Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 4th August 1951) is an amusing piece that opens with the narrator, an American Civil War veteran, telling his grandson to “quit zoomin’ your hands through the air, boy”. He tells his grandson that that he knew he would be a good pilot. The narrator then goes on to explain why, beginning his story in 1864 with him and a Union major riding past the White House.
During their journey the Major explains he used to be a Harvard professor, and shows the narrator a device in a box he is carrying:
“Know what this is, boy?”
“Nosir.”1
“It’s my own invention based on my own theories, nobody else’s. They think I’m a crackpot up at the School, but I think it’ll work. Win the war, boy.” He moved a little lever inside the box. “Don’t want to send us too far ahead, son, or technical progress will be beyond us. Say, 85 years from now, approximately; think that ought to be about right?”
“Yessir.”
“All right.” The Major jammed his thumb down on a little button in the box; it made a humming sound that kept rising higher and higher till my ears began to hurt; then he lifted his hand. “Well,” he said, smiling and nodding, the little pointy beard going up and down, “it is now some 80-odd years later.” He nodded at the White House. “Glad to see it’s still standing.”
They continue on to the Smithsonian museum and, after gaining access by time travelling around the walls, the Major decides they will take the Kittyhawk back in time to help them win the battle at Richmond. The narrator is sent back to 1864 for petrol while the major moves the Kittyhawk out of the museum.
The Major then explains to the narrator how to control the craft, and they hook it up to the horses. The Kittyhawk is soon airborne:
The road was bright in the moonlight, and we tore along over it when it went straight, cut across bends when it curved, flying it must have been close to forty miles an hour. The wind streamed back cold, and I pulled out the white knit muffler my grandma gave me and looped it around my throat. One end streamed back, flapping and waving in the wind. I thought my forage cap might blow off, so I reversed it on my head, the peak at the back, and I felt that now I looked the way a flying-machine driver ought to, and wished the girls back home could have seen me.
They land back at base and, after the narrator arranges to purchase a jug of whisky, which he puts in the aircraft beside the petrol, they go to see General Grant:
“Sir,” said the Major, “we have a flying machine and propose, with your permission, to use it against the rebs.”
“Well,” said the General, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair, “you’ve come in the nick of time. Lee’s men are massed at Cold Harbor, and I’ve been sitting here all night dri— thinking. They’ve got to be crushed before—A flying machine, did you say?”
“Yessir,” said the Major.
“H’mm,” said the General. “Where’d you get it?”
“Well, sir, that’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet it is,” said the General. He picked up a stub of cigar from the table beside him and chewed it thoughtfully. “If I hadn’t been thinking hard and steadily all night, I wouldn’t believe a word of this.”
The Major proposes that they fill the aircraft with grenades and drop them on rebel headquarters but Grant vetoes the plan (“Air power isn’t enough, son”) and tells them what he wants:
“I want you to go up with a map. Locate Lee’s positions. Mark them on the map and return. Do that, Major, and tomorrow, June 3, after the Battle of Cold Harbor, I’ll personally pin silver leaves on your straps. Because I’m going to take Richmond like –well I don’t know what. As for you, son”—he glanced at my stripe—“you’ll make corporal. Might even design new badges for you; pair of wings on the chest or something like that.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Where’s the machine?” said the General. “Believe I’ll walk down and look at it. Lead the way.” The Major and me saluted, turned and walked out, and the General said, “Go ahead; I’ll catch up.”
At the field the General caught up, shoving something into his hip pocket—a handkerchief, maybe. “Here’s your map,” he said, and he handed a folded paper to the Major.
The Major took it, saluted and said, “For the Union, sir! For the cause of—”
“Save the speeches,” said the General, “till you’re running for office.”
After the narrator fills the tank they drop over the cliff edge and get airborne. The next part of the story tells of their reconnaissance of the rebel lines, a task complicated by the fact that the Kittyhawk seems to have become “high-spirited”, leading the narrator to complete some wild, aerobatic manoeuvres to keep control.
After they complete their task (during which the narrator finds his whiskey has been stolen), they land back at camp and pass on the map. Then they return the Kittyhawk to the future-Smithsonian so they “don’t break the space-time continuum”.
The next day (spoiler) the Union troops attack and are routed. The Major and the narrator disguise themselves and slip away.
Years later, the narrator sees Grant when there is public reception at the White House on New Year’s Day. When (by now, President) Grant recognises the narrator, he tells him to wait in a room. Later on they discuss the incident and what went wrong:
So I told him; I’d figured it out long since, of course. I told him how the flying machine went crazy, looping till we could hardly see straight, so that we flew north again and mapped our own lines.
“I found that out,” said the General, “immediately after ordering the attack.”
Then I told him about the sentry who’d sold me the whisky, and how I thought he’d stolen it back again, when he hadn’t.
The General nodded. “Poured that whisky into the machine, didn’t you? Mistook it for a jug of gasoline.”
“Yessir,” I said.
He nodded again. “Naturally the flying machine went crazy. That was my own private brand of whisky, the same whisky Lincoln spoke of so highly. That damned sentry of mine was stealing it all through the war.”2
Grant then adds that he and Lee discussed air power after the surrender at Appomattox, and he discovered that Lee was opposed to it as well. Both men agreed to keep quiet about the Kittyhawk incident (“As Billy Sherman said, war is hell, and there’s no sense starting people thinking up ways to make it worse”).
This is a delightful piece, and an excellent example of the style and wit that Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas (the editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who reprinted the piece in their December 1952 issue) were attempting to import into the genre at the beginning of that decade. To me, this is an archetypal F&SF story.
**** (Very Good). 6,250 words. Story link.
1. I’m pretty sure that the only two lines of dialogue the narrator has (after the introduction) are “Nosir” and “Yessir”.
2. Those keen on alcohol-related SF tales of the Civil War should also check out James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. Story link.