“How long have you actually been working here?” I ask Earl on the now shorter sled ride back to the prep area.
“Earl’s been here forever,” Jared informs me. Earl smiles.
“I helped build the place,” he says proudly. And with a nod at Jared, “He was just a little tyke back then.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jared acknowledges the tease. “You’re such an old codger.” He brings the sled to a stop and locks down the controls.
“I was a year out of college, and they were gearing up for construction, so I came up and they gave me a job after they learned I had some engineering experience. I guess they figured less could go wrong if they had higher caliber workers. That was a great time.” He stops to gather his memories. “Everybody believed and was excited about the launch possibilities of the rail.
“After construction was complete, they asked me to stay on as part of the ground crew. I didn’t have anywhere else to go so I agreed, and they trained me in how to drop the splanes through that hole in the roof back there.” He stops and points towards the tunnel opening. “Once I had that down, I came to know the fueling procedures and was able to assist in that area, too.”
“So you were here when they started launching then?” I ask.
“Sure was. I used to watch from up there.” He points to the roof over the control room which is maybe twenty feet below the roof of the building.
“I thought nobody was supposed to be out in the open during a launch?” Jared questions him.
“True enough,” Earl answers, a bit of his old personality coming out, “but it’s easy to hide up there, and if you cover your ears tight enough, it’s not that loud.”
“But what about when the engines would fire?” I ask.
“They don’t go full throttle until the sled is outside the tunnel,” Jared says.
“It’s still plenty loud,” Earl adds, becoming more animated, “and there’s a quick couple of seconds when you can feel the concussion from the blast. That’s followed by a vacuum sensation from everything heading out the tunnel and you know it’s on its way.” He looks up as if he is watching a launch, his eyes fixed on a distant point only he can see.
“Cool,” I say, as we finally start down the staging platform stairs. “I barely remember watching any of it from our front porch.”
“And they never did let anyone get too close on launch days,” Jared explains.
“Nope. I still kind of remember when you guys moved in,” Earl says to me. “Housing was cheap because most of the construction crew had finished up. Your mom and dad, who could find plenty of hydrogen work here, thought this might be a good place to live.”
“Well, I’m glad we did,” I profess. We start for the exit.
“Give me a minute,” Jared asks. “I have to get that old computer for Kylie to check out.” He runs past the control room and disappears into the storage room. Earl looks at me quizzically.
“So how’s that saucer coming along?” he asks, taking me by surprise. I’m not sure why I thought he didn’t know about it.
“It’s going slow,” I answer guardedly, “but it’s going to be a great exhibit when we get it done.”
“Too bad it won’t actually fly,” says Earl, sounding a little sad. Then, in the oddest way, he gives me a sidelong glance, as if he is trying to see something, followed quickly by a whimsical smile.
I turn away pretending to look for Jared coming from the storage room. Obviously Uncle Earl is still himself, medication or not. I feel strangely joyful coming to that realization. I definitely like this Uncle Earl more.
“Got it,” we hear Jared say, as he comes around the corner. “Now Kylie can load her software and get to work on the actual physical controls.”
“How’s she planning the interface?” I ask, as we walk towards the electrical room to shut off the lights.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure she knows yet,” he answers. He hands the rack mountable computer to me and ducks into the little room. Row by row, the lights go out. “And a lot still depends on how Willie rigs the support legs. He’s narrowed them down to either hydraulic or electric motor. And the control of the gyroscope needs consideration, too.”
We begin our walk down the corridor to the stairway. I’m at Jared’s side, and I can see Earl following close behind, listening as we talk.
“Well, it’s going to be a pretty tough interface to install. We’re all going to have to sit down and think this one through.” I’m trying not to get discouraged. “Using either hydraulics or motors is going to add an awful lot of weight. I’m not sure that would be a good idea with Jen’s lift constraints.” My mind jerks a little as I think about what I just said wondering what Uncle Earl would read into it. We’ve been talking as if he wasn’t even there and probably have said too much already.
“You know,” Uncle Earl interjects, “it might work better if you balanced the saucer like a top.” We stop at the bottom of the stairs. Jared and I turn to him. “The speed and tilt of the gyros might be enough to cause the saucer to stand upright. Then you wouldn’t have to add the weight and the ratio of weight to lift,” he emphasizes the word with a pause, “wouldn’t be so great.”
Uncle Earl hadn’t missed a word we’d been saying and he’s still sharp as a tack. “Look, Uncle Earl,” I begin my cover up, “I was just wishing when I said…”
“It’s okay, Tyler,” he butts in, looking around furtively. “I won’t say anything, and I won’t get in your way or hang around. I’m on probation, of a sort, and I sure don’t need anymore trouble right now. No. You boys just do what you’re doing. I’ll keep my distance. But if you need anything out of the ordinary, or have a problem, I’m here for you. Maybe I could be your eyes on the outside or something like that though.”
I look at him. How could you not love this man or admire who he is. Not too long ago I heard somebody say genius and insanity are somewhat the same thing; that all genius is usually accompanied by some lunacy. I’m beginning to believe that’s my uncle’s situation.
“I think you have already helped us, Earl.” Jared places a hand on his shoulder. Earl smiles. “I’m going to run your idea past Kylie and see what she thinks. This could save us a lot of time.” He looks over at me grinning and eagerly says, “Now let’s get out of here!”
We are up the stairs and out of the building a few minutes later. I am still carrying the computer. Uncle Earl gives a little wave and heads down the drive with a noticeable bound in his step. He doesn’t seem to mind walking home. I notice Willie’s beast parked in front of the next building over where we are working on the exhibit. Next to it, dwarfed by its size, is the hy-ped. Next to that I see Kylie’s bike.
“I guess we should take this over there,” I say to Jared, indicating building ‘E’.
“You go ahead,” he replies. “I have some things to do at home.” He jumps into his vehicle without another word and is gone.
A slight breeze is trying to cool off another hot summer day as I walk lazily over to the other building. Feeling the heat, I think there are probably other, worse jobs I could have gotten for the summer. To be down in the tunnel, working with cold water on a ninety-two degree day, isn’t such a bad thing.
Kylie and Willie are standing by the former crop duster. The cover of the cockpit has been removed, as has the old gasoline engine. Parts have been organized in several different piles. They don’t notice me until I get pretty close. I can tell they are working out details for the new controls. Willie sees me first.
“You want this?” I call out loudly. Kylie looks up and smiles.
“It would sure help!” Willie responds with his usual boisterous voice. He hurries to meet me, taking the computer, turning it around to look at all sides. “This is great!” He heads back to the cockpit.
As I move to follow, Kylie walks towards me. “Where’s my brother?” she asks, sounding like a bratty little sister.
“Said he had something to do at home,” I snitch.
“Good!” She spins around me, locking an arm around my waist and together we walk in step over to where Willie is trying to fit the computer somewhere into the former helicopter’s instrument panel. He doesn’t seem to notice our attachment.
“We were talking about the instrumentation when you showed up,” Kylie explains, letting go of me and picking up her notebook.
“This is going to work out nicely,” we hear Willie mutter to himself. “We figure we can get rid of the gauges for engine speed, blade rotation… anything specific to flight control that’s going to be taken over by the computer.”
“And that’s pretty much everything,” Kylie adds. “The computer is going to monitor and interface with the flight controls, so whoever pilots this thing will mostly watch the screen.”
“And it will be mounted smack dab in front here,” Willie points out. “And this is where I think your hydro-cycle’s fuel cell is going to sit,” he adds, tapping an aluminum bar behind the seat. “I just need to know how it mounts.” He looks at me expectantly. I know what he is asking.
“By the way,” I change the subject, “Uncle Earl came up with an idea today that might be useful. Jared was going to talk to you about it but now seems as good a time as any.”
“Your uncle? The old loon?” Willie laughs, insensitively.
“The ‘old loon’ as you say,” I chastise Willie, “just happens to have a degree in engineering and has made what Jared and I think is a viable suggestion.”
“What’s that?” Kylie asks.
“Think of the saucer as a top,” I state. “Balance it on a point, inside which the gyroscope spins. Then just have some support around the periphery for when the saucer is at rest. He seems to think the speed and tilt applied by the gyroscope will be enough to bring it upright.”
“I like it! That way I don’t have to come up with any movable landing gear,” Willie says.
Kylie thinks for a minute. “It’ll never work. These gyros will never have enough weight or speed to be able to get the whole vehicle upright. They’re just not big enough.”
The disappointment must have showed on my face, more for Uncle Earl’s sake than the idea itself.
“But it really doesn’t matter, does it?” Kylie whispers. She looks around a bit and moves closer towards me. Willie sits up to listen as well. “For Willie’s benefit,” she nods towards him, “let’s use the idea.”
“But if it won’t work…”
“Listen!” she interrupts me. “The outer ring of bits can do the leveling. The gyros can handle the stabilization, and that’s really all we need them to do.”
“The outer ring?” I ask.
“Haven’t you thought this through at all?” She stares at me. Sensing her impatience, I say nothing. “Willie and I believe the best configuration for the containment fields will be to have larger, more powerful tubes for lift mounted in a circle around the cowling. A smaller, less powerful group can then be mounted on the outer tips of the ribs to allow the craft to be tilted.”
Willie energetically adds, “That way the bulk of the lifting stress on the structure will be carried at the strongest point, and the directional control lift will be on the weaker point. You won’t come flying apart so easily.”
“And that’s a good thing,” I conclude smiling. “You guys make a pretty good team.”
“It’s just that we’ve been hanging around thinking about these things,” Kylie points out.
“I’m glad somebody is,” I admit. “I’ve been trying to get some calculations done but I guess I haven’t thought it through too far.”
“That’s okay, Ty. We got it covered,” Willie reassures me. “We are a team. Everybody does what they do best.”
I agree. Nobody can be expected to do the entire task. Maybe that’s what they’re trying to teach us at school when we do those group projects. “Thanks guys.”
Willie smiles as he turns back to his work. He seems to be having a good time. Kylie and I watch him for a second before she turns to me to gently say, “Tyler, it’s time.” I look at her sadly. “Willie really needs the hy-ped to continue.”
“I know,” I say quietly. It is getting late, and I feel like going home. Dinner will be ready soon. I’m not very hungry, but it still seems like a good time to go. I reach into my pocket, pull out the hy-ped’s keys and slide one of them off as a memento. “Hey Willie,” I call over to him. When he looks up, I toss the remaining key to him. “Be gentle with her.”
“From caterpillar to butterfly, my friend,” he consoles me. “She’ll still be here, just in a new body.”
“Yeah, I guess.” I try to sound cheerful. “Well, I’m going home for dinner. You want me to stop back later?”
“Not tonight. Cheri and I are getting together later. In fact, I gotta get going real soon myself.”
“Well, have fun then. See you later.”
“Okay man.” He waves, popping the key into the pocket of his t-shirt. “Hey! You wanna ride home?”
“No thanks. I think I’ll walk.”
“See you tomorrow then.”
I turn to leave. Kylie is next to me. “Mind if I walk with you a while?”
“If you want,” I say a little downhearted.
“Well, if you don’t, just say so.” She seems a little put off.
“It would be nice if you did,” I assure her, forcing a smile as we pass out of the building and into the early evening light. I retrieve my lunch bag out of the hy-ped, pat the seat, and look at it one more time before I turn to go.
We walk silently across the taxiway and between the buildings to the old construction road that leads out to The Hill. The sun is slowly dropping behind the hills to our right.
After a while I become aware that Kylie is humming a tune to herself. She has a pure, pleasant sound that gives me the same sense of calm that Handsome does when he is purring on my lap. I listen for a while. The melody is slow and sweet; almost sad sometimes, but it doesn’t seem like I ever hear the same series of notes. Then she stops.
“That’s pretty,” I compliment her. She looks up at me puzzled. “You’re song,” I explain. “It has a nice melody.” She looks back down the trail.
“I like to make up tunes sometimes,” she says, kicking at a stone. “It helps me to think through problems.”
“Do you ever record them into your computer?”
“No.” She snickers, like it’s a dumb idea.
“Seriously,” I defend my suggestion. “You might want to try and develop them.”
“No,” she says thoughtfully. “Mom used to play our piano a little. Since she died, it just sits there. I plunk around every once in a while, mostly when Dad’s gone. I think it makes him sad to hear it.”
“Hmm,” I murmur, not knowing what else to say. “That’s too bad. That should be a good memory, I would think.”
“It is for me,” she says looking up with a sweet, sad expression. She takes hold of my hand. “Maybe someday it will be for him, too.”
We walk on a while longer. “So what were you thinking about while you were humming your tune?”
“Well, actually, and this might sound weird, I was wondering how those bits you and my brother snatched off the shiff got to be the way they are.” She begins swinging my arm back and forth in an absentminded, embarrassed sort of way. The force causes them to separate.
“And what did you theorize?”
“Nothing really. Just one bizarre possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you remember a couple of months ago, there was a news report that a cosmic wave of some kind had passed through the Earth?”
“Yeah. Everybody was afraid because there was no warning and it didn’t register like anything that had ever hit the Earth before. I don’t think they ever figured out where it came from either.”
“Right, and then we never heard any more about it?”
“So?”
She hesitates a moment. “Have you ever wondered about quasars and the gam
ma-rays they eject?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Well I have,” she reveals. “Do you know they can eject energy as high as several terra-electron volts? Don’t you wonder what kind of effect that would have on things? And I doubt we’ve even learned ten percent about what’s hitting us.”
“I think maybe they know, but they’re not about to say anything that might panic the rest of us.”
“That could be true,” she agrees. “But what if, embedded like a carrier wave on an electric line, there’s some undiscovered gravitational property we’ve only imagined with our tiny human minds? And what if that property were to cross paths with the Earth? What kind of effect would that have on different materials?”
I’m starting to understand where her thoughts are heading, but having a hard time getting my mind around them. “So you think some great cosmic event caused our bits to become what they are?”
“Well, yeah. It’s the best I’ve come up with so far. Some property of the nanotubes that were on the space station trapped some of those cosmic wave properties, and, well, we know what they are capable of when they are brought nearer to a larger gravitational field.”
“Yeah. They want to float away. Have you tried to find any evidence on the web of any of this?”
“No, but I don’t think something like that would be published too quickly. Like you said, it might cause too much of a scare. At least until we know more about them.”
“What other things do you think about?” I ask her.
“Black holes,” she blurts out. “They’re amazing things. And the Big Bang theory gets me thinking too. What if there has always been an occasional bang when one of those black holes pop every once in a while?”
I grin and look at her. “Where do you come up with this stuff?” I ask. “Most girls your age are busy trying to figure out how to wear their hair and clothes, or who’s cool to hang out with.”
“Yeah. And they’re so boring,” she says with irritation, quickly adding, “fun though. But I actually want to contribute something in my lifetime. Mom taught us that it’s important to give back. And keeping her ideas alive keeps part of her alive.” Her voice drops with the memory. She looks away.
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