Ghosts of Engines Past

by McMullen, Sean

“I suppose the military potential of Stephen's craft is what interests you most,” said Richards as we entered the hangar and approached the piles of wreckage.

  “What military potential?” snapped Taylor, alert and alarmed.

  “Why, a submarine with a limited flight capacity could have quite a number of applications, I should imagine. Surprise attack, sabotage, even nuclear weapons delivery.”

  That had been a bad moment, but clearly Richards still had no idea what Stephen Cole had really done. He had indicated no suspicions at all in his report. The man was a hack, he did not know how to dream. The Pharaoh had been shattered by its collision with the jet fighter, and all that had been recovered from the sea bed was the cabin, a tangle of wires and tubes, some small gas tanks, a cheap industrial robot arm, and a metal container full of rock samples. The cabin was a modified propane gas tank, and it had been partly split by the impact.

  Richards had built a mockup based on what had been recovered. It resembled nothing more than a small submarine, the type that is used for prospecting on the sea bed. An access hatch had been cut in the main tank, and a frame for the robot arm welded on just below the window. The whole assembly rested on two steel tubes that served as skids.

  “Welding marks on the original cabin indicate that quite a lot more was attached,” Richards explained. “The red circles on the mockup indicate where we think the propulsion unit was attached. And see this, the cylindrical container welded to the left skid. It was an external sample carrier, and was full of rock samples when our divers found it.”

  “Just a simple little machine for prospecting on the sea bed, except that it could also fly,” I observed.

  “Yes, yes, but there are several design faults, too,” he said with that pedantic obsession that one sees in some engineers. “See here? The access hatch hinges inwards, and the seals compress in the wrong direction: dangerous under water, you know.”

  Except that Stephen had never intended it to operate under water. A collection of items from the cabin was laid out beside the mockup. There were several plastic food and drink containers, some garbage bags, an air re-cycling unit, a sleeping bag, and a device that had been identified as a makeshift toilet. I peered inside the hatch. Just below the window was a control panel with several dozen lights and switches. There were six small joysticks wired to the missing propulsion device outside, and the whole cabin was heavily padded and insulated.

  “Have you any idea how much of the original vehicle is missing?” Taylor asked.

  “Ah yes, I... conducted some tests to determine that just after I submitted my report. The night that he left Stephen moved the Pharaoh out of the garage and left it sitting on the lawn for about an hour, according to his mother. From the indentations that it left I estimate that it weighed nearly a ton. The wreckage recovered, plus Stephen's weight and the rock samples, comes to about two thirds of that.”

  “Yet ninety-eight percent of the jet fighter was recovered,” I pointed out.

  “Well yes, and that does indicate that the drive unit should have been found if it had sunk near the crash site. The pilot's report suggests that it was still functioning after the crash, so it probably flew quite some distance before coming down. Getting back to what we did manage to find, though, Stephen's consumption of food and, ah, use of that toilet device indicates that he had been sealed inside the cabin for the whole three days from when his mother last saw him to when his craft collided with the jet. Oh yes, and the condition of the catalyst in the air purifier bears out this estimate, too.”

  Taylor walked over to the pile of twisted metal that was the original Pharaoh and knelt beside the sample container. Releasing a spring loaded cap she reached in and withdrew a small, dark rock. It had jagged edges, and gleamed wet in the hangar's floodlights.

  “Dr Richards, I must be frank with you,” she said, turning the rock over in her fingers. “The material in this cylinder is of great strategic importance.”

  “Really? What is it?”

  “I'm afraid I can't say, but we need to know where he got it.”

  “But Stephen left no maps.”

  “The microflora attached to the rocks will give us an idea of the depth and latitude, but we need all the material available.”

  Richards began to nod reflexively in agreement, then stopped.

  “You want to take all the material?” he asked suspiciously.

  “That will be necessary, Dr Richards. I've checked with your government and we have permission—as long as you think it has no direct bearing on the inquest.”

  “Well, ah... I suppose not.” He was reluctant, but he still signed the papers releasing the rocks to us. “How did your people in the US come to learn about the rock samples so quickly?”

  “One of our specialists just happened to be in Australia on secondment. He recognised a rock sample for what it was and had it sent back home for analysis.” I peered into the container at the jagged, pitted rocks. “What puzzled us, though, was why you included it with your report.”

  Annoyance darkened his face for a moment.

  “It was a mistake,” he said quickly. “A new assistant misunderstood his instructions.”

  Taylor could barely conceal her excitement as we returned to the car. She had snatched the key to a fantastic secret from under the very nose of a foreign government's top investigator. Because she had achieved her primary objective already, the rest of the trip would be just my backup work. Oddly enough I was looking forward to this, as I was fascinated by Stephen.

  “He must have had help, Adele,” I said as we walked. “There was some very skilled welding in the Pharaoh, and a lot of other high quality work that a short-sighted undergraduate could never have done alone.”

  “High quality? The seal on the sample cannister was not even watertight.”

  “It didn't have to be.”

  We sent a coded report to Washington over the car's radio, then drove out to Stephen's home. It was a timber house in one of Brisbane's inner suburbs, a small shack on stilts in a huge, overgrown yard. Stephen had built the Pharoah in a free-standing garage at the back. Richards had been out there already, looking for clues to the secret of the Pharaoh's propulsion unit. There were none. There were no drawings: Stephen had known exactly what he wanted to build. There were no offcuts: Stephen was meticulous in cleaning up after himself.

  Mrs Cole met us at the front door, a thin, tense woman in her fifties. She had a heavy cough and she chain-smoked for the whole time that we were there.

  “I took him a cup of chocolate milk every night at nine,” she said as she showed us the garage.

  The remaining tools gave us no clues. Outside, I could see two deep grooves in the lawn where the Pharaoh had rested for an hour before its first and only voyage.

  “So you saw it for the whole six months it took to build,” said Taylor, covering old ground for my benefit. Mrs Cole wheezed, then coughed violently before she could reply.

  “Yeah, that's right, but I don't understand mechanical things. That Dr Richards has already asked me about all that.”

  She had seen the Pharaoh every night as Stephen built it. I groaned inwardly at the thought that she might develop lung cancer and die—as her husband had.

  “Mrs Cole, would you agree to undergo further questioning under hypnosis?” Taylor asked.

  “I've already told you all I know,” she said impatiently. “I don't remember any more than that. I'm not a technical person, Dr Taylor. He could have been building an atomic bomb for all I know.”

  “Under hypnosis you often remember things more clearly,” Taylor explained. “The US government will compensate you for your time and trouble, of course.”

  If Stephen had been building an atomic bomb it could not have caused more consternation. At the mention of a four figure compensation payment Mrs Cole agreed to undergo hypnosis, and to having her house and garage searched yet again. Taylor, efficient as ever, produced the forms from her briefcase at once.

 
I wandered into Stephen's old bedroom while I waited. There was nothing out of the ordinary among the books and notes remaining there. The furniture was sparse, and everything was almost military in neatness. A photograph above the desk caught my attention. It was of an impossible contraption, a collection of large balloons supporting a deckchair, which in turn had an engine and twin rotors beneath it. It was several feet above the ground, and there were uniformed police in the watching crowd. When I asked Mrs Cole about it she tried to be evasive.

  “Ah, yeah, he did get into trouble over that thing, but he was only fourteen at the time. He flew it to school as part of a science day, but the police arrested him when he landed. Something about flying through the airport's flight path, I think.”

  “He probably committed half a dozen breaches of the local air traffic laws,” laughed Taylor.

  “But they let him go, with only a warning. He was such a good boy. Now that I think of it, he called the balloon thing the Pharaoh too.”

  “He did?” I exclaimed with a sharp pang of excitement. “Are you sure?”

  “Well, some name like Pharaoh. It's in the police museum if you want to see it.”

  The officer in charge of the museum was enthusiastic and helpful. Among the exhibits were such strange items as a small cannon that fired beer cans filled with concrete: it had once belonged to a motorcycle gang, we were told. Stephen's two flying machines put all the other exhibits to shame, however.

  The first looked like a hang glider attached to a propellor driven go-cart—except that the thing was made out of packing case wood, the wheels were from a pram, and the motor was electric. Stephen had been ten years old when he had built it—alone. It showed signs of extensive damage, which had been carefully repaired.

  “This bird actually flew,” Sergeant Powell told us. “It only got off the ground because he was such a small kid, and he took off downhill.”

  “He must have had help,” I said. “Who bought the tools and materials?”

  “No problem for Steve. His old man died the year before, and he had free run of the workshop in the garage. He scrounged the parts from neighbours, or the local tip.”

  There were three photographs beside the aircraft. In the first, a small boy wearing thick glasses stood beside his creation. His face was a study in determination, mixed with nervousness. In the next, the aircraft was a few feet above the ground. The last showed a scattering of wreckage, with an ambulance and police cars in the background.

  “He took off from the street in front of his home. The motor's coil burned out, the craft stalled, and you can see the results. A neighbour took these pictures.”

  “Fantastic,” I said, “but most kids just build models if they're interested in flight. Why did he go to so much trouble? Why do something so dangerous?”

  “Oh, just some rivalry at school. A couple of kids were talking about becoming pilots when they grew up, and Stephen said that he'd become a pilot as well. They teased him, said that nobody as short-sighted as him could ever get a pilot's licence.

  “It's funny, you know, but most people thought of Stephen as a sort of absent-minded little whizz kid. He was actually stubborn, bad tempered, resourceful, and very, very proud. He shouted that he'd fly a plane before they could even drive a car, then went home and started to build this. He was right, too.”

  I looked at the last photograph again. “Was he hurt?” I asked. “I'd say he came down pretty hard.”

  “Several fractures,” said the sergeant, shaking his head. “When he got out of hospital we agreed to forget the whole thing if his mother kept him locked out of the garage workshop. He wore that for a year or so, then decided he wasn't going to be pushed around. He ran away.”

  “All kids do that,” said Taylor, “I used to run away to Gran's nearly every month.”

  “Little Steve was not just any kid,” he replied, walking along to the next exhibit. It was a display of newspaper clippings. “It was over a year before we found him, in a city 2000 miles away. He had travelled by hiding on trains and big rigs, and earned money by selling newspapers, sweeping, and other odd jobs. Talk about resourceful: he was renting a cheap room, and had $500 in the bank when we found him. The kid was barely thirteen!”

  We examined the clippings and photographs. A picture was emerging of Stephen's character, but one that was not at all encouraging for us. He must have had helpers, so find those helpers , they had told us in the Pentagon. It was now becoming clear that this short-sighted little boy had enough resourcefulness and mechanical skills for a dozen normal people. He could have built the Pharaoh with no help at all, I was sure of that now.

  The last exhibit was a deck chair. Above it was a cluster of weather sonde balloons attached by thin wires. It rested on a wicker frame which enclosed a gimballed chainsaw engine driving two small rotors which cancelled each others' torque.

  “He called it the Pharaoh's Chariot,” said Sergeant Powell. “It can't leave the ground until the motor is started, because it needs a small downward thrust to help the balloons raise it. The deckchair was from his mother's sunroom, the chainsaw engine from a neighbour's junkpile.”

  It was a masterpiece of safety design, and Stephen had obviously been influenced by the crash of his first aircraft. This one could not crash! If the motor failed, the craft drifted down slowly. If some balloons burst as well, he could reduce weight by dropping the motor and wicker frame and so still descend slowly. To steer he tilted the rotors' mounting slightly, to go up throttle forward, to go down throttle back. His main expense had probably been the balloons and hydrogen.

  “He was fourteen when he built this,” explained the sergeant. “His school was running some sort of science day, and the kids were told to bring along some special project. This was Stephen's contribution, and he actually flew it to school.”

  He pointed to a photograph that had been taken on the day. The Pharaoh's Chariot was descending towards the school's football field, while a police helicopter hovered in the background.

  “He seems to have a police escort,” Taylor observed.

  “He sure did, and this time he was in real trouble. He had flown through the approach path to Eagle Farm airport, and he was charged with nine counts involving the Air Navigation Act. He was given a good behaviour bond, and I was one of the officers who counselled him. He behaved himself for the next five years, so we must have done some good.”

  I reached out and touched the deckchair, and the contraption wobbled slightly. It was suspended from the ceiling by wires, as were the dummy balloons, yet one could see that it was viable.

  “We've noticed that Stephen named his last two aircraft after the Pharaohs,” I said. “Did he ever mention his interest in ancient Egypt to you?”

  “Yeah, he was crazy about it. You should have seen his room: books and comics piled everywhere, walls covered with pictures of Egyptian art. Apparently a teacher had once told his class that the tools and technology for building some inventions can be around for thousands of years before anyone thinks of the invention itself. He went on to say that the ancient Egyptians could have actually flown, using hot air balloons. Even three thousand years ago they had charcoal burners, papyrus fabric, strong cord and wicker baskets, everything you need to build a balloon except the idea itself. By the way, did you know that he took out a patent on his balloon-helicopter? Even after the fines and court costs had been paid he still had several thousand dollars left in royalties.”

  So, Stephen had a few thousand dollars available, probably more than enough to build that fantastic third craft that he had eventually died in.

  “One last question,” I said as we were about to leave. “What was his bedroom like when you visited to counsel him?”

  “Well... I don't like to run down the departed, but it was a pigsty. Full of rubblish, bits of radios and odd gadgets, dirty mugs and plates, piles of clothes—his mother had given up trying to make him keep it tidy years before. Remember how stubborn he was about getting his own way
?”

  “More answers and more mysteries,” I said as we drove through the sub-tropical heat to the University of Queensland. “We now know that Stephen had both the manual skills and money to build the Pharaoh all by himself. We also know that at some stage he changed from being a slob to being meticulously tidy. There must be something behind that.”

  “Well, our contact at the university discovered that he lived with another student for five months,” said Taylor, ticking off items in a file. “She must know something.”

  I smiled. “His mother was very quiet about that.”

  “And about his police record. Poor woman, she just wants to remember him as a good, clever son.”

  I began to daydream. A hot air balloon was drifting over the seaside palace of one of the Pharaohs. The pilot called to the guards and waved. The guards looked up in astonishment, then one of them panicked and shot the aviator dead with an arrow. He tumbled from the wicker gondola, and with his weight gone the balloon rose rapidly. The wind took it out to sea, and by the time the Pharaoh's chief engineer arrived it was out of sight.

  “This man was flying over the palace wall, so I shot him,” the guard informed the engineer, pointing to the body.

  “How was he flying?” asked the engineer. “Did he have wings?”

  “No, he was in a basket under a huge bag. His clothing smelled of burning wood. There were no wings.”

  “He must have had wings,” said the engineer. “When birds and insects fly they use wings. Think again, did he have very thin wings, perhaps?”

  “Er... he was waving his arms.”

  “Marvellous!” exclaimed the engineer. “He was obviously flapping invisible wings.”

  “But what about the huge bag?” protested the guard.

  “Hah! The man was clearly a thief, and the bag was to carry off the Pharaoh's treasures.”

  Far out to sea the furnace beneath the balloon died, and it sank slowly to the waves. My little fantasy had its lesson. The Egyptians certainly could have built a manned balloon three thousand years ago, yet the idea of using hot air to fly did not arise until the Montgolfier Brothers began their experiments in late 18th Century France.