"To hell with him, then. If he wants to go, let him."
"We're in a hole," Mac said seriously. "We'll have to find someone to run the studio.
You can't operate a motion-picture company without someone to make pictures."
That was nothing I didn't know.
It was too bad that David Woolf wasn't coming back. I could depend on him.
He felt the same way about movies that I did about airplanes.
But he'd caught it at Anzio.
"I want to make San Diego tonight," I said.
"Let me think about it and we'll kick it around in your office in L.A. the day after tomorrow."
I had bigger worries on my mind just now.
One Centurion cost almost as much as a whole year's production at the studio.
We landed at the San Diego Airport about one o'clock in the morning.
I took a taxi right from there to the little shipyard we had rented near the Naval base.
I could see the lights blazing from it ten blocks away.
I smiled to myself.
Leave it to Amos to get things done.
He had a night crew working like mad, even if he had to break the blackout regulations to get it done.
I walked around the big old boat shed that we were using for a hangar just in time to hear someone yell,
"Clear the runway!"
And then The Centurion came out of the hangar, tail first, looking for all the world like an ugly giant condor flying backward.
Like a greased pig, it shot down the runway toward the water.
A great roar came from the hangar and I was almost knocked over by a gang of men, who came running out after the plane.
Before I knew it, they'd passed me and were down at the water's edge.
I saw Amos in the crowd and he was yelling as much as any of them.
There was a great splash as The Centurion hit the water, a moment's groaning silence as the tail dipped backward, almost covering the three big rudders, and then a triumphant yell as she straightened herself out and floated easily on the bay.
She began to turn, drifting away from the dock, and I heard the whir of the big winches as they spun the tie lines, drawing her back in.
The men were still yelling when I got to Amos.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I shouted, trying to make myself heard over the noise.
"What you told me to do – water-test her."
"You damn fool!
You might've sunk her.
Why didn't you get a pressure tank?"
"There wasn't time.
The earliest I could've got one was three days. You said you were taking her up tomorrow."
The winches had hauled the plane partly back on the runway, with her prow out of the water.
"Wait here a minute," Amos said, "I gotta get the men to work. They're all on triple time."
He went down the dock to where a workman had already placed a ladder against the side of the giant plane.
Scrambling up like a man half his age, Amos opened the door just behind the cabin and disappeared into the plane.
A moment later, I heard the whir of a motor from somewhere inside her and the giant boarding flap came down, opening a gaping maw in her prow that was big enough to drive a truck through.
Amos appeared at the top of the ramp inside the plane.
"O.K., men. You know what we gotta do. Shake the lead out.
We ain't paying triple time for conversation."
He came back up the dock toward me and we walked back into his office.
There was a bottle of whisky on his desk.
He took two paper cups from the wall container and began to pour whisky into them.
"You mean it about taking her up tomorrow?"
I nodded. He shook his head. "I wouldn't," he said. "Just because she floats don't mean she'll fly.
There's still too many things we're not sure of.
Even if she does get up, there's no guarantee she'll stay up.
She might even fall apart in the sky."