living in now, although some of the promises didn't pan out, and there were plenty of things they didn't foresee. Anyway, their vision would require building thousands of giant airships, with trillions of dollars of capital invested, and to incentivize early investors to take all the risks of being pioneers, they had to promise sky-high returns in the event of success, so they had to throw Milt under the bus. Milt, for his part, grew increasingly resentful of the emerging industry and the venture capital surge and Airshipmania in the stock market. It put him in the awkward position that Skywalker Airlines was worth less as a company, first than the airships in its fleet, and later on, less by far even than the helium in its airships. 

Milt could have liquidated the company and become a billionaire, but how would that have helped Portland, Maine? So he held out stubbornly, denounced the bubble ever more fiercely, and was still flying after the crash of 2039. In 2037, he was forced by investors, led by daddy, to sell off his helium and switch to hydrogen as a lifting gas, which also meant that he had operate the whole airline from international waters, since hydrogen airships over land were illegal. That was a difficult pivot, and sad for the city, since for a few years the airships stopped out at sea, exchanging loads with a barge, and we didn't get to see them fly over our heads anymore. And by the time the airships could fly into town again, they were too common to be a tourist draw. But Skywalker Airlines got an impregnable cash hoard and its future was secure.

The helium crisis of the late 2030s gave airships a bad name until Captain Jake came along to redeem them. It started when Congress passed the Airship Development Act in 2034, intending to seize the initiative for the United States and to make it the unassailable airship capital of the world. There were lots of subsidies for towns to build hangars. Ten years later, hundreds of towns regretted contributing their 50% match to these projects. Twenty years later, they were glad they had done so after all. There was lots of money for the Department of Defense to fund R&D and equip itself with a huge airship fleet. But the fateful provision of the Airship Development Act was that a massively increased US government investment in the Helium Strategic Reserve. 

The increase was phased in over a decade, the idea being that that would incentivize helium exploration while leaving enough helium for airship builders to buy. But the results of helium exploration were disappointing, and by 2038, the US government's scheduled helium purchases were taking almost all the helium on the market. That drove up helium prices, and the rising price of helium attracted speculators, who bought helium, not because they had a use for it, but because they expected its price to rise. That became a self-fulfilling prophecy: people bought helium because its price was rising, and its price rose because people were buying it. Vicious circle. 

Sensible people said we should change the law and the US government should stop buying helium. But the helium speculators lobbied against that. Other people said we should legalize airships flying with hydrogen instead of helium. But the helium speculators lobbied against that, too. The real helium exploration companies, as distinct from the speculators, also had an interest in keeping US government purchases on track, and hydrogen airships illegal. So they made common cause with the speculators, but since the speculators had lots of money but no public credibility, while the helium exploration companies were cash strapped but much more creditable, a secret arrangement developed whereby the speculators hid behind the helium exploration companies and subsidized them. Then a whistleblower told the press about that, and there was a big lawsuit. Then there was a smear campaign against the whistleblower. What a fiasco! 

While this was going on, all through the late 2030s, there were a lot of fully built airships sitting in hangars that couldn't get helium. Startup founders kept having to reassure restless venture capital investors that they were making good use of the enforced down time, making tweaks that would improve performance as soon as the helium supply loosened up, or hydrogen operations were legalized. All these promises came back to haunt them when, in 2039, the FAA finally started allowing hydrogen airship operations for testing, though still not commercial, purposes. Long-idled airships floated out of the hangars, full of hydrogen, and mostly, they proved a lot less maneuverable, and a lot more vulnerable to wind, than the builders had promised to their investors. Markets seized up, disillusionment set in, and the bubble went into reverse. Soon people were joking about airship company founders who found themselves unable to pay $15 for a restaurant meal, and offered a million dollars' worth of airship company stock instead.

To be fair to Congress, I should mention here that there were some great things about the Airship Development Act. First, it helped establish the World League of Islands, an arrangement that islands could opt into whereby airships could land freely within five miles of their coasts. It was framed as a human rights issue about safe havens for distressed airships at sea, so Jove's Chariot crewmen could claim rights under its charter simply as human beings even when we were internationally outlawed. We made lots of use of that. Second, it helped establish a worldwide norm that ocean-going ships should refuel airships at need, for three times the fuel price in port, and airships, in return, should evacuate aging or imperilled mariners. Jove's Chariot made a lot of use of that too.

After the Airshipmania bubble in the US popped in 2039, the airship capital of the world moved to Hong Kong and the Pacific Rim of Asia. They had already hit on the right solution to the lifting gas problem. Helium was still required for operations over city centers or with passengers, but elsewhere, hydrogen could be used as a lifting gas for cargo airships, subject to a rigorous inspection regime funded by taxes specific to hydrogen airships. After thirty years of intensive hydrogen airship operations during which not a single hydrogen airship, other than Jove's Chariot, has ever exploded, people have gotten relaxed about hydrogen. It's hard to recapture how scary hydrogen still was back then. Having flown in a hydrogen airship for thirteen years, I can attest that feeling like a pinhole leak and a stray spark could turn your home into Armageddon at any minute affects your nerves. I remember that a lot of people disapproved of Milt Whickutt when he switched to hydrogen. But for that, Jake would never have got his start. While Milt's airships flew with helium, every internship attracted hundreds of applicants. As soon as he switched to hydrogen, it was hard to staff the airships at all. In Asia, investors were extremely wary of hydrogen cargo airships, and initially, companies had to promise huge ROIs to compensate for the perceived risk of hydrogen. But the inspection regimes built confidence, and the stocks of hydrogen cargo airship companies surged in value. That was one of the factors driving the Asian Airshipmania bubble that peaked in late 2045.

In the US, disillusionment in the aftermath of the 2039 crash got metaphysical. There were gloomy reflections on the pride of man and the folly of technological ambition. But the Asians saw the crash as reflecting US-specific factors, especially the weird vagaries of the helium market under the influence of perverse policies. Asians bought up lots of distressed American airship companies, mostly for the sake of their patents, and built the airships in Asia, mostly to run cargo routes between Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, South Korea, and Japan, all short hops over water with lots of trade volume. The Asians didn't innovate all that much in airship designs. Some think that Asians are just inherently less innovative than Westerners, but I think the low-hanging fruit in airship innovation had already been picked by the late 2030s, and what was needed at that point was just what the Asians excelled at: mass production. 

Build times kept coming down: one year, six months, two months, even as little as three weeks by the end of the 2040s. Quality and precision improved. Supply chains improved. Materials improved slightly in quality and dramatically in price. Armies of workers had very exact instructions and worked with speed and precision, alongside increasing numbers of specialized robots. Journalists began to talk of "assembly line methods," but that was only a metaphor. There was no conveyor belt moving half-built airships along the line of workers. I've seen the time lapse videos of Asian airships being built from the 2040s. It's amazing, vaguely resembling a giant egg gradually rising out of the ground, as scaffolding constantly shifts around it, like sand. The number of giant cargo airships operating started almost doubling every year, yet there was enough demand in East Asia alone to keep them all busy, as supply chains adapted to the new options for moving products quickly by air among the coastal and island industrial powerhouses of the Pacific Rim. Some of the cargo companies had global expansion plans, and Milt Whickutt was a little worried, for he couldn't match their prices.

But the Asians didn't prove to be very adept at penetrating markets other than straightforward cargo shipping. And that tended to be a low margin business. Huge profits could occur when just one airship-wielding carrier was grabbing market share from airplanes and ships, but as soon as another carrier with airships came along, price competition drove margins down fast. In higher-margin businesses like exploration and mining support, or cruises and ecotourism, Westerners seem to have more of a knack. That was one factor that eventually popped the Asian Airshipmania bubble. Another was that the intellectual property rights Asians had purchased at fire sale prices in 2039 proved much less valuable than they had expected, because US courts proved rather friendly to inventors patenting new workarounds that looked very similar to the original inventions. But of course, the main problem, as with any bubble, was simply that people started buying shares just because they expected their value to rise, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hong Kong became a crazy boomtown, sucking in money from all of East Asia to some extent even the rest of the world, as people wanted to get in on the action of share prices gaining a steady 5% per month. Bubble apologists had lots of stats on their side. Why shouldn't airship stocks double in value every year if airship freight ton-miles were increasing fivefold? The idea of commodification, the principle that competition brings down profits, became a whispered heresy. In a bubble, only the liars survive, blowing smoke, fueling the delusions, as they try to find a bigger fool to sell their inflated assets on to before they go broke. Jake was in Hong Kong then and saw it all firsthand, and it scarred him for life.

In retrospect, the great Asian Airshipmania crash of 2045 wasn't a judgment on the future of airships, but only on the sustainability of high profits for Asian airship companies. But at the time, it seemed as if the idea of a giant hydrogen airship blowing up in the sky, which had haunted so many people's imaginations for years, had arrived not as a physical event but as a master metaphor for the whole airship industry, which was always flying high and then blowing up financially. Everyone had seen giant airships flying, once or twice at least, but their global economic footprint was still small, and they seem to be the culprit in constant bubbles and financial disasters. 

And then that first desperate voyage of Jove's Chariot riveted the world's attention, and all that past didn't matter anymore.

Thirteen years later, the adventure ended, and I came home to Portland, Maine, with no plans for the future. I had a little savings, and stayed with my mom and dad trying to regain the old footing and remember what it was like living in America. It was good to go to my old church again. I'd kept in touch with my friends pretty well. They'd mostly married and had kids, and some had moved away, but it was pretty easy to take up where I left off with the ones that were still in town. The first round of meetings with old friends were mostly about catching up and telling stories. In the second round, and by this time a few weeks had passed, I struck them as a little bit anxious about my work situation. Word got round, and brought me an interesting visitor.

One bright, cool, blue-sky Saturday morning in late summer, the doorbell rang promptly at 9AM. I left my breakfast and went to open it. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The first features I recognized were the chipped teeth and the bowtie. He was past sixty, but still in charge, vigorous, busy, and dapper. It was Milt Whickutt! In the flesh!

"Hello… sir… Welcome! It's an honor," I stammered. "Please come in!"

"Good morning!" he said, not yet entering. "I'm Milt Whickutt. Pleased to meet you!" And he offered his hand to shake.

"I know that of course! I recognized you immediately." Introducing myself, I added, "Tommy Daly," and shook his hand. "Please come in!" This time he did.

"I've come here this morning hoping to hire you," he said, with his usual gravitas but also a welcoming tone. "I heard through the grapevine that you needed work. I'd like to see you flying airships for Skywalker Airlines."

I was too surprised to speak. Ten seconds passed.

Milt gave his biggest, warmest, most encouraging grin, and said, "Well, aren't you going to say anything?"

"Sorry," I said, "I'm a little overwhelmed, being in the presence of the local hero."

Milt Whickutt grinned with pleasure at being called a local hero. Then he said, "I feel the same way." I didn't dare to understand that until he added, "This is one local hero offering a job to another local hero. We local heroes need to stick together!" Milt smiled again. I felt shy and looked at the ground to hide a blush. I was still overwhelmed.

"I would love to do it," I said, "but I don't really have the experience."

"You'd be the most experienced airshipman I've ever hired," said Milt.

"Airshipman maybe, but I'm no pilot. I flew Jove's Chariot maybe ten hours in my thirteen years on the crew. I've never pulled up to a mast. Mostly I just refueled the airship, and the systems I used for that are obsolete now. Plus I was… well, sort of Jake's poodle or something…"

"Bulldog," Milt countered, with a smile of praise.

"Well," I said, smiling at last, "maybe a Labrador retriever."

But Milt shook his head to dismiss the dog metaphor and said seriously, "Captain Jake's best friend and closest confidant."

I couldn't argue with that. Jake had honored me with his confidence to an extraordinary degree. Some of his weightiest cares he had kept completely to himself for everyone else's good, wrestling with them in the solitary darkness of his own soul. I felt them but couldn't make him talk about them. And sometimes he had to keep other people's secrets from me. But all in all, he had trusted and confided in me more than anyone else, and he always knew that he had my complete loyalty. I guess family has certain privileges. I couldn't help but get thoughtful and quiet at the mention of it.

"I'm sure that Skywalker Airlines can benefit a good deal from the knowledge you picked up as a crewman of Jove's Chariot," Milt persisted.

"I'm afraid you'll be disappointed," I said. "Others were knowledgeable, not me… But don't get me wrong, I'd absolutely love to work for Skywalker Airlines. I've always been a huge admirer of your company."

"And I of yours," said Milt. This time I understood right away. And, wow! The old aristocrat sure had some charm.

"Listen, I understand your reservations," said Milt. "But you'll just be a trainee at first, then a co-pilot, before you're in command of an airship on your own. We'll get you all trained up. I'm sure you'll succeed. Not that I never make mistakes," he added with a self-deprecating smile. "I seem to remember declining to extend the contract of a certain Jake Munro. But I'm sure you'll succeed."

"Well," I yielded at last, "that sounds pretty good. When would you want me to start?"

"Anytime you like," said Milt. "Monday, if you're free."

"It's a deal," I said. "I guess I'll see you then." We made a little more awkward small talk in which I kept saying that it was an honor to meet him. Afterwards, I half believed that I dreamed it, until I showed up at Skywalker Airlines headquarters on Monday morning and found that sure enough, I was expected.

I was a trainee for three months, then a copilot for four, and piloting their ship after seven, an unusually fast progression. It definitely helped that I had such a good feel already for how airships moved. Lots of things were instinctive for me that others had to learn. And I had a great network to help me out, in my old crewmates from Jove's Chariot. Archie Jones himself, in particular, was very generous with his availability to explain things that I had trouble with. Some of the guys on Jove's Chariot were so good that by comparison with them I'd come to take for granted that I was incorrigibly incompetent. My easy success this time was a pleasant surprise.

And Milt was probably right that I contributed my share of knowledge back, because the experienced pilots at Skywalker could learn more from my stories about my Jove's Chariot days than I ever knew. I found myself relaying their questions to Archie Jones, and reporting back his answers, to the fascination and delight of my new colleagues. Every time I got home from one of the annual Jove's Chariot reunions that we started to have about this time, usually in Argentina or Zambia, the stories and I brought home became the talk of the office for a week. I was starting to feel, tentatively, that Milt had made a good hire, and I was earning my keep. 

I'd worked at Skywalker for 14 months when it happened to me the first time. Clara from HR called with a request from the boss himself.

"Hey Tommy, what are you doing next Tuesday?" she asked. "At about 9:45 AM?"

I checked the schedule on my phone. "Well, it looks like I'll have just floated off the mast, on my way to France, in command of Skywalker 119, with… hold on, let's see… 88 tons of nuts, 33 tons of beef, 15 tons of wild blueberries, 13 tons of live lobsters, 90 used cars, some bulldozers, a few tons of shoes, a couple of tons of computers… So far everything is containerized… Here are 67 tons from FedEx, so probably that's just mail, hopefully there's no surprise project cargo in there… Hmm, three manufactured houses and a boat… And some kind of a reactor, with huge dimensions… I'd better look at the drawings of that and think it through…" Feeling a little dismay, I paused at this point and selected my tone of voice carefully as I went on, to avoid sounding disgruntled at the way Milt's recent ambition to win more project cargo was causing some longer hours for us captains without, so far, any extra compensation. I didn't have any doubt that Milt would get around to treating us fairly pretty soon, and didn't want to worry him while he was in the throes of marketing the new initiative. "OK, looks like I'd better show up a couple hours early that day to help make sure the load is balanced, just in case we need to do some testing before we get underway…"

I paused, which gave her an opening to interrupt without rudeness. "Longfellow Elementary has a school assembly that day. Milt was hoping that you'd be the speaker."

"But what about Skywalker 119? Who will move all that freight to Europe?"

"Don't worry, we'll find a sub for you."

"What would I… um… talk about?"

"Jove's Chariot."

Of course, I agreed, but the words Don't worry, we'll find a sub for you haunted me. Was I that replaceable? 

At one level, the speaking gig was definitely to my advantage. 

I was paid on salary, and having a sub meant an extra two days to myself while Skywalker 119 made its way to France and back. In general, the rhythm of work at Skywalker Airlines was two weeks on, two weeks off. Being on duty meant a 40-hour flight to France, then, after a few hours for load exchange, a 40-hour flight back to Maine, twice a week– if the weather cooperated. Of course, we slept in shifts aboard the airship itself. Three pilots traded off, so you'd often have a few hours to yourself while the airship was cruising, though you might have to do paperwork or training. In later years, when I was married with a daughter, I had loving conversations with my wife, helped Suzy with her schoolwork, and watched her soccer games and basketball games over a video link during my off hours over the North Atlantic. 

Occasionally, there was time to swing by home mid-week, in between the Atlantic crossings. And we didn't ordinarily schedule flights for Sunday. However, if we had a backlog because there had been bad weather, the recovery plan would usually involve Sunday flights. That happened a lot. It wasn't uncommon to get unexpected time off, though. I learned to use it well, hiking or reading or visiting family or going to museums while a storm swept through the North Atlantic and five or six giant airships waited patiently on their masts just north of Portland. In later years, I once pulled the kids out of school and took them to Acadia National Park on an unexpected day off after an overtime-consumed couple of months when we had been catching up with a backlog. 

There were also a lot of in-person trainings when you weren't flying. Some were officially optional, but I treated them all as mandatory, good company man that I was. Some of them were brilliant guests invited by an enthusiastic Milt, while others were mandated by the FAA, which were usually boring and only sometimes seemed necessary. 

The point is that while it didn't really add up to that many hours on duty, certainly less in total than a traditional eight-to-five job, it could feel a little bit grueling, what with the way you had to be on call so much, and I should have been grateful to get three days off for one-hour talk to some kids. But I felt let down, and when it happened again, and again, and again, my fears accumulated.

Clara in HR was a pretty girl, in her late 20s, not married, and I had asked her out once. She turned out to have a date that night already, with an on-and-off boyfriend that I hadn't known about. But she seemed sorry to have to turn me down. After that, there seemed to be a touch of tenderness between us. So one day I took the risk of voicing the question that was haunting me.

"Clara," I asked, "don't you suspect that Milt Whickutt doesn't think much of me as an airship captain?"

"Oh, Tommy," she said in a warm, tender, half-laughing tone with a trace of scorn, "don't think like that. Milt wouldn't put a $150 million airship in the hands of a man that he doesn't trust."

"But why does he keep sending me off to talk to kids?"

"Because he believes in inspiring kids," she said loyally. "In giving them role models of achievement and heroism. That's what really makes Milt tick."

That put it in a new light. "Well, you're right, he does," I agreed. I remembered the whizz-bang science and technology speakers that had visited my school when I was a kid, courtesy of Skywalker Airlines. "Okay, I'm sorry. Forget that I asked."

It still sounded to her like I needed some reassurance, so she said, "I think it's amazing what you guys do. To watch those things flying, with so much power and grace, and to think about the mind of a pilot, keeping track of it all, planning it all, monitoring the buoyancy, dealing with crosswinds, so much to think about… and then cruising out there, thousands of miles… Wow! You guys are wonderful. Do you like the new route?"

"You mean refueling in Greenland? Sure, yeah. Nuuk has become a really interesting town in the last few years. But what I like best is…" And for a few sentences I waxed poetic about the gulls and the mists and the sparkling waves, then scolded myself inwardly for the shameless attempt to impress her.

"But it's nothing to what you saw on Jove's Chariot, I guess," she said. "I kind of envy all those kids getting to hear about it."

If you ever do lose that boyfriend of yours, I'll take you out sometime and tell you all about it, I thought mischievously.

After that, I decided to repress my sense of inadequacy at the airline's ease in finding subs for me. But it wasn't just the fear of Milt's low opinion that had haunted me. I really loved flying airships. I needed it. The dazzling quantity of products laid out to be loaded, the winches pulling the loading deck up and down, that all the doors sealing the interior world against the elements (but you could open windows if you wanted to)... and then the slight, almost imperceptible vibration as the airship engines came on, the changing landscapes as it rose, then picking up speed, and the oceans, the vast remoteness and the strange solitude of them… No matter how blissful domestic life became in the years that followed, I still needed that.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I resented being interesting to other people mostly as the cousin of Captain Jake Munro. It is a little bit odd, at the age of 35, to feel quite certain that the rest of your life will be overshadowed by your own glorious past, glorious with a glory that really belongs to someone else. Odd, but not really unpleasant. The issue, rather, was that turning from airship captain to school assembly speaker felt like a demotion. Fortunately, Milt heard about the question I had asked to Clara and became more sensitive not to offend my professional pride by making sure that I got plenty of time flying, while speaking engagements continued as a reasonable pace, two or three a month maybe.

So what did I tell them, all those children, and sometimes college students, board meetings, conferences, and wherever else I was sent, loyally serving Milt's mission to inspire the world?

I would start by telling them some basic things about how airships worked. How air has weight, and when it is displaced by very lightweight gases such as helium and hydrogen, it causes things to rise. I'd bring a helium balloon with me to illustrate. How airships can hover in one place. How thrusters work. How avionics work. I talked about why airships usually don't land, but instead, are tethered to masts when they're not being used, and weathervane in the wind. 

I'd usually spend three to five minutes just helping students to wrap their heads around the enormous size of the things. One way I brought that home to their imaginations is to tell how, as a crewman on Jove's Chariot, when I wanted to see the stars, I had to go along catwalks and ladders for 25 minutes, up and up and up, and then over a long way to wear the observation manholes in the roof were, past the giant marshmallow mountains of fabric, not very taut but rather flabby, that contained, between them, over 40 million cubic feet of hydrogen at our usual flying altitude of 1,000 feet, and finally I'd get out and see the stars. I tell them how many times their school could fit inside Jove's Chariot. I told them how on the deck, where we lived, only those who had been voted by the crew to be considered good musicians were allowed to play and sing, but out there, in the hull, among the marshmallow mountains of hydrogen, you were soon out of earshot of everybody, and the bad guitarists were allowed to practice.

When I started talking about the business of Jove's Chariot, I was a bit careful, trying not to offend anyone, not so much the kids, who were all on our side, but teachers and possibly parents. Everyone approved of Jove's Chariot and revered Captain Jake as a hero. But there were differences of opinion about whether we had been right all along, or had gone wrong for a while and then redeemed ourselves at the end. I was happy enough to tell the story in different ways to please different crowds, although of course, I couldn't pretend to be repentant when I wasn't. In any case, I certainly didn't want to inspire kids to be the wrong kind of outlaw. After a while, I found that I didn't have to tell that much about our story because most people more or less knew it already from watching the TV show or hearing about it secondhand. So I left more and more time for question-and-answer. That made it most real for them, like a conversation with the best friend of one of the most admired men of recent history.

"So you were good outlaws then, kind of like Robin Hood and his merry men in Sherwood Forest, robbing the rich to feed the poor?" was a question that often came up in some form.

"Yes, kind of like that," I would say, "only we didn't rob anyone. Pirates rob people, and we didn't like them at all. We used to observe them from above, take pictures, get coordinates, and then alert the US Navy where to catch them. They're terrible. Honest sailors fear and hate them. We weren't like that at all.

"What we did is just stuff that some big corporations didn't like, and they had a lot of political influence so they got us outlawed for it. For example, on our first voyage, we were shipping a piece of a power plant, to make the plant work again. The company that had built the power plant didn't want us to do that, because the government had taken the plant away from them. But the people there really needed the power plant to work, so they could refrigerate their food, turn on lights, run hospital machines, and all that. So we delivered the piece anyway, and got outlawed. It seemed like the right thing to do.

"Another thing we did is ship a lot of fruit trees and farm animals to Africa. Those were special trees and animals that biotech companies had spent a lot of money developing. They wanted to make everyone who grew those trees or kept those animals pay them money that they called royalties. And in some countries, where the legal system wasn't able to collect royalties for them, they didn't want those trees and animals to be available at all. But people in those countries really needed those trees and animals in order to grow enough food to feed their children. So we delivered them, and that's a big reason why we stayed outlawed so long.*

"I don't understand how an outlaw airship is even possible," is another one I often heard. "Don't outlaws need to be able to hide from the law? Airships are so visible, floating there in the sky. How could you avoid getting caught?"

I had a lot to say to that one.

"Well, for one thing, we were never outlawed in all the countries in the world. They were always at least a few countries where we were allowed to fly, plus islands and international waters. So we didn't usually need to be stealthy. Sometimes, on the contrary, we wanted to be seen. During our world tour in 2057, we deliberately flew over lots of cities, and it was amazing how there were cheering crowds everywhere we went. Partly, that was because we were famous, and partly because we had that beautiful picture of old Jove with a crowd on his head and white hair and beard, riding in a golden chariot behind the team of twelve white, flying horses, through a pink and orange sunrise cloudscape. It was a huge painting, hundreds of feet long, with Jove more than sixty feet tall. And partly it was because we really put on a show. 

"We had these huge banners that we could suspend from these long poles, and then turn the ship around so they would wave in the wind. And we had loudspeakers and live music on board, and we would shoot thousand of these little candy parachutes from our candy guns for the children to catch as they came slowly down. The parachutes were partly so the kids wouldn't get hurt by falling candy, but they were also beautiful, in lots and lots of bright colors, and it was fun to see the air filled with them as they descended. And we had this guy, Mickey Tritt, who used to be a Hollywood stuntman, who would wear a suit of lights like a performer in a circus, and jump down, suspended by a bungee, almost far enough to touch the crowd. And then, after he stopped bouncing, he would lower himself slowly, using a remote control, until he could sort of coast along on their upraised hands. I think it's still true that Jove's Chariot has been seen by more human beings than any other man-made object in the history of the world, over a billion people, about two-thirds of them on that world tour. We made a lot of money on that tour, not from the crowds, but from the passengers, who were mostly billionaires or executives of big corporations. We donated the money to the campaign against world hunger, as we'd promised to do. It was kind of a fundraiser. But I think Captain Jake was also trying to make us so popular that Congress would finally give us an amnesty and let us come home."

Let me come home, more like, I thought sadly. He always cared about getting me home safe more than all the rest of the crew put together. From our family's perspective, he had practically kidnapped me, and he was hoping to earn forgiveness that way.

"And yet we could be stealthier than you would think. For one thing, sometimes you can hide inside a cloud. Occasionally, you can hide behind a mountain and not be seen even if you're pretty close to a city. But we did usually get seen if we were in a populated area during the day. Nighttime was a very different story. If we wanted to be seen, we had floodlights that would light up the picture of Jove. You could see it better lit up at night than during the day, actually. But usually we kept it dark so we wouldn't disturb people's sleep. The engines had good mufflers and were quite quiet, but the propellers made a little noise, so people sometimes noticed that we were flying overhead because they heard the sound. Of course, if we were flying over a populated area we could sometimes turn the propellers off, and rely on momentum or the wind to get through it, but sometimes we couldn't get across without turning them on again. On a bright, moonlit night, or even just a clear night with stars, people could see by our silhouette that an airship was passing overhead. If we were traveling fast, at a thousand feet up, we would fully block the moon for half a minute or so. 

"If people did notice us, they couldn't immediately tell, at night, that we were Jove's Chariot. We were just an airship. But at the beginning, there were no airships that size flying over Africa except us, so they might guess. Later, there were enough airships around that an unidentified airship flying over Africa probably wasn't us, but by that time, there was also a Jove's Chariot tracker on the internet to help our fans get a glimpse of us. So people would often look up the tracker if they saw an airship at night, just on the chance… and then get excited when they found out. Soon, there would be a crowd, and searchlights would come out, trying to illuminate us. When we saw that, we'd swoop in and turn on the lights to give them a little show. Partly we did that to reassure them. For it was partly out of fear the people felt the need to illuminate passing airships. There were popular myths at the time of pirate airships swooping in to raid peaceful cities at night. That never really happened, by the way, but it wasn't a crazy fear since dating airships did get hijacked by bad guys. Anyway, once we got seen, we felt we had to show ourselves just to reassure them. Then the fear gave way to cheering, because everyone knew us and trusted us, and in Africa mostly liked us too. No one had anything to fear from Jove's Chariot, except some big corporations. Well, and the Taliban, as it turned out." That would always get a cheer. "And pirates." More cheers. "And poachers."

"On cloudy nights, we generally couldn't be seen at all flying overhead. That was when we could be really stealthy. Sometimes, just for fun, we would float in fairly low over a city late at night, over streets that had some nightlife happening, and just eavesdrop for a little while. We could hear the music from the bars. We could see drunken men stagger home through the street lights. We could see the taxis come to pick them up. Maybe we'd see a crowd filtering out of a movie theater after the last show. Sometimes it was fun just to hear the noise of cars again, because we were away from it for so long, out over the jungles of the Congo or the waters of the Great Southern Ocean. We had each other's company, and in a way that was plenty, but in another way you could get a little lonely out there, and it was soothing just to eavesdrop for a couple hours on a busy, happy, roistering crowd. We'd have all the windows open. It was kind of intimate.

"Planes flew above us, and we didn't have any distinctive markings on the top side of Jove's Chariot. At first, though, I think they could usually guess who we were, because, as I said, there were very few airships as big as us in the world, and none working Africa. Later on, there were lots of airships as big as Jove's Chariot, so we got more anonymous as far as planes were concerned.

"The time we really didn't want to be seen was when we were smuggling arms to freedom fighters in Ethiopia. We chose a cloudy night for that mission, flying from Kenya just as darkness fell, then high and quiet for two hundred miles to the rebel camp, then back again before morning, unseen by anyone, like a ghost.

"But mostly, the way to hide was to be where people weren't. And it just beggars the imagination how many wild, uninhabited places this world has. There is so much ocean. There are so many big deserts and jungles. We couldn't go into high mountains, because our altitude ceiling was ordinarily just 5,000 feet or so, but we still had a lot of room to roam where there was no one about. It's almost impossible for someone who's lived their whole life on the road grid to wrap their heads around the sheer size of the wild places of the Earth. Even if you think you love the wild, you've never quite been there if you went by car. Because if you went by car, by definition, there's a road there, and roads are civilization. Only a small part of the surface of the Earth is accessible by road. And that's where almost all the people live. The rest of it belongs to us, the airshipmen. I can't explain just how neat it is to land on a lake somewhere and take a swim, and it's completely wild, no buildings, no roads, no sign that any human being has ever been there before."

Another common question was: "Is it true that you took $200 million worth of gold from an African mine, then buried it, somewhere, and lost it?"

"Yes, that's true," I said with a smile. "If, by 'take,' you don't mean 'steal.' The mine operators at Fossyzalibanga thought it was dangerous to have the stuff on their premises. So they commissioned us to haul it to some kind of safe haven. We were worried too, but they begged until we agreed to do it. Then we couldn't find a safe haven. So we finally just buried it on a mountain slope. We kept the coordinates very secret, written down on a piece of paper in Jake's wallet. But now they're lost." That's a somewhat sanitized version of it, but the full story is a little hard to explain to kids.

"Here's the thing, though. Nobody, I mean nobody, believes us. Everyone thinks it's some prank we cooked up just to send treasure hunters on a wild goose chase. Your parents probably don't believe in Jove's Chariot's lost treasure either. And children should respect their parents. So don't tell them that I told you this."

"What animals did you see?" was another common question.

"Oh, we saw them ALL. Lions, zebras, hippopotamuses, wildebeest, giraffes, water buffalo, rhinoceroses, gorillas. And so many birds. We saw huge animal migrations. We saw them up close, too. We hovered just a hundred feet above a pride of lions, and Mickey Tritt wanted to lower himself down and try to pet them. Captain Jake didn't allow that. But he did let us feed some elephants by hand from overhead. I remember giving one peanuts, looking into its big wise eyes… Wow. That's illegal nowadays, biologists are afraid the tourists might unintentionally tame them and make them dependent on man. But then, we were outlaws anyway, so we would have ignored rules like that. And then there was that time when we took two rhinoceroses on board. Two male white rhinos were living in an area where there were no females, so we were commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund to bring them two female rhinos. I hear they're doing well, and now there have been a couple more generations of rhinos, each more numerous than the last. It was pretty amazing to see a rhino up close like that. The zookeeper who was with us told us not to feed them, but Captain Jake told him that if you do business with outlaws, you'd better be prepared to see some rules broken." I grinned to bring the point home, and usually got some laughs.

Sometimes the questions touched on the romantic aspect of Jove's Chariot. I went along with that, answering as best I could.

"Was Captain Jake very much in love with Alyssa D'Angelo?" teenage girls would ask in a dreamy tone of voice.

"Absolutely," I said, to please the crowd but also quite truthfully. "Heart and soul. She was the sun in his sky, beautiful as all the stars and sunrises." Groping for words to express it, I once said, "He would have gone to the ends of the Earth for her. He would have gone through fire for her." Thinking about it after, my own words came home to me, and I wondered if I had misspoken, for I realized that he had gone to the ends of the Earth, and he had gone through fire. Yet it hadn't been for her sake exactly, except in the sense that he was living up to the ideal that he represented in her eyes, the ideal he taught her that seemed too good to be true, that satisfied at last the hunger and thirst for righteousness that had so long haunted her, and that made him into her white knight forever. Does she regret that he lived up to it, paying that price? Surely she must regret it sometimes, and wish that she had loved an ordinary man, and not a hero. But I think hers was, and is, a love for the man as he was, with the life he lived and the destiny that called him, and she would not have him be less than he is just to be in her arms again. And so I kept saying those words every time, without knowing quite what they meant. He would have gone to the ends of the Earth for her. He would have gone through fire for her.

"Why did Alyssa D'Angelo fall in love with Captain Jake, when Face was so much more handsome and charming?" some girls would ask, and I could never help thinking less of them for asking that question. But I answered as best I could.

"Captain Jake was deep and true-hearted, and she saw that," I explained. "Face was just a callow adventurer." I could have said worse than that of the rascal, though he was brilliant and marvelous too, and the pleasantest company you could hope to meet. "Face lived for pleasure, but Jake lived by principles. Face seems to be the luckiest man alive, and his apparent luck sprang from a certain genius. He could discern opportunities in the flux of things that no one else could see, and he was amazingly quick-witted about catching them. We all benefited from that. But to love Face was to build a house on sand. Alyssa's heart warned her against that. Jake was the rock." And girls, let that lesson sink in, I thought, and fall in love with a real man. Don't waste your heart on some cad.

But sometimes they would reply, "But Face was really in love with her, wasn't he? Don't you think he was in love?"

And I would say, "Yes, probably he was really in love, for once in his life. Well, I'm sorry, no doubt I'm a little biased. Jake was my cousin, after all."

Finally, they often asked me, "Was it fun? Did you have a good time?"

I learned it to make it kind of whoop to emphasize my response to that. "Whoo, yes, I most certainly did, it was wonderful. It was the best adventure ever! I think it's safe to say that no one in the entire history of the world has ever had as much fun as the crew of Jove's Chariot. We ate like kings. We had spectacular views all the time. We made live music. The weather, in tropical climates but 1,000 feet up, was perfect. If there was a place we wanted to see, we went and saw it. We were important people, making money hand over fist, and shaping the destinies of nations, but Jake sort of took all the responsibility of that on himself, and made sure that we were just having fun. He was a little like Peter Pan that way, at one level, even seeming irresponsible in his sheer freedom, the spirit of fun and adventure that he let us all to feel, though he had a kind of secret destiny of his own too…" But I never did more than touch on that theme, not for the kids. I guess I never tried to express it until now.

"But as I say," I would continue, "no one in history ever had more fun than the crew of Jove's Chariot. I remember bungee jumping into Victoria Falls, my hands coasting through the thundering waters. I remember hang gliding over the African savannah. I remember all the strange pets that Drew Keats found for himself in the wild places of the Earth, birds, monkeys, iguanas, a rock hyrax, the rescued baby lion that's now in a zoo in Chicago, and that wonderful troop of penguins whom he taught to do tricks... It was like we had a zoo on board, and visitors jokingly called us Noah's Ark. And hearing Archie Jones play piano... And Father Clancy's chapel, gorgeously gilded, with the choir singing beautiful hymns every morning… and JoJo's art gallery, always changing… you probably remember JoJo as Miss Genevieve from the TV show, but we called her JoJo… But it had its dark signs too." I felt I had to add that for the sake of honesty, but I didn't explain. I didn't talk about the broken marriages, or about the three months where we took shifts doing suicide watch for Chris Cummins. I didn't tell them how Riley Mulligan stole a million dollars' worth of gold, rode off into the jungle, and was never seen again. I didn't tell them about the Grim Plain of Dardamoor.

As I told the old stories again and again, I realized slowly that I owed it to posterity to write it down, even if it's been written before and better than I can do it. The eyewitness of a hero has a kind of debt to pay to mankind. There are things I can put in writing that I might never manage to say. There are things I saw that no one else knew. So I'm doing my best. Milt Whickutt, if you're reading this, you're the person living who inspired it more than anyone else. No man has ever been more fortunate in his employers than me. You inspired me to inspire others, and I thank you, for that and for so much else. I wanted to dedicate it to you, but I realized I couldn't. It's dedicated, of course, to Captain Jake.

Continue to Chapter 2.