Rocket Science

by Jay Lake

  “Move. Please. They’re watching both of us.”

  It was the ‘please’ which decided me. I moved. I remembered what Pegasus had told me about taking off from inside the barn. And I remembered that I had promised Floyd a messy death. I just wasn’t sure if I’d meant that or not.

  Chapter Twelve

  Floyd held up an oil lantern as we walked into the barn. The door I had knocked over had been roughly patched and leaned back into place to shield Pegasus from casual observation. In shadow-riddled corners, cat eyes gleamed at us, interrupted in their nightly wars against mice, rats and worse things. The lamp’s light was a rich, almost golden, yellow that flickered in the wind from outside even through its wire-wrapped glass chimney.

  Seen in that errant golden glow, Pegasus again looked like a great metal eagle spread for flight. It reminded me of a Charles Grafly sculpture I’d seen at Wichita State, finely-wrought wings set wide to leap in the air. The machine didn’t have feathers or a tail, but rather the whole balance of the thing, the energy it projected even as a static piece of metal, gave the overwhelming impression of a straining need to soar. Looking at it made me feel I could fly, spread my arms and ride the thermals like a red-tailed hawk.

  I just stood there in Floyd’s ragged flannel bathrobe, my arm still reeking of shit, bandages on my head and blood trickling down my back from the cut of Floyd’s knife. I felt small, weak, ineffectual. Not because I was a prisoner under a death sentence. No, it was this beautiful machine that had come across time’s deeps, across the empty spaces between worlds, to be here. I looked and felt like a drunk after a hard Saturday night, standing in one of the great cathedrals of Europe braying out of tune with the midnight choir.

  “Do you know how to open it?” asked Floyd. In the direction my thoughts had fled, his voice was a profanity, but that profanity brought me back into myself.

  Ask permission, I thought, but I didn’t say that. “I think that I can open the pilot’s hatch if I push on it in the right place,” I said carefully.

  I desperately hoped that Pegasus would get the hint. The radio handset, heavy in my pocket, still possessed that tingling warmth it had exhibited ever since I first fooled with it. That meant it was active. I hoped.

  “Vernon Dunham,” said Pegasus’ voice in my ear. I didn’t dare answer it with Floyd standing right next to me.

  “Cripes,” said Floyd. “Get it open.” He stopped talking, dropped the knife into the straw. “Vern...I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. With you, it’s like with Mama...they’ll hurt me, or worse, if I don’t do what they say.”

  Never in his life had I seen Floyd so uncertain. Crazy as his father was, with Mr. Neville around and all those guns, maybe I wouldn’t have behaved any better.

  “Let’s figure this out,” I said. I wasn’t going to tell him everything, but if he wanted to talk, show his regrets, I needed to encourage him. “Something will come up.”

  I approached the Mack stake bed. Pegasus towered over the truck, filling much of the barn, just as I had seen her that morning. The wing geometries caught my eye and held it, this time as an engineer rather than with that sense of awed supplication that Floyd had just banished. I had been studying, building and flying airplanes for five years. Looking at Pegasus with its wings spread wide I was utterly convinced of its alienness. No human engineer could have conceived those wings. I knew of no equations to explain them.

  “Can you open it?” asked Floyd behind me.

  “Approach me near my front section,” said Pegasus in my ear.

  There was a crate positioned near the middle of the truck that I left there before to help me climb up. Painfully, I swung up to crouch under the spread wings along the narrow margin of the truck bed. Pegasus had unfolded so dramatically that I had to lean backwards to keep my footing. Pegasus’ nose faced the rear of the truck. I worked my way along that direction, feeling the bumps and textures of Pegasus’ skin pass underneath my fingers.

  Skin was the only word for it. When I’d first seen the computational rocket, I had thought it milled from a block of metal. Pegasus had been dormant then. Now, I stopped moving, just feeling that skin. At Floyd’s urging, embarrassed by some girls from the junior high, I had once reluctantly held a python at the White Eagle Fair in Augusta. A snake act had shown up, earning a little money by scaring the girls and thrilling the boys at the fall festival. I vividly remembered the densely compact feeling of the snake in my hands, the complex texture of dry scratchiness and flexible tension under my fingers.

  Pegasus reminded me of that snake. There was an intense sense of life, a subtle motion under the apparently static skin. That was when I realized that Pegasus was no more an aircraft or a rocket than I was fish. There was some relationship to the physics of airfoils and the mechanics of flight, but my B-29s were creaky toys left behind in a child’s nursery when I set them next to Pegasus.

  “What’s the matter? Can’t find the hatch?”

  I couldn’t figure if he was angry or what now. Maybe both. “Take it easy, buddy.”

  “They’re going to come check soon, Vern.”

  I hung onto the rippling skin of the computational rocket and twisted around to look at Floyd. “Floyd Euell Bellamy, if you call me ‘Vern’ one more time, so help me God I will knock you upside the head, carving knife or not. My name is Vernon, and if you can’t remember that, you can just forget getting my help on this thing.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you have to keep working. Or else...”

  He was rattled, somewhere between his regrets and his anger. I felt strong, and reckless. The only card I held was Pegasus, and whatever emotionality I could hector out of Floyd. I adopted his father’s tone. “Or else what? You threatening to kill me twice? That’s getting mighty old, Floyd. Think of a better one or shut the heck up.”

  Floyd glared at me but said nothing. I wondered why Mr. Bellamy hadn’t sent him up here with a gun. Didn’t trust his own son? Maybe Mr. Neville didn’t trust Floyd. That man held a lot of power over the two Bellamys, for all that everyone said Mr. Bellamy was in charge. Maybe he was a Soviet spy, minding the Bellamy cell.

  I turned back towards Pegasus. The thing seemed to breathe.

  “Are you ready Vernon Dunham?” asked Pegasus.

  “Yes,” I whispered. I tensed myself to scramble inside. I didn’t see any kind of hatch, but I had to trust Pegasus.

  “Now,” said the computational rocket. There was a snapping click, and a hole opened in the side of Pegasus, the strangest thing I’d ever seen. It just sort of dialed open — there was no other way to describe it. Like watching someone’s eyes widen.

  I was so surprised I lost my balance. My weak leg folded under me, and I fell backward off the truck onto the barn floor.

  The fall knocked the wind out of me completely. I felt like I might have broken my left hip, too. It ached tremendously. I wanted to shriek with frustration — all the care and planning I could bring to the problem, and my bad leg just gave out on me. Floyd stepped over to reach down and grabbed my wrist. He pulled me up.

  “Stupid gimp,” he growled. Now that my sense of power was gone, I regretted antagonizing him. “You almost landed on me. Now let’s get inside and check that darned thing out.”

  I had muffed it. I lost my chance to get inside Pegasus and away from Floyd. He was already jumping up onto the truck bed, reaching down to drag me after him. And he’d brought the knife with him.

  There wasn’t anything I could do now.

  “Patience,” said Pegasus. “This will work. You are only set back, not defeated.”

  I scrambled back onto the truck bed as Floyd pulled at my wrist. My hip wasn’t broken, because I could stand okay, but it hurt like crazy. Floyd bent over and stepped through the open hatch in Pegasus’ side. I followed after him, torn between a sense of profound excitement and feeling sick at heart that Floyd would be inside Pegasus with me, carrying the poison of his father and his family into this bright future.

>   Even though I was right behind him, I missed my best friend.

  The inside of Pegasus resembled the world’s largest vacuum tube. It was much larger than I would have thought from the outside. The entire cabin glowed a dull orange. Twisted shapes as unsettling as the exterior lines of the computational rocket cast strange shadows across the entire cabin, and nothing was level or true, not even the deck.

  Screens vaguely resembling large versions of the hooded radar terminal in the f-panzer outside lined the front of the cabin, dominated by a huge, flat one displaying a view of the inside of the barn. That explained the lack of cockpit windows or vision blocks. Unlike a normal cathode-ray tube, there was no curvature to its face whatsoever. There were two steeply angled chairs, big and padded, in front of the screens. They were obviously the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats.

  Purple, white and orange lights flickered in patterns and sequences across the faces of curved panels gathered around the seats. There were dozens of wide, concave buttons, some of them backlit and some of them matte dark. A white column of light rose from a low platform in the middle of the cabin just behind the seats, with a shifting diagram of color-coded curves and vectors displayed within it. The whole thing looked like a three-dimensional movie, if such a thing were possible.

  “Hot damn,” said Floyd. There was my buddy back, without the fear or anger or conspiracy of his father. “Hey, Vernon, what do you make of all this?”

  We were in a marvel of engineering and design, surrounded by achievements of engineering principles that were years, decades, perhaps centuries ahead of anything that could be done on Earth. I was at a loss for words, at least words that would make any sense to Floyd.

  The whole situation was overwhelming, flooding my eyes like fireworks going off too close. It was like what I had imagined the inside of a U-boat to be, cramped and strangely laid out, but in this case crossed with a really swank scientific research lab.

  A lout like Floyd was as out of place as a cow at a college graduation.

  “Preflight sequence completed in thirty seconds,” said Pegasus. “I suggest you take a seat.”

  “Sit down, Floyd,” I said roughly, taking the left seat. There was no control stick where I expected it, but there was a handle set on the arm on each side of the chair.

  “Why?” he demanded. “We’re not going anywhere yet.”

  “Safety considerations,” I said. “You never know what I’ll touch.”

  “You’d better not mess around. Daddy and Mr. Neville are still out there.”

  I sighed. “I’m not messing with you, Floyd. But if I pop the wrong switch and this baby lurches hard to the left, you don’t want to be scraping your scalp off one of those weird pointy things in the corner do you?”

  Floyd stared hard at me for a moment, then sat down in the right seat. “If you damage this thing before we lift it off the truck and get it outside, Roanoke Joe will not be happy.”

  He’d have to take a number and stand in a very long line. “I’d say customer relations are your department, Floyd. I don’t deal with angry Italians. I’m just the mechanic here.”

  “Be careful.” Leaning back in his chair, Floyd untucked his shirttail and began to clean the carving knife. It was a weird echo of Mr. Neville’s nearly obsessive pistol-cleaning. Could Neville be Floyd’s real father? Mr. Bellamy hadn’t mentioned Neville in his Russian story, and I gathered that the man was a buddy from the moonshine days. Part of the Bellamy gang.

  Floyd cleared his throat and sighted down the blade. My back ached, itchy, where he had jabbed me walking out of the house.

  “Preflight sequence completed. Do you wish to lift off now?”

  Lift off, not take off, I realized. Pegasus had said it could fly vertically. I didn’t dare talk to Pegasus in front of Floyd, not yet anyway, so I shook my head in a tiny motion while making a “nuh-uh” low noise in my throat. I hoped Pegasus would get that.

  No such luck, of course. “Do you understand me?” asked Pegasus.

  “No.” I shook my head more violently, pretending to study the incomprehensible control panel in front of me.

  “No what?” asked Floyd suspiciously.

  “This is all very confusing,” I said.

  “I understand,” said Pegasus.

  “It had better not be,” said Floyd.

  Listening to Pegasus and Floyd at the same time was distracting, worse than that terrible conversation in the car with Lois. At least she hadn’t been threatening my life.

  I glanced over at Floyd. He was perched on the edge of his chair, looking up at an array of buttons and panels over his head. Setting his knife down on the deck, on the side of his chair further away from me, Floyd reached up a hand and brushed his fingers across some of the buttons.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Don’t touch anything until I say so. You could short something out, or worse.”

  “Calm down. It’s just an airplane.”

  “Look, I’m the aeronautical engineer here. Do you want me to do my job or not?”

  Of course, what we really needed was a rocket scientist, which I most certainly was not. Robert Goddard would have known what to do.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Floyd set his hands on his knees. “I’ll sit tight.”

  Pegasus spoke again. “Get him to recline in his chair and buckle the safety straps.”

  How the heck was I going to do that? “Floyd, sit back in your chair,” I said calmly.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Quit being so suspicious,” I snapped. “This thing’s a jet plane. It’s awfully complicated. If I hit the wrong switch and start the engines, you’re gonna be knocked down.” I couldn’t help getting in a little dig. “Wouldn’t want to lose control of the situation, would you?”

  “Watch your mouth,” said Floyd, leaning back in his chair.

  I ostentatiously tried to snap my safety straps, only they didn’t snap. The fastener resembled no clasp I had ever seen. After a minute’s worth of examination I figured out that the two metal clips were maybe like electromagnets. They had slightly patterned edges that fit perfectly together, a purple button just offset on the left side of the clip.

  I put them close together and pressed the button. The clips flew together as if they were one piece of metal being reunited. Which, given Pegasus’ nature, was quite possibly the case. The straps were huge and loose on me, as if the chair had been built for a much larger person. Or thing. Even as I had that thought, they shrunk to a snug fit.

  Somehow that didn’t surprise me, but I hoped like heck Floyd hadn’t noticed.

  “Hey, check this thing out,” I said. I tried to sound excited.

  “What?”

  “The clasp on this safety strap.” I fiddled with mine. “It’s like a magnet, only weirder. You have to lie back in the seat and pull the straps over you to make them reach each other. You pull these two metal dinguses together and press this purple button. Presto, they’re one piece of metal.” I demonstrated as I spoke. “I think it’s an electromagnet.”

  “Hey, that’s pretty neat,” said Floyd. He shrugged into the straps and began playing with the fitted ends. After a moment, there was a clicking noise and his clasp melded. He fiddled with it for a moment then looked up at me. “Vern,” said Floyd, “how do you unclasp this?”

  Clever, clever Pegasus, I thought. Stupid, stupid Floyd. “I have no idea,” I said honestly.

  “You just took yours off to show me how it worked.” Floyd sounded panicky. He should be panicked. He was strapped down while I had freedom of movement.

  I shrugged. “Aircraft safety feature.”

  Pegasus spoke in my ear. “He will not be released until you tell me to do so. We may proceed with our planning.”

  “Can you subdue him?” I asked Pegasus.

  “What?” asked Floyd, just as Pegasus replied, “I will not take such measures.”

  “Fine.”

  “Let me out of here, Vernon.” Floyd’s voice was rising, angry, the bluster
back, the regrets gone. He struggled to slip out of the straps than ran across his shoulders and hips to meet at the clasp low on his chest. Like mine, they had tightened. He didn’t have enough slack to get away.

  “Or what?” I asked. “You’re too far away to stab me with that carving knife even if you could reach it on the deck. And Daddy didn’t trust you with a gun, did he? Too bad, Floyd. You’re just going to have wait and watch what happens. Trust me, it’s not a very comfortable feeling.” This wasn’t time to give way to the screaming, gibbering fear and frustration inside me, but I let a little leak out. “Maybe I’ll come over there and poke that knife into you a few times while you’re tied down. See how you’ll like that, bright boy.”

  “God damn it! Let me up or I’ll kill you!” screamed Floyd. If he got loose, I was pretty sure he’d follow through on that threat. He was mad. Floyd never had been good at being mad, at least not gracefully.

  “Sorry, that doesn’t impress me. I’ve already been told I’m expendable. Now shut up and wait to see what happens next.” I had no idea what was going to happen next, but I couldn’t work it through with Floyd yelling at me.

  Floyd took a deep breath, obviously trying to calm himself. “Wait for what?”

  I wasn’t about to tell Floyd that I had no idea what I was doing. We both knew that I was smarter than him. Right now that intelligence and a glorified safety strap provided by my friend the computational rocket were my only advantages. I needed some more angles, but Pegasus was starting to sound like a pacifist. That worried me. We weren’t dealing with people who would be influenced by a gentle application of moral suasion.

  “Pegasus,” I said.

  “Who are you talking to?” Floyd strained against his restraining straps to look around the cabin.

  “Shut up,” I said, “or I will come over there and use that knife on you.” Now we were getting somewhere. It felt good, throwing a little power of my own around, but that sense of satisfaction was almost immediately followed by a feeling of cheap betrayal. If I hated being threatened, who was I to threaten? Even him.