Rocket Science

by Jay Lake

  “By God,” I muttered to the dashboard, “I will never find myself on the inside a bottle. I will not be like Dad.”

  Dad.

  His name blew Midge right out of my thoughts like last year’s leaves. Last night I had been willing to let him go to the hospital alone. He was unconscious, but Doc Milliken had said Dad wasn’t in great danger. Every time I saw the old man, I got angry all over again with him, but now, since finding him in the trunk of my car, I pitied him.

  My heart ached for him.

  I really wanted to go look for him in Wichita, but there was no point. A hundred and fifty thousand people lived there, and I didn’t even know the name of the coffee shop where Deputy Truefield had lost him. For that matter, I realized, I didn’t know which hospital Doc Milliken had sent Dad to. There were several hospitals in Wichita. Why hadn’t he told me? That was strange.

  What I could do for him was to drive out to Dad’s house and look around myself. Ollie Wannamaker had told Sheriff Hauptmann that the place looked like it had been tossed. I could well imagine what Ollie thought he saw, but I knew Dad’s habits, especially how he had been since Mom died. Unlike Ollie, I’d be able to tell which part of the mess was new and which was just housekeeping Dunham-style. Gosh only knew what Ollie might have missed in the chaos.

  I started the Cadillac and headed out toward Wichita Highway. I passed just a few blocks from the police station, which made me wonder if there was any point in telling the entire story to Ollie — Nazis, airplane and all. Or maybe even approaching Chief Davis for help. I could throw myself on the mercy of the Augusta police department. If I was lucky, they’d put me in jail just to keep me safe.

  But that wasn’t the right thing to do either. Anything I said to Ollie Wannamaker, or anyone else on the Augusta force, would get back to Sheriff Hauptmann within a day or two. And my confidence in Hauptmann was slipping fast. He kept acting strangely around me — nothing obvious, but enough to tip me that something was up. He was obviously working with CID to crack this Nazi thing and find the murderers of the late Captain Markowicz. Not to mention the real-live fake Captain Markowicz.

  There was some angle that involved me, which was why he was looking through my notebooks. But obviously he wasn’t going to let me in on whatever was going on. Besides, Ollie had acted pretty odd when I talked to him about Floyd yesterday. Something was definitely happening around me, something that involved Dad and Floyd. It had to involve me.

  That meant I was either under suspicion or I was being used for bait. I knew I wasn’t a Nazi, but the whole thing with the aircraft could be getting me in really big trouble. I still wanted to talk Floyd into turning ourselves in, but we’d been interrupted by the fire and I’d bet it would be this evening before he and I got a chance to discuss it. And then who to turn ourselves in to? There must have been an FBI office in Wichita. At this point I would much rather turn ourselves in there.

  And then I’d lose the aircraft. I’d never see it again — they would haul it off to Wright Field or someplace even more secret out in the deserts of the west, and tear it apart.

  I shook my head. Damnation, but that was a beautiful piece of machinery.

  Even worse, if I wasn’t under any suspicion, that meant Sheriff Hauptmann really was using me for bait. I didn’t like the idea of Hauptmann hanging me out to dry in order to catch a few Nazis.

  I laughed out loud at myself. My imagination was running away from me — things were bad enough with Dad and the fire at Mrs. Swenson’s boarding house. I didn’t need to conjure phantoms to make them worse. Heck, I could just go back to the beginning of the problems of the last two days and demand my envelope back from Mrs. Sigurdsen. But I figured my chances of that working out were slim. Regardless of whether the Head Librarian was one of the Nazi gang, she could probably break my neck by sheer force of character. The only reason I didn’t suspect her of beating Dad was that I couldn’t imagine her being willing to make that much noise.

  Besides which, the library wasn’t open on Sundays. God-fearing folk generally went to church, while the rest of us slept in or read the paper. At least I hadn’t gone home last night. I’d probably be dead now if I had, killed in the fire or beaten by whoever set it, just the way they had beaten Dad.

  There was a chilling thought.

  My musings were interrupted by an odd sensation from the pocket into which I slipped the German radio handset — it was getting very warm, like the time in junior high school when Floyd had set my pants on fire. Was it the invisible German, coming back for more? He had been silent since asking me about Kansas.

  I pulled the car off the road by the Whitewater River dike along the west edge of town. Augusta stretched behind me, sleepy in the autumn Sunday afternoon, except for the angry black pillar of smoke that still boiled into the sky from my destroyed home. The Whitewater flood plain stretched in front of me — willow trees, water meadows, ducks lifting off.

  Fishing into my pocket, I pulled out the silvery handset. It was sufficiently hot to the touch that I dropped it on the seat. I didn’t know how much hotter it would get, and I didn’t want to scorch Doc Milliken’s leather upholstery, so I grabbed the floor mat from the passenger side foot well and laid that on the seat. I flipped the handset over onto the mat with my fingertips, blowing the heat off them afterward.

  “Change of plans,” I said. This thing needed to go back to the f-panzer pronto. The heating up bugged me, but it was too small to be a bomb. I didn’t feel like I was in any particular danger. Rather, it appeared to be an electronics malfunction. Not immediately worrisome, but too much trouble to deal with here in the car. At the very least, it meant my German friend wouldn’t be bugging me any more. Maybe I could find a way to explain it to Lois after she cooled off, too.

  At any rate, whatever the problem with the handset was, I didn’t need to haul this thing around the county with me. It would take some more time out of my day, but I had to take the silvery thing back to the Bellamys’ place. If it got hotter on the way, I’d deal with that. I didn’t want to submerge it in water, but at the least I could set on some open ground and wait to see if it burst into flames or something. Assuming nothing like that happened, I could drop the handset off, then go check around Dad’s place for myself.

  I owed him that much.

  I had to u-turn the Cadillac across Wichita Highway in order to head back through town. As I put it in gear, a high-pitched squeal gave me an instant headache. I’d never in my life heard an automobile make a noise like that. The car bucked and stalled, straddling the center of the highway.

  Thank God it was Sunday morning — there was no refinery traffic, and most people were in church. And today, the rest of them were off fighting that fire. Even before I could touch the starter, it turned over on its own and the engine started up again.

  That was weird. I knew quite a bit about engines from my work at Boeing, and that wasn’t possible. The engine hadn’t been dieseling, and the car wasn’t moving fast enough to restart itself. This had been the starter turning over, and starters didn’t just fire on their own. It seemed like the handset’s electrical problems were contagious.

  The Cadillac’s horn started honking, echoing across the dike and the trees in the bottomland beyond. The car bucked again as I tried to switch it off — I hadn’t liked the sudden start and wanted to let everything cool down, until all the static discharge left the system or whatever was wrong had a chance to settle. Even as big as it was, I figured I could push the Cadillac to the other shoulder if need be. But now the engine wouldn’t shut off.

  Then the radio came on, popping and hissing. There was another high-pitched, ear-splitting squeal. The tuner knob began to slowly turn by itself, as if an invisible hand had laid fingers upon it.

  My hair prickled up, bumps rising on my arms. I wanted to leap from the car, but at the same time I was fascinated. I had never seen, or heard, anything like this. My spine shivered as the speakers wailed, the radio passing through the whole range
of frequencies. Gospel music from Wichita, a news bulletin, an ad for fertilizer, a bellowing radio preacher, big band music, two different farm reports. It hit the end of its range and the knob reversed, the invisible hand starting back down again.

  The radio settled down to a Negro gospel service out of Wichita. I reached for the knob, but it was stuck on that frequency. I turned the Cadillac off. This time the car died, just like it should. I pressed the starter. It cranked right up again, radio blurting back to life on the same gospel station.

  Except for the radio being stuck on at the one station, the Cadillac now seemed willing to run again like a normal automobile. I finished the u-turn and headed back through town. What had made it behave this way? The engineer in me wanted to imagine weird magnetic fields, electrical disturbances in the atmosphere, but I knew that couldn’t be true. Hundreds of cars and trucks drove up and down Wichita Highway every day. Maybe thousands. Heck, it was a U.S. Highway, 54, that got long-haul traffic all the time. Somebody would have noticed if it was built over a huge hunk of magnetic ore, or an Indian burial ground, or something.

  Or something. Right.

  I drove slowly, keeping the speed down so that if I lost control again I wouldn’t kill myself or anyone else. With the glaring exception of the radio, the car continued to behave normally.

  Forget magnetic anomalies, it was the handset from the f-panzer. That thing had to be a radio, although I could not imagine how a handset could be made so small. I’d seen plenty of radios in my work at Boeing. Miniaturizing the tubes alone would be an engineering challenge on par with the biggest projects ever considered. And it wasn’t just tubes. Circuit design, fabrication, the works. Whoever had buried my aircraft in the Arctic ice had also built a transceiver that was a miracle of engineering, a transceiver that the Nazi gang here in Butler County was using to track me and somehow take control of my car. Not to mention whisper in my ear.

  That idea was plumb crazy. Radio didn’t work that way. In principle, you could use radio waves to send control signals for mechanical processes, but that would require extensive special equipment at the receiving end — servomotors and so forth. No one could build a receiver that would take over the electrical system of an ordinary automobile.

  Which, of course, was what had just happened to me. On the other hand, no one could build that receiver in the first place, so if they could do one impossible thing, why not do another?

  Hands clenched on the wheel, I made it through the middle of town, averting my eyes as I drove past the turn to the State Street Lounge. I didn’t think I could ever set foot in that place again.

  Even though I felt like a circus freak — see the Unlucky Man, displayed for your edification ladies and gentlemen — no one on the streets of Augusta gave me a second glance. Gaining confidence in the Cadillac’s continued good behavior, I gradually accelerated as I headed out past the eastern edge of town.

  The radio still stuck loudly on one station, I listened to colored folks praying and singing all the way back to the Bellamy place.

  Chapter Eight

  As usual, the little track that cut off from Haverhill Road up to the Bellamys’ farm was almost axle-deep in mud. But the black walnuts lining the road were beautiful enough to make up for the aggravation of driving it. I was also pleased to see the tell-tale caterpillar tracks of the f-panzer had been obscured by all the recent coming and going.

  I manhandled the Cadillac as it slid along. The car fishtailed to the rhythms of the colored church service on the radio. I found I was tapping my fingers on the steering wheel rim in time to the music as well.

  I laughed. “Who’d have thought it?” I asked the walnuts.

  When I drove into the yard, I considered parking in front of the house and walking to the barn. The Cadillac was lower to the ground than either my Hudson or Mr. Bellamy’s truck. But then I’d have to carry the German handset. I’d decided the thing scared me, sitting on the passenger seat, scorching a hole in Doc Milliken’s carpeted floor mat. I was darned glad I’d thought of the mat in the first place — it would be cheaper to replace than the seat leather.

  I drove across the yard along the smoothest of the various ruts leading toward the barn. As I pulled up in front of the barn doors, the radio shut itself off. I turned the engine of the Cadillac off as well and listened to the silence. Distant birds chirped, chickens fretted within the barn, while somewhere nearby a heifer bawled the eternal complaints of dim-minded cattle.

  But there was no motor, no gospel hour, no German voice. Nothing interrupted the sounds of nature except for the sputtering drone of a small airplane.

  That got my attention. I jumped out of the car and walked around the barn, scanning the sky. In the distance I could see a small high-winged monoplane circling low. Probably a Piper Cub, L-4 in the military version. I recognized a search pattern when I saw one, and I was willing to bet my friend upstairs was either looking for an old Mack stake bed truck or a blue Cadillac convertible.

  I hurried back around to the front of the barn and dragged open the door. Then I started the Cadillac and pulled it inside. Doc Milliken’s big car barely fit with the two trucks already taking up space in the barn, and I nearly ran over one of the barn cats getting the car in there. I stepped out and pulled the doors shut as the droning of the airplane came closer. Thank God for all the mud. That kept me from leaving any kind of a dust trail that would stand out from the air like a searchlight pointing back at me.

  I finally turned around and looked at my aircraft. I thought my heart was going to stop.

  It had changed shape.

  The crumpled fuselage was stretched out, the furrows and bends evening into the elegant airfoil I had envisioned earlier. The ends had expanded into wings, although they were still very stubby. The thing was huge, filling the barn, barely balanced on the back of the Mack truck.

  And it was beautiful. It reminded me of a bird of prey, composed organic curves and odd textures across its body. I walked around the airplane. The shape was more like a teardrop set within a flattened disc — a saucer. I sank to my good knee, propping myself up on my bad right leg, and shook my head.

  The idea that had been nagging me almost from the beginning had to be true. The engineering of this thing was astounding, beyond anything that could be done by human hands. No German ever built such a thing, I was sure of that, nor an American. Where had it come from? I shook my head in awe.

  That stolen Nazi report had been telling me the tale, but it was so unbelievable that I had refused to take it seriously. That this aircraft had been found under the ice truly meant it must be ancient beyond measure. Inhuman. Literally.

  I felt cold, and very small.

  “What is happening, my brother?” asked a German accented voice in my ear, speaking in the rich, rolling rhythms of a radio preacher.

  I was so surprised I lost my precarious balance. I fell over, feet tangled together like a kid who’d run too fast downhill, cursing the pain in my bad leg.

  The voice broke into a rousing rendition of “Amazing Grace,” carrying four-part harmony with itself.

  The aircraft was talking to me.

  It had to be.

  Whatever Nazi agents might be lurking in Butler County, they weren’t learning their English from Negro gospel programs. There wasn’t anyone else it could be. I stared at the aircraft in open-mouthed astonishment as the voice continued to sing in my ear. The machine quivered in time to the music.

  That proved it. I didn’t even want to think how it was possible — giant banks of phonographs, with some kind of gear-driven selector process? I’d worked with pretty sophisticated calculators at Boeing, but it would take a calculator many times the size of this barn to begin parsing, let alone bounce from German to English. This, perhaps, was the true miracle of my airplane.

  Outside, the drone of the Cub became a loud roar as it buzzed the barn. Distracted from my line of thought, I grabbed the smoking floor mat with the silvery radio handset off the seat of D
oc Milliken’s Cadillac and ran to the barn door. There were plenty of warped boards for me to peek out between the cracks without opening it.

  I watched the Cub land in the lower pasture, spooking the heifers terribly. The little airplane was dark green, with Army Air Corps markings. I had seen enough of them at the Boeing plant during the war, coming and going with visiting engineers or Army Air Force brass. I wish I knew what unit the tail numbers and squadron markings on the Cub referred to — I’d never bothered to learn USAAF unit organizations outside of the heavy bomber wings I had helped build. We always knew over at the plant when one of our big birds went down, sooner or later.

  The unit didn’t matter. Wherever it came from, that Cub was being used by CID Or maybe by the false Captain Markowicz, he of the broken arm. I wasn’t sure which was worse for me, but now that my aircraft had spread her gorgeous wings and spoken to me, I wasn’t letting go without a fight.

  But I sure wished the darned airplane would quit singing!

  I looked around the barn in a mild but controlled panic. The deadliest thing in here was a pitchfork. With my bad leg I seriously doubted my ability to menace a Nazi agent with one of those. Even if I had been prepared to take on the entire SS last night in the Bellamys’ kitchen armed with just a flashlight, today my wits were better gathered.

  Fine, I thought. No available weapons. What was my next option? I peered out the door again. The Cub was taxiing to the downwind side of the pasture. The pilot was positioning for a quick take-off. I would have done the same in his place, especially if I was up to no good. Unfortunately, his taxi pattern would put the Cub mighty close to my barn door.

  I considered fleeing out the back of the barn. That required me to either cut across the yard to the house, in full view of whoever was in the aircraft, or head over the back pasture towards the peach orchard. Floyd probably would have managed that, but I couldn’t move sufficiently fast enough over open country to be sure of hiding before they got close enough to notice me.