With Otto the inflatable pilot grinning beside him and Elaine shouting instructions, Ted ignored the sweat pouring off his brow like a localized monsoon. He pulled back on the stick, the tires screamed against the tarmac, and Flight 209 slammed onto the runway, shearing off the landing gear and coming to a rest just feet away from a confused group of airport firefighters.
"Captain, how soon can you land?" Rumack asked."I can't tell," the Captain wheezed."You can tell me. I'm a doctor.""No, I mean I don't know.""Well, can't you take a guess?""Not for another two hours.""You can't take a guess for another two hours?"
Ted exhaled. He had done it. He turned to Elaine, and for a moment, the romantic music soared. They stepped out of the wreckage, watched Otto inflate a female companion, and walked into the sunset—or at least toward the nearest taxi stand.
Ted felt the world shrink. He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He looked at Elaine. She looked terrified. He stood up. "I can," Ted said, his voice cracking only slightly. "Surely you can't be serious," Elaine gasped.
The cabin of Flight 209 hummed with a deceptive calm. Ted Striker, a man whose sweating palms were currently the most humid place on Earth, sat frozen in seat 4A. He wasn't just afraid of flying; he was "post-traumatic stress" afraid. Beside him, a young boy asked if he’d ever been in a cockpit before. Ted stared ahead, his mind flashing back to the "war"—or at least the dramatic, slow-motion version of it that played in his head whenever he smelled exhaust.
As the plane began a terrifying, zig-zagging descent toward Chicago, Ted grabbed the yoke. Outside, the Mayo Clinic (a literal clinic made of mayonnaise) flashed by. The control tower was a zoo; Steve McCroskey was already picking the wrong week to quit every vice known to man.
In the cockpit, Captain Oveur and Roger Murdock (who looked suspiciously like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) were slumped over their controls, their faces a sickly shade of green. Dr. Rumack, a man who took everything—literally everything—at face value, emerged from the galley.
