Word: pilot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...whistled southeastward out of Oakland, Calif. in his T-33 jet one day last May, Air Force Lieut. David Steeves, like any pilot, could survey the earth beneath him with something of detached contempt. Traveling at better than 500 m.p.h., he seemed almost motionless in space. Just behind him, in twinkling miniature, lay the sweep of San Francisco Bay; ahead, curving gently with the earth, was the hot yellow of Death Valley and the desert wastes beyond. And below, like the riffles in a child's papier-mache relief map, were the grey granite thrusts and the white snow...
...measured the stillness around him, took inventory of his assets: a .32-cal. revolver, a knife and some book matches (he had forgotten his survivor's kit). Dave Steeves was, in fact, some 11,000 ft. up in the Sierra-a dangerously low altitude for a transcontinental jet pilot, a dangerously high...
Salvation in a Shed. There was only one instinct, one Air Force rule of survival, to follow: go downstream. And down Pilot Steeves struggled day after day-crawling, hobbling and sliding through snow-filled gorges, sleeping in hollow logs and under sheltering rocks. In 18 days he went 25 miles, finally got to Simpson Meadow (elevation: 6,000 ft.). There, crazed from hunger, he stumbled on a park ranger's storage shed. Breaking in, he found more matches, fishhooks, a map of the area and a tiny store of provisions-a can of beans, hash, tomatoes. He wrapped himself...
...neither the bear hugs of Air Force pressagents, the television interviews nor the well-publicized reunion with his wife and daughter would ever alter one basic fact. Never again, as he flew with the high and the mighty, would Jet Pilot Steeves feel quite the same detachment about the earth beneath...
Touch of the Supernatural. Most of the characters in these stories are beginning to feel their age and, if they have not found religion, at least have been brushed by the supernatural. The title story deals with a former U.S. Army pilot, penniless in Paris, who refuses $25,000 to pull a job for a smuggler because of a superstitious hunch that the job would be fatal for him. When a less imaginative friend succeeds, the flyer knows that fear, and not a hunch, has dictated his refusal...