Although Aquila could not be seen, it was still there, and if it was left where someone might walk into it, its existence would hardly remain a secret very long. It had to be left where nobody went, and finding such a place was harder than you might think. There were plenty of places where people did not go very often, but nowhere the boys could be absolutely sure Aquila would be undisturbed.
Tom suggested leaving it above a flower bed, on the grounds that nobody walked on them, but Geoff pointed out that there were gardeners and, even as they talked, a tennis ball landed on the rose bed beneath them, and the boy who had thrown it naturally stepped out over the flowers to retrieve it.
Geoff’s suggestion was that they leave Aquila high enough in the air for anyone walking around to be able to pass underneath it, but then the problem was how to get in and out. You could probably jump out all right, Tom said, but then you would need a ladder to be able to climb back in.
In the end, and with the bell already ringing for the start of school, they left it three metres in the air by a fire escape at the back of the domestic science block. It was on the edge of the school grounds, at the end of the playing field, and far enough away from most school activity for the boys to be reasonably confident of being able to retrieve it without being seen.
As they hurried over towards the main building, Geoff felt a certain satisfaction at the way they had solved the problem.
‘It’s the perfect place,’ he said, contentedly. ‘I think it’ll be safe there.’
‘Completely safe,’ agreed Tom. ‘Nothing to worry about at all.’
From her office window on the first floor. Miss Taylor watched as the two boys scurried into school. They had a cheerful, happy look that merely confirmed her suspicion that they were up to no good.
She swivelled round in her chair to face Mr Urquart.
‘You have no idea what they were really doing?’
‘As I said, I only took Tom in the end,’ Mr Urquart explained. ‘But he just seemed to be… interested in the site.’
‘Hmm…’ Miss Taylor thoughtfully fingered a thumbscrew on her desk. It had been a leaving present from the staff at her last school, and playing with it helped her think.
‘Was he carrying anything when he went home?’
‘Carrying?’
‘Yes. It occurred to me’, said Miss Taylor, ‘that they might have found something out there while they were on your field trip, hidden it, and then gone back the second time, so they could bring it back.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Mr Urquart thought for a moment, but then shook his head. ‘No. Tom had a backpack, but there was nothing in it. I remember he tipped everything out in the car on the way home, looking for food. I suppose he might have had something in his pockets, but if it was that small, he could have brought it back the first time, couldn’t he?’
‘Yes…’ Miss Taylor spun the thumbscrew another couple of turns. ‘And you say he talked to this woman about… geology?’
‘That’s what she told me.’ Mr Urquart nodded decisively. ‘She said he had a remarkable knowledge for a boy his age. I must admit I didn’t think he’d recognize carboniferous limestone.’
‘He’s never shown any of this knowledge in class?’
‘He’s never shown any knowledge in class,’ said Mr Urquart. ‘I’ve never heard him talk.’
At break, Tom sat in a corner of the library with the Encyclopedia of Flight on the table in front of him, studying the entry on air safety. Geoff had gone off to get something to eat from the lunch boxes they had left in Aquila, and was probably taking a quick flight around town, but Tom had decided it was important that one of them do some basic research into the rules of the air. He was particularly anxious to avoid the sort of near-collision that had happened on their way home from the park the day before.
They had been flying high, ‘breathing a bit of cloud’ as Geoff put it, peacefully nibbling some ginger nuts, when an RAF Harrier GR7 had come storming towards them at something over 700 miles an hour.
Afterwards, they had realized the pilot could have had no idea they were there. They were, after all, invisible, but at the time it had felt like being run down by a train.
Geoff had dropped his biscuit, grabbed the controls and sent Aquila into a screaming dive as the bomber flew straight overhead, close enough for Tom to see the stencilled numbers on the missiles slung beneath its wings. By the time they had emerged below cloud level, the Harrier had gone, and showed no signs of reappearing, but it had been a distinctly unnerving experience.
Tom knew that all aircraft, military and civil, are only allowed to fly in particular areas and at regulated heights and he was hoping that the encyclopedia could tell him what these were so they could make sure Aquila was always somewhere else.
He was still reading the first paragraph, on the founding of the Civil Aviation Authority, when Geoff appeared beside him, his face white as a sheet. He had been running, and he was barely able to speak.
‘It’s gone!’ he said, breathlessly.
‘What’s gone?’
‘It,’ hissed Geoff. ‘It’s gone!’
He gave up trying to talk, grabbed Tom’s arm and pulled him out of the library. Together they ran out of the main building, along past the bike sheds, and round to the back of the domestic science block. They stopped under the fire-escape ladder and Geoff picked up a stick and gave it to Tom.
‘Go on. Try it for yourself.’
Tom climbed a few steps up the ladder, and used the stick to poke the air where they had left Aquila. There was nothing there.
‘Did we leave it a bit higher?’
‘I’ve been all the way to the top. It’s no use. I’m telling you, it’s gone.’
‘But why… I mean, where… How?’
It was the question Geoff had been asking himself ever since he had discovered Aquila was no longer where they had left it, and he had a miserable feeling he knew the answer.
‘I think it was the chewing gum.’
‘What?’
‘The bit of chewing gum that’s stuck in the forward control. It’s all right as long as you remember to flick the button back out when you stop, but this morning was such a rush…’
‘You forgot?’
Geoff nodded. He couldn’t bring himself to speak.
Together the two boys stared out across the playing field. An invisible Aquila was out there somewhere, moving further away with every passing second.
They were still wondering what to do about it as the bell rang for the end of break.
Miss Taylor caught Mr Urquart as he passed her office on the way to his classroom.
‘He’s been to the library again.’
‘What?’
‘Tom Baxter. He came in at the start of break and took out some books.’ Miss Taylor looked over the top of her glasses at a list in her hand. ‘He got the Encyclopedia of Flight, One Hundred Places of Interest to Visit in the Midlands, and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells.’
‘Goodness,’ said Air Urquart. ‘Why would he want them?’
‘I’m going to ring his mother at lunchtime.’ Miss Taylor headed back into her office. ‘See if she can explain any of this.’
At the start of the lunch break, Tom and Geoff returned to the base of the fire escape where they had left Aquila and wondered how you set about finding something that was invisible.
They had to find it, Tom thought. Apart from anything else, they couldn’t have any lunch until they did.
They knew roughly the direction Aquila must be moving. It had been left pointing out across the playing field, and they knew it was about three metres up in the air. Geoff’s idea was that they start walking across the field with long sticks, waving them above their heads until they hit something solid. Unfortunately, it was the sort of thing that they knew would attract a certain amount of attention, particularly as the first eleven football team had just come out on the field for a practice.
Tom, who had been thinking about the problem
all through double biology, had the glimmerings of a different idea.
‘If it’s moving like it did in the garage,’ he said, ‘it must be going very slowly. We know it’s heading over there.’ He pointed to the far side of the field. ‘And if we were waiting for it by the trees when it got there, one of us could climb up and get back in.’
‘But we don’t know when it’ll get to the trees, do we?’ said Geoff. ‘It could happen in the middle of the night, or sometime next week. We can’t just stand there and wait for it.’
‘What we have to do’, said Tom, ‘is calculate how fast it’s going, and I thought…’
But Tom never got to say what it was that he thought. At that moment, someone kicked the ball from the far end of the field and a large boy called Mike Smithers leapt into the air in front of the goal and tried to head the ball into the net.
As he did so, the ball disappeared. In mid-air, it simply vanished from sight and, at the same time, there was a ‘thunk’ sound as Mike’s head connected with something very solid and he collapsed to the ground.
The games master blew his whistle and came running over, and the rest of the players gathered around Mike as he lay groaning on the ground.
Tom and Geoff stared thoughtfully at the scene.
‘Isn’t there a map of the school grounds on a noticeboard by the main entrance?’ Tom said eventually.
Geoff said he thought that there was.
‘Only, if we can find out how far it’s gone since this morning –’ Tom studied the distance from the domestic science block to where they were putting Mike’s body on a stretcher – ‘we might be able to work out how long it would be before it got to the trees.’
Geoff looked doubtful. ‘You mean… like maths?’
‘Yes.’ Tom wasn’t entirely confident about the idea either, but it had to be worth a try.
They stood at the map in the main hall, and Tom measured the distances, while Geoff carefully wrote them down. According to the measurements, it was thirty-four centimetres from the fire escape to the front of the goalpost where Mike Smithers had bumped his head on Aquila, and a further twenty-eight centimetres from there to the other side of the field.
They had left Aquila at a quarter to nine that morning, and they knew it had been outside the goalposts at a quarter to one. All they had to do now was use this information to work out how fast it was going and how long it would be before it would get to the other side. It was a simple problem of arithmetic.
‘What we need’, said Geoff, thirty minutes later, ‘is someone who knows about maths.’
‘I’d never have believed it.’ Mr Duncan was in the staffroom, addressing anyone who would listen. ‘If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I swear I would never have believed it.’
‘Baxter and Reynolds?’ Miss Taylor had only come in on the tail-end of his story. ‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Positive,’ Mr Duncan insisted. ‘I found them in the form room, and there’s no question. They were doing maths.’
‘What sort of maths?’
‘They were trying to work out a problem. I don’t know where they got it from. Something about if A travels X centimetres in Y hours, how long is it before it gets to Z. Seriously! I couldn’t believe it!’
‘Was this homework or something?’ asked Miss Poulson.
‘No.’ Mr Duncan shook his head. ‘I haven’t set any this week. It had nothing to do with their class-work.’
‘So why were they doing it?’
‘Fun,’ said Mr Duncan. ‘That’s what they told me. Fun.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘And when I offered to explain what they were doing wrong, their little faces lit up. They were interested. They were hanging on every word like they really wanted to know… xand then when I told them the answer – I forget what it was, four hours and something – they were so grateful. Extraordinary, isn’t it? I really hadn’t thought they were the type!’
Miss Taylor went back to her office wondering if the world had gone quietly mad. Baxter and Reynolds doing maths…
That lunchtime she had already had to deal with a vanishing football, a concussed football player who had hit his head on thin air, and then, when she had tried to ring Mrs Baxter, an answerphone message said she had gone out.
And the one thing everyone knew about Mrs Baxter was that she never went out…
Aquila arrived at exactly the time Mr Duncan said it would.
At five minutes past five, there had been a creaking sound from the tree above them, and both boys had looked up to see one of the branches being slowly pushed aside by some powerful but invisible force.
Geoff had quickly swung himself up into the tree, pulled himself out along the branch and then vanished inside Aquila. A moment later he had flown down so that Tom could climb in beside him.
The first thing Geoff did when they were airborne was use the point from a pair of dividers to poke out the bit of chewing gum that had stuck in the forward control. Tom sat beside him, hungrily eating his lunch. His egg sandwiches had been badly flattened by the football, but he ate them anyway. It had been a long time since breakfast.
As they flew home, the boys were relieved to find that Aquila seemed none the worse for the experience. Nothing had changed, apart that is from a little purple light in the centre panel of the dash that had started flashing. Tom wondered if it meant something was wrong but, as Geoff pointed out, a flashing light can mean anything.
‘My dad’s got a light that flashes on his watch on his wedding anniversary,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have to mean anything. It’ll probably turn itself off after a while.’
But an hour later, as Tom sat in Aquila back in the garage writing up the day’s events in his exercise book, he couldn’t help noticing that the light was still flashing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The noise began soon after six the next morning, though you could hardly call it just a noise. It was a high-pitched wailing, ululating sound, with a penetrating quality that woke Tom from a deep sleep and sat him bolt upright in bed.
He looked briefly at his clock before staggering to the window to see what was going on. The noise, he realized, was coming from the garage, and without even bothering to put on his slippers, he ran downstairs and out of the back door.
Outside, the noise was even louder and in the garage it was almost deafening. It came from Aquila, and it was accompanied by a pulsating purple glow that came from the light on the centre of the dashboard. Only now there was not one flashing light, but two.
For several seconds Tom stood there, wondering what to do. He knew that if the noise went on much longer, he would not be the only one coming to find out what was causing it. The only idea he could think of was to get in Aquila and fly it somewhere where the noise would attract less attention, but as he put a hand on the side to swing himself into the seat, the sound ceased.
The purple lights were still flashing, but the garage was completely silent. Tom took his hand off Aquila and stepped back, but the noise did not return. He was still trying to work out what it all meant when he heard his mother calling.
‘Tom? What’s going on?’
Tom emerged from the garage to find his mother standing on the step outside the back door.
‘What on earth was all that noise about?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘I was wondering myself.’
‘It sounded very close.’ Mrs Baxter looked nervously around her for a moment, then stepped back into the kitchen. ‘I suppose it was some sort of alarm.’
Tom followed his mother into the house.
‘An alarm?’
‘I don’t see what else it could have been,’ said Mrs Baxter. ‘Do you?’
‘If it was an alarm’, said Tom, when Geoff came round and he told him what had happened, ‘then it must mean something’s wrong.’
‘It doesn’t look as if anything’s wrong.’
Geoff sat in Aquila as it hovered, solidly, half a metre or so above the ground in Tom
’s garage. Apart from the flashing purple lights, there didn’t seem to be anything different about it at all.
Geoff was in fact less worried about Aquila making a noise than the news that Tom’s mother had actually come out to investigate. The decision to keep Aquila in Tom’s garage had been based on the knowledge that Mrs Baxter never left the house. If she was going to start behaving normally, they would need to find somewhere else.
‘She’s not getting cured or anything, is she?’ he asked.
‘I think she’s trying.’ His mother had not said anything about it, but Tom had noticed a pair of outdoor shoes by the door when he came home the previous evening. He pointed to the lights again. ‘I was wondering if they meant that something wasn’t working right.’
‘There’s only one way to find out.’ Geoff put his hands on the controls. ‘Are you going to do the doors?’
Tom opened the garage doors and Geoff floated carefully outside, where he waited until his friend climbed in beside him. Keeping Aquila close to the ground, he flew slowly round the back of the house and into the garden.
Everything seemed to move just as it should. Aquila went to the right and the left, up and down, and swung from side to side as it had always done. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it at all.
‘All seems fine to me,’ said Geoff, as he banked in a sweeping curve that took them somewhere over Mrs Murphy’s rose garden.
‘What was that?’
‘What?’
Tom peered round. ‘I heard a noise. A sort of knocking sound.’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’ Geoff looked at his watch. ‘Come on, we’ll be late for school.’ He swung Aquila up and over the houses. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep us low, just in case.’
Neither of them noticed Mrs Murphy standing in her rose garden. Several times in the last few days she had heard voices when there was ho one there, and this time, when she had reached up, she had actually been able to touch and then knock on something solid in the empty air above her.
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