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eyes crinkling with good humor. "Sorry, Bandy, but I couldn't resist." He had just a trace of a polished Scandinavian accent, which gave his rather high voice a ministerial tone. "It's been a long time."
    The two men looked at each other, remembering their days together at flying school. Lindbergh cleared his throat. "I never felt right about the way they washed you out. It could just as well have been me."
    Bandfield nodded, pensive. It had been three years since he had slunk away from flying school, a failure in the only thing he'd ever really loved to do. The depressing smell of the San Antonio station came back to him, its rolling clouds of steam-laden coal smoke matching his utter dejection. It had been the most miserable day in his life, the end of his dreams, the end of his flying. Or so it had seemed at the time.
    "What the hell happened, Bandy? I was as much at fault as you were."
    "Banana oil, Slim!" Bandfield knew exactly what had happened, having lived through it in memory hundreds of times since then. He and Lindbergh had been flying single-seat S.E.5s in a practice diving attack against a solitary DH-4 observation plane. Lindbergh had disappeared beneath the target plane as Bandy sent an imaginary line of machine-gun bullets through it.
    A jolt had turned the roaring noise of wind and engine into sudden silence. Twenty feet away, Lindbergh had stared wide-eyed across their locked wings. The two S.E.5s had collided, noses whipping together to splinter the propellers and stop the engines, crumpling the spirited fighters together like grotesque mating dragonflies. Pounding noise had given way to a silence flawed only by the broken-bone grating of the interlocked struts. He could have called to Lindbergh, but instead gestured with his thumb toward the ground. They had leaped into a welling terror, relieved at once by the groin-wrenching jerk of the parachutes opening.
    "Slim, I already had two strikes against me. You only had one."
    Lindbergh knew about his own strike; his outrageous practical joking had earned him enough demerits to keep him walking tours on weekends.
    "What were your two strikes, Bandy?"
    "You remember that the Cadet Squadron commanding officer, Captain Westerfield, was the presiding officer on the elimination board. He'd had a complaint about me from a girl's family in town. I had a tough session with him the day before the board met."
    Lindbergh smiled. "Ah, Maria. I'll never forget her, Bandy, she was the prettiest little Mexican girl I ever saw. I always wished I had enough nerve to ask her out."
    Bandfield knew that Lindbergh had never dated while he had been there; he wondered if he had later.
    Maria worked in headquarters as a sort of roving secretary, back ing up with her typing skills the generally pathetic hunt-and-peck efforts of the typical squadron clerk. You could tell when she was coming or going by the ripple effect on the soldiers, and it had become a gentle custom for any marching body of troops to be given "eyes right" if they happened to be passing her. She ignored all equally and democratically, keeping her pleased brown eyes straight ahead, content just to be aware of the train of admiration in her wake.
    "Westerfield thought so too. He'd been trying to make time with her for almost a year."
    Lindbergh shook his head vigorously, and his voice went up half an octave. "No, he wouldn't have risked it! As career-crazy as that old mustang was, he wouldn't have fooled around with anybody like Maria."
    "You didn't know Maria very well."
    "Bandy, I still can't believe he'd wash you out for that. He was an iron-ass, but not a bad guy."
    Bandfield's tone took on a sudden bitterness. "No, Slim, there was something else, a typical stupid goddam military balls-up, something I should have been smart enough to avoid. Westerfield asked me which of us—you or me—I thought was the better pilot. I was honest and said you were. He got all over me, saying that I would never make a good pursuit