His pulses pounding with excitement, Barry Blake gazed across the long runways of Boeing Field at his first fighting ship. The great Flying Fortress seemed to perch lightly on the ground, despite her twenty-odd tons. Her propellers were turning slowly, glinting in the sun like the blades of four gigantic sword dancers.

Despite her drab coat of Army paint Barry thought her beautiful. The slim, torpedo-like profile, the high, strong sweep of her tail assembly—even the fishy grin produced by her bombardier’s window and forward gun ports—thrilled her young co-pilot to the core. This was the ship of his dreams. Her name, Sweet Rosy O’Grady, was painted just above her transparent nose.

Hurrying forward, he saluted the long-legged, lean-faced pilot who stood by the Rosy’s armed tail.

The lengthy captain looked up from the postcard he was scribbling. He lifted a nonchalant hand.

“You’re Lieutenant Blake?” he said with a Texas drawl. “The rest of our crew are all here, getting acquainted with the ship. I was just dashing off a card to the real Rosy O’Grady—my wife. It’s finished. Come in and meet the others. Then we’ll be ready to take off.”

Inside the big bomber, Captain O’Grady introduced Barry to the six other members of the crew.

“Meet Lieutenant Aaron Levitt, better known as Curly,” the skipper invited. “He’s the smartest, and probably the handsomest, ex-lawyer in the Air Forces. Born in Manhattan.”

“Lower East Side,” Levitt added, giving Barry a cordial handclasp and a keen look. “Happy that you’re going to be one of us, Lieutenant.”

“... and this gent is our bombardier, Sergeant Daniel Hale. He’s of the old time Texas breed, in spite of hailing from Arizona and looking more like a shorthorn bull. His great-granddad died fighting in the Alamo.”

Barry pulled what was left of his hand from Sergeant Hale’s bone-crushing grip and turned to “Sergeant Fred Marmon of Glens Falls, New York—the head nurse in charge of Rosy’s roaring quadruplets.” The red-haired engineer-gunner chuckled as he acknowledged Barry’s greeting.

“Boy!” he exclaimed. “And do those 1200 horsepower babies keep a man busy! Some of ’em, that is. One engine will run like a dream for fifty or a hundred hours. Another will develop more ailments than a motherless child. I’m hoping these new engines will be the first kind, Lieutenant. If not—well, here are Sergeants Cracker Jackson and Soapy Babbitt to help me out. They’re our top-turret and belly gunners, but they know a lot about aerial power plants, too.”

Last of all, Barry Blake met Tony Romani, the pint-sized tail gunner. The little corporal was as friendly as could be, but his sad, Latin eyes seemed to hold all the cares and worries which his crew mates laughingly discarded.

He was already hurrying back to his turret when Captain Tex O’Grady said, “Okay, boys! We’ll take her upstairs! I’ll mail this postcard to Mrs. O’Grady from Salt Lake City. If you have any letters to send you can drop them there. We’re heading west to the Orient.”

The Rosy’s four big engines deepened their song of power as she rushed down the runway. She was a living, throbbing organism, but her personality was yet to be learned. Newly fledged from Boeing’s great hatchery of warbirds, she had still to get acquainted with her crew, and they with her.

Barry Blake sat alert in his co-pilot’s seat, checking the instruments, as the runway dropped away below him. At the skipper’s nod, he touched the lever that retracted the landing gear. He heard the wheels wind up with a smooth mechanical whine, and noted the time it took in seconds. Again he moved the lever, letting the wheels down and raising them back in place. He tested the action of the flaps, the engines’ response to their throttles, the revolutions-per-minute of the props. In everything the Rosy O’Grady behaved as sweetly as any lady with such a name should do.

At Salt Lake City there was a short stop; then on they flew to San Antonio. Again Barry glimpsed the familiar countryside over which he and Chick Enders and Hap Newton had flown. The perfect green pattern of Randolph Field, with three or four flights of planes swinging over it, brought a homesick pang.

“We’ll never forget that scene, Mister,” the voice of Captain O’Grady broke into Barry’s thoughts. “I graduated from Randolph ten years ago, but it’s just like yesterday when I look back.”

“Those were the happiest weeks of my life,” Barry replied with a choke in his voice. “I know it now, though at the time it seemed a tough grind.”

Captain O’Grady turned one of his warm Irish grins on the young co-pilot.

“The real, tough grind,” he said, “will come when we reach our South Pacific base, I reckon. Barring accidents, the life of a fortress is about five or six months on the battlefront. Before it’s over we’ll all feel like graybeards, kid.”

The Rosy made one more stop at Tampa, Florida, where her engines were thoroughly checked and her tanks filled. Ahead of her stretched the long hop to Trinidad, off the northern coast of South America. If anything should go wrong, there were island bases in the Caribbean Sea where an emergency landing might be made. But in aviation, an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure.

That evening in Tampa the crew had their last big restaurant meal for months to come. The following afternoon they took off despite storm warnings. There was no long last look at their native land. A few moments after the Rosy’s wheels had left the runway she was climbing through a heavy overcast of clouds.

As they roared over the southeastern tip of Cuba the weather cleared. Below them the Windward Passage lay, deep blue in the sunlight. Ahead rose the rugged mountain tops of Haiti.

Barry Blake felt a strange thrill as he gazed down into the jungle-clad valleys where not so many years ago United States Marines had hunted murderous voodoo worshipers. Somewhere in those dark gorges bloody voodoo rites were probably being performed at this very moment.

Invisible from the air the Haitian border was left behind. The dark green ranges of the Dominican Republic flowed past beneath the Rosy’s wings. Again the blue Caribbean stretched ahead of her.

Crossing the long thousand miles between Haiti and Trinidad they struck the worst weather yet encountered. At ten thousand feet the Fortress slammed into a black storm front.

It was worse than anyone had expected. The tumbling masses of air were like giant fists pummeling the big ship. She bucked like a frightened horse, reared, stood on her nose, and shuddered.

Something struck the right wing from beneath, flipping the Rosy over on her side, and off course. It was only air, though it felt to Barry like a collision with an express train. Tex O’Grady fought the controls with every ounce of strength in his big body. Muscles stood out in bunches on his lean jaw. In a flash of lightning Barry saw sweat streaming down the pilot’s face.

He glanced behind him. Lieutenant Levitt’s teeth showed in a fixed smile below his little moustache. In the lightning flashes the whites of his eyes showed clearly. Sergeant Hale’s big mouth was closed like a steel trap. Only Fred Marmon, the red-headed engineer, seemed to be enjoying himself. Meeting Barry’s eyes he winked, and waggled his fingers in a mocking gesture.

At that moment lightning struck the ship. Every light went off. The fuselage might have been the belly of a blasted submarine, pitch dark and battered by ceaseless depth charges. A beam of light touched the instrument panel. Barry Blake felt the cool barrel of a flashlight pressed into his hand.

“That will help you keep a check on your instruments!” Fred Marmon’s shout sounded in his ear.

Barry was grateful for his first chance to do something, however small, to help Tex. He watched the altimeter register a drop of five hundred feet, a steady climb of eight thousand, then another drop. In this fashion an hour passed.

All at once they were out of the storm. Clear moonlight shone through the plastic windows of the cockpit. The crew raised a hoarse cheer.

“Take over, Barry,” drawled Tex O’Grady’s voice. “I want to find out if I am still in one piece. When Rosy starts bucking like that she’s tougher than any bronc I ever forked on my daddy’s ranch in Texas!”

Unfastening his safety belt, Captain O’Grady heaved his lanky frame out of the seat and went back to talk with the navigator. Barry swept his glance over the instrument board. He tried the controls, to feel out any possible storm damage. Satisfied that there was none, he looked below.

A sea of rolling, silvery clouds lay in every direction. It was beautiful, but menacing. The ceiling below that overcast, Barry judged, would be zero. It might hide either land or sea, hills or marshes, for all that anyone knew. The storm had carried the Rosy O’Grady a number of miles off her course.

The four big engines’ steady drone of power sounded reassuring, until Barry remembered the last reading of the gas gauge before the lightning had knocked it out. There wasn’t enough left for fooling around, while the Rosy found out where she was.

After a few minutes, Captain Tex O’Grady loafed back to the cockpit.

“The radio’s out,” he told Barry. “That means we can’t get cross bearings to find our position. Curly Levitt is getting a fix now on some stars. Trouble is, he’s afraid his octant may have been knocked out of kilter when it fell off the navigation table, back there in the storm. Why don’t you go back and cheer him up?”

Barry thanked the lanky pilot and unfastened his safety belt. He suspected that O’Grady was just giving him an opportunity to stretch his legs. If a fellow needed cheering up, nobody could do a better job of it than “Old Man” O’Grady himself.

Lieutenant Curly Levitt was up in the top turret sighting through his instrument when Barry stepped back.

“Three stars is enough for a fix,” he shouted above the engines’ thunder. “Just wait till I shoot Venus.”

“Better not—it might really be Sirius!” punned Barry. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Thanks,” replied the navigator, as he prepared to step down, “Just open your mouth again and I’ll put my foot in it.”

Barry dodged, just in time to tumble over Fred Marmon who “accidentally” happened to be crouched just behind him. As he picked himself up, even sad-eyed Tony Romani laughed. The crew’s tense nerves were relaxing. Whistling a few bars from Pagliacci, the mustachioed navigator went back to his desk.

Curly Levitt was still a bit worried, however. On the accuracy of his reckoning depended the life of every man on board. If he failed, the chances were excellent that Sweet Rosy O’Grady would plunge to a watery grave the moment her gas supply gave out. At best she would crash in the Venezuelan jungle—unless, of course, the clouds broke up farther on and showed her crew a landing field.

“Check this reckoning with me, will you, Blake?” Levitt invited. “Then if there should be an error we can blame it on the wallop my octant took in the storm.”

“Okay!” Barry agreed. “If your octant is off, we’ll probably find it out too late to help ourselves. So don’t worry.”

Reckoning the fix is really a simple matter. At a given time only one point on the earth’s surface can be directly under any star. Using his octant, the navigator “shoots” or measures the elevation of two or more stars, and then figures out just where each “substellar” point is on the earth’s surface.

His next step is still easier. With his substellar points located on the map, he draws circles around them. One of the places where these circles intersect is the place where his plane was at the time the stars were “shot.” There is no real difficulty in guessing which intersection is the right one: the others are apt to be thousands of miles from his last known position.

Everything, of course, depends upon the accuracy of the star-shooting octant. This expensive and delicate instrument will not always stand abuse such as Curly Levitt’s had taken. There was reason for the young ex-lawyer to be worried. He slipped on his headset and switched on the interphone. The click in his ears told him that it still worked.

“Pilot from navigator,” he said. “If I’m right we’re fifty miles due north of Cayo Grande. Our present compass course would take us just past the southern tip of Trinidad. That checks pretty well with my dead reckoning. I haven’t had an accurate drift reading since we banged into that front.”

“Navigator from pilot,” came the drawling reply. “Rosy says she’ll take your word for it. She likes your style, hombre, even if you are a lily-fingered product of the effete East. A man who can keep any sort of dead reckoning in a storm like the one we just rode through will do to cross the river with.”

For the next hour Barry flew the big bomber, while her “Old Man” dozed in his seat. Below them the clouds continued unbroken. The moonlight on their gleaming crests and ridges gave the young co-pilot a queer sensation. It was hard not to believe that he was guiding a fantastic ship over the surface of a strange planet, thousands of light-years from Earth. In the lightless cockpit nothing seemed real.

“You fool—snap out of it!” Barry found himself muttering. “You’re heading into dreamland with your throttles wide. And that blur on the window isn’t imagination—it’s oil!”