The Shape of Wings to Come

By Alexis Glynn Latner

Modern sailplanes may be the most beautiful machines the world has ever seen. What they can do is amazing enough to be fantasy—but it’s fact. And in futures real and imagined, they could fly in stranger skies on other worlds. Five previously published tales of science fiction and science fantasy, plus a futuristic fact article, describe The Shape of Wings to Come.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alexis Latner
• Release date: Feb 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780978194260

Book preview

The Shape of Wings to Come

Sailplane science fiction

Alexis Glynn Latner

Contents

Wilbur’s White Glider

Dragon’s Tooth

Sailplane

Trinity Bay

The Shape of Wings to Come

Endnotes

Soaring Sites

Websites of Interest

Quickfeathers

About the Author

Credits

For my friends at the Soaring Club of Houston.

See you at the Field!

Wilbur’s White Glider

When Larry Tuohino asked me if I could write a story for the Website for a transcontinental sailplane race called Return to Kitty Hawk in 2003, this was the tale I wrote.

Sailplanes are the most beautiful machines the world has ever seen, pilots are relelentlessly reverent, and this is a story about first flights and last.

IT WAS AN UNGAINLY contraption, precariously hanging on the wind, looking like a monstrous boxy kite with a man aboard. It teetered into a turn as the pilot struggled to steer it by shifting his weight. The left wing’s tip scraped the top of a sand dune. Then the Glider crash-landed.

Orville sprinted to his brother’s aid. To his relief, Will was already extricating himself from the Glider, unhurt, or nearly so. Blast! Will used his handkerchief to wipe a trickle of blood from his chin.

What happened?

I thought I could control it in a turn.

Months of labor and years of hard thought about aerodynamics lay crumpled on the sands of Kill Devil Hills. The Glider’s cloth-covered wooden frame sagged. Torn muslin fluttered in the wind.

A bracing-wire loosed itself with a shrill twang.

Sick of the hot sandy weather and the mosquitoes and most of all disillusioned with the Glider, Orville hurled his derby hat down onto the sand. Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!

Above them, a seagull crested the dune, then circled. The sunlight shone on its alabaster wings and tail. The bird looked like polished and sculpted white stone, yet it effortlessly balanced on the wind, compensating for gusts with slight movements of its wings and tail. The gull had a black head and a scornful voice. Hargk-hargk, hargk, hargk!

SPARROWS TWITTERED in the elm trees beside the porch of 7 Hawthorn Street. It was ten years since the travail of the 1902 Glider. The Wright brothers’ fame now shone across America and Europe as brightly as the early summer sun.

Arriving slightly later than he had promised his sister he would, Orville bounded up the front steps two at a time. He had been meeting with lawyers. His satchel bulged with papers relating to patent infringement lawsuits. Now that he and Will had invented a motorized flying machine, their competitors in manufacturing—Glenn Curtiss and others—were attempting to pick the Wright patent to pieces by copying the vital features of the Flyer. Curtiss intended to persist. Damn the man’s stubbornness!

Katharine rose from a chair as Orville burst into the parlor. She looked tired, but smiled her bright warm smile to see him. She wore a fine-looking blue dress for the errands she needed to accomplish in downtown Dayton.

"How is he?’ asked Orville.

He’ll be better with you here, she answered. His mind is churning with ideas that need an anchor! Look for Father to return at noon.

Orville belatedly remembered to take off his hat as he entered the sickroom. Approaching the four-poster bed, he greeted his brother with all the good cheer he could muster in his distracted state. How do you feel today?

Will muttered something indistinct. His color, Orville noticed with concern, looked worse than yesterday. Will’s skin had an unhealthy yellow tinge.

The sickroom was clean and pleasantly wallpapered, but the air seemed stuffy. Orville put down the satchel, strode to the window and flung the window and its shutters open. Sunlight streamed in with a strong but mild breeze.

Abruptly propping himself up on one elbow, Will announced, I’m afraid you’re right that not for a thousand years will man ever fly!

We already did! Orville reminded his brother. Taking his seat in the wing-backed bedside chair, he discretely nudged the satchel behind the chair, out of sight. The legal papers needed to be reviewed, but this was not the time to burden Will with that.

Will collapsed back into the bedclothes. Glider’s wrecked. Didn’t do what I expected. We don’t know how to control it after all. Let’s go back to the unmanned kite. We must understand the control of flight before we add an engine!

Orville saw nothing to gain by saying we already did, and so he stayed silent. Typhoid fever could loosen the moorings of one’s mind so past and present, there and now blurred together like a watercolor picture left out in the rain. Orville remembered that strange and unpleasant state of mind from his own bout with the fever sixteen years ago. Will, this is May of 1912.

Damnedly hot weather for May, Will complained. His gaze darted back and forth yet seemed not to see the familiar room. And there’s sand everywhere. Sand in my shoes, sand blowing in the wind, sand in the Glider’s moving parts! Will man ever devise a machine impervious to sand?

That may be harder than flight, Orville said truthfully.

Sweat beaded on Wilbur’s brow. Orville located the laving bowl and stack of clean cloths that Katharine had left. Orville soaked a cloth in the lavender-scented water and dabbed his brother’s forehead. He felt clumsy. Katharine was much better as a ministering angel.

Wilbur’s fever climbed even though Orville diligently applied the cool cloths. Will fretted and mumbled. Orville made out the phrases camber of the wing, elevator control, wing-warping, and tensile loading, with pigeon thrown in for good measure.

Suddenly Orville remembered Reverend Ullam back in Indianapolis. Ullam had been a dedicated and diligent old clergyman. Stricken with malarial fever, he drifted in and out of delirium in his last days on Earth. When delirious, he preached, as his white-haired widow later related in a state between laughter and tears.

Ullam had been elderly. Will was only 45. Like Ullam, his fevered brain clung determinedly to the discipline to which he had devoted his life, but Will was in his prime. He would win his struggle with typhoid fever, just as Orville had done years ago.

We’ll engineer a vertical ruddering device! Will exclaimed.

That’s it! said Orville, with the heartiness of certainty, since they had done exactly that with great success.

But listen, that gull is laughing at our miserable attempts to fly.

WHEN ORVILLE RETURNED from the American Wright Company in the evening, Will seemed much better. He was sitting up in bed drinking beef tea. The books and magazines on the nightstand had been rearranged, so he had been reading, or at least thumbing through the reading material, which ranged from Holy Scripture to Scientific American Magazine. Will put the drained cup on its saucer with a clatter caused by the unsteadiness of his hand. Orv, I’m tired of being sick, I’m sick of being deathly tired, and I haven’t even caught up on my reading.

Orville settled into the wingback chair and stretched his legs out to cross his argyle-sock-clad ankles. But have you discovered any solid food for thought? I’ve read only newspapers for weeks myself, and that fare is unsatisfying. Not to mention annoying, he thought, when so many articles chattered about the aeronautical successes of Glenn Curtiss!

"I found a Professor’s Weston’s article on the Paleontology of birds in Scientific American," Will replied. He describes the Archaeopteryx, a reptilian ancient bird fossilized in the limestones of Bavaria. Weston proposes that ancient birds evolved wings to glide down out of trees.

Of course, said Orville, after a moment’s reflection.

I’m not so sure. Maybe bird kind learned to glide on the ground.

Orville raised one eyebrow. What makes you think that?

Watching the gulls at Kitty Hawk. How they ran at each other snapping their bills, or ran away from a larger and meaner bird. Or raced each other toward some delicacy with their wings held out. And the wind— Will broke off, breathing raggedly.

With such strong onshore winds, even a bird with rudimentary wings might launch itself on short glides, when it ran into the wind. Orville supplied. Beating the less flightworthy birds to the morsel.

Like our Glider, Will wheezed.

Which could not have flown in a less windy place. In fact, they had flown the Glider at the sixth most windy place on the United States because the first five all had other qualities, such as being the city of Chicago, that made them unsuitable for flight testing.

Will gave up on sitting. He lay down, in which position he was able to muster enough breath and energy to communicate. No harm in crash landing on flat sand, Will said from the pillow. The First Birds learned to control their flight just like we did. Gliding over sandy shores. Not leaping out of trees and other high places and hoping to learn control on the way down. The forest floor would have been littered with dead birds.

Lilienthal and the other brave but dead pioneers of flight did not have much luck with the second method, Orville agreed. But look, the First Birds had a winning stratagem. They evolved feathers.

Will grunted skeptically. Not between the tree limb and the ground.

But why else would feathers evolve if not because the First Birds attempted to fly?

Will’s eyes narrowed in thought. "Mr. Darwin would say that, given the evolution of feathers for any reason at all, if they made the organism fitter by exhibiting a useful purpose, then it would