When Women Were Dragons(52)

In the fall of 1948, I published a pamphlet called Some Basic Facts About Dragons: A Physician’s Explanation. I published this pamphlet anonymously, as we always did, but because of the concrete and universal applications of the findings, I did my best to disseminate the information as widely as I could, and without our usual precautions, and outside of our usual network. This was done without the blessing of the collective, which prompted a parting of ways. The observational data I collected on dragons for this project were a bit of an accident—an unexpected set of findings from the research I conducted on a group of Women Airforce Service Pilots at the beginning of World War II, funded by the United States Army. The topic I was originally tasked with investigating was not dragons—clearly not! The military could barely bring itself to mention the existence of its female recruits, much less discuss anything so delicate and profane as dragons. Instead, I was supposed to monitor the physiology of the female pilots, likely as a pretense to bar them from service entirely. (In this my superiors were disappointed. I found no evidence to prohibit women from serving. My subjects thrived.) Scientific research is a curious beast, however. Any researcher worth his salt will tell you that the things we discover are rarely the facts we set out to prove. A good scientist must remain curious, open-minded, humble, and above all, obedient to the data, and to the facts.

The women I studied were young, healthy, and resilient. Bright sparks, each one. They took to flying in a way that alarmed their superiors—not to mention their male colleagues. They greeted the sky each morning, and gazed at it ruefully as evening fell and they returned to their barracks. My research was only underway a month when, quite unexpectedly, one woman dragoned—a nineteen-year-old girl from Iowa named Stella. Her dragoning was fairly consistent with the other cases documented over the years by the WRC. By all accounts, she transformed in a state of rage. Four airmen perished instantly. A fifth man—an older mechanic by the name of Cal—was the only witness. He said that he saw the men surround Stella. He called it “hassling.” He heard her yelling to be left alone, and had headed toward her at a run, hoping to help. Instead, he heard her scream, and saw her transform in a terrible burst of fire. The blast was so strong, it blew him a full twenty feet backward. The ground shook like they had been bombed. The men had been blown apart. It wasn’t clear if either the transformation or the subsequent death of the airmen was intentional. The mechanic did not believe so. When the dragon came to her senses, she noticed Cal staring at her, wetting himself with fear. She patted his head and flew away.

The next two dragonings were less typical. One occurred while the woman in question was in flight. I was in communication with her via radio link, getting data every fifteen minutes regarding her respiration, perspiration, vision, hearing, verbal acuity, and cognitive reasoning. Her answers, as recorded in my log, were notable in that they demonstrated a consistent elevation over time of her sensations of optimism, cheerfulness, and a strange, fierce joy. After she had been flying for two hours in a long oval around and around the base, she stopped and said, “I’m sorry, Doctor. It’s just . . . too wonderful up here. It’s all just . . . too wonderful.” I asked her what that meant, and was met with the sound of the emergency release and the pilot eject. Fearing the worst, we ran outside, expecting to see debris raining down. Instead we saw that she had cut the engine while still human, and, in dragon form, she held the aircraft in the vise of her talons, unfurled her wings, and was flying it back to its base. She was an impressive specimen—dark green with gold on the underbelly, and strikingly large. She shone so brightly it was difficult to look at her straight on. Normally, it was army policy to shoot dragons on sight (not that this did any good, and often ended in friendly-fire deaths from ricocheting bullets), but this was so extraordinary that the soldiers simply stared in astonishment as she gently set the plane down on the tarmac, paused a moment, and then launched into the sky. I remember the scene quite well: the chaotic questioning, the men running back and forth, and a group of WASP recruits standing outside, together in a line, their faces lit in the morning sun, and their eyes gazing up.

The next dragoning transpired one week later. This incident is a bit more delicate to relay, and so I must do so in a more oblique fashion. Two WASP recruits in the study were close friends. Two peas in a pod, as they say. I never saw one without the other. Their devotion was an obvious fact. Like sisters, you see. But closer than sisters. An intimacy that—well, perhaps even that is too much. What I can say is this: I saw them both on a Tuesday for our regular check-ins, where I took data points on their weight, heart rate, basal temperature, blood pressure. I took their blood for study, asked them about their mental states, asked about the regularities of their menstrual cycles, and checked their vision. Both were as healthy as they had been the week before, but I did notice that one of them—a young woman named Edith—had an increased heart rate. I made a note of this, in case it signified an infection. The two left my office and went off alone. It was their R&R, and they had made a picnic and had a couple blankets, and wished for privacy. Later that day, only one returned, a woman by the name of Marla. I interviewed her, despite her tremendous grief. Her testimony is not entirely useful, as it had all the hallmarks of a woman who has suffered a devastating loss. I will note, though, that in her report, she said, “Edith was happy. She was so happy. It couldn’t be contained.” Why did Edith dragon? I am still not entirely sure. The data remains inconsistent and unclear. The female pilots were all temporarily grounded for a number of months after that, for safety reasons, and would have remained so had not the need for qualified pilots superseded those concerns. As for my research, it was terminated the next day, and the army sent me home.