Aquila

by Andrew Norriss

  The doctor had advised her to get out and about more. Maybe he was right. He had also said that in an emergency she could take two of the new pills. As she tottered back to the house, she decided this was definitely an emergency.

  ‘Come in!’ Miss Taylor was in her office, lunching off a couple of pork pies, and she motioned Mr Urquart to a chair. ‘You’ve heard about the maths?’

  ‘Maths?’ Mr Urquart looked blank.

  ‘Peter Duncan found them yesterday in a classroom, doing arithmetic for fun.’ Miss Taylor shook her head. ‘This thing is getting stranger by the day.’

  ‘Well, it’s partly about the boys I wanted to see you.’ Mr Urquart took a piece of paper from his briefcase. ‘Tom anyway. I gave their class a test in geography this morning, and I thought you might like to see what he did.’

  He passed the paper to Miss Taylor who stared at it, a section of pork pie frozen in mid-bite.

  ‘I called it a general knowledge test’, Mr Urquart explained, ‘to see how much they knew about geology. The first ten questions were about recognizing types of rock – some of the bright ones scored a few marks there – and then I gave them ten more questions on putting geological ages in the right order. Nobody got any of those, except Tom.’

  Miss Taylor looked at the row of ticks down the page and then at the total at the bottom. Twenty out of twenty. To her certain knowledge, Tom had never come top in anything before. There were thirty-six in his form, and the highest position he had ever reached was equal thirty-fifth.

  ‘What I don’t understand’, said Mr Urquart, ‘is why he never produces anything like this in any of his other work. You don’t think he’s been deliberately hiding his intelligence?’

  ‘I know he’s hiding something,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I certainly never thought it might be intelligence.’

  *

  Tom was sitting with Geoff in Aquila outside the sweetshop between a couple of parked cars. Geoff had bought two ice creams and they were quietly eating, when a man walking along the pavement stopped in front of them and gave both boys a cheery smile.

  ‘My word, what’s this then?’

  Tom and Geoff stared up at him.

  The man bent and tapped Aquila’s hull. ‘Now that’s the sort of vehicle I’d like. What is it?’ He was looking directly at Tom.

  ‘It’s… It’s…’ Tom’s mind froze. ‘It’s Geoff’s,’ he said eventually, pointing to his friend.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ The man looked brightly at Geoff. ‘Where’d you get it from?’

  ‘We got it from a man’, said Geoff, slowly, ‘who didn’t want it any more.’

  ‘I see. Left over from a film set, was it? Something like that?’

  Neither of the boys replied.

  ‘Well, I think you’re very lucky. Wish I’d had one when I was your age.’ The man looked at the dash. ‘Flashing lights and everything, eh?’

  He smiled again, and disappeared round the corner into the shop.

  The boys looked at each other and then at the dashboard.

  ‘I thought we were supposed to be invisible,’ said Tom.

  ‘We were when I got in.’ Geoff was already climbing out to stand on the pavement. Both Aquila and Tom, he saw, were in full view.

  ‘I don’t understand it.’ He checked briefly that no one was in sight. ‘Press the button again.’

  As Tom pressed the button, Aquila disappeared, but the moment he took his finger away it came back again. Eventually, they used a piece of sticking plaster from the first-aid kit Mrs Baxter put in Tom’s school bag to tape over the switch and keep it on. It worked but it was, as even Geoff admitted, a little disturbing.

  ‘Flashing lights, engine knock, and a dodgy invisibility button,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t sound too healthy. What we need is a proper test flight. I’m going to do some safety checks.’

  ‘Safety checks?’

  ‘I’ll take it out somewhere and put it through its paces, you know? A few tight loops, hard turns, full throttle and plenty of speed changes. Then we’ll see what breaks down.’

  Tom had a feeling this might not be the way the professionals would conduct a safety check, but Geoff was very insistent.

  ‘If anything else is going to go wrong,’ he said, seriously, ‘I think we need to know about it.’

  Tom did not argue. He had just noticed a change to the flashing lights on the centre of the dash.

  There were three of them now.

  ‘What did his mother have to say?’ asked Mr Urquart. ‘Did you get a chance to talk to her?’

  ‘I did.’ Miss Taylor nodded. ‘She came in to see me this morning.’

  ‘She came in? What… into the school?’

  ‘Yes…’ Miss Taylor hesitated. It had not been an easy interview. Mrs Baxter, white and shaking, had gripped the sides of her chair and tried desperately to concentrate on answering the questions put to her, but when she had passed out for the third time, Miss Taylor had given up, carried her down to the car, and driven her home.

  ‘You have to hand it to the woman,’ she said. ‘She was very determined. But hopefully I’ve persuaded her you need expert help to face these things. The doctor said he’d line her up with someone.’

  ‘So she didn’t say anything about Tom?’ asked Mr Urquart.

  ‘She said he likes rocks.’ Miss Taylor glanced down at the test paper again. ‘But we already know that, don’t we?’

  She had the distinct feeling that somewhere she had missed something. An important clue.

  ‘Maybe we’re going after the wrong person. Whatever they’re doing, Geoff will be the one behind it, not Tom. He’s the one we need to investigate.’ Miss Taylor finished the last of her pork pie. ‘I think I’ll stop off at the newsagents on my way home. See what his father thinks…’

  They took Aquila to the park in the end. If anything did go wrong, Geoff argued, and they crashed, they would do much less damage on grass or the lake than if they were flying over houses and streets. It was not a thought that Tom found particularly consoling.

  Geoff flew three tight circuits. He began by hurtling over the water of the lake at a terrifying speed, then shot up through the trees, over the brow of the hill, down the other side, through the subway tunnel and a tight spin round to the main gates where they started. It was an exhilarating trip and, as Tom pointed out at the end, you couldn’t say anything was wrong at all.

  Geoff, however, was clearly not satisfied. ‘I was on full speed that last bit.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tom was still trying to catch his breath. ‘Yes, it felt like that.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand.’ Geoff frowned. ‘You remember how fast we went the first time I pressed the button?’

  Tom remembered when they had shot out of the cave. It had taken them under a second to go half a mile. They had been travelling fast round the park, but not that fast.

  ‘You had the button full on?’ he asked.

  ‘All the time.’ Geoff paused for a moment. ‘I think I know what the flashing lights mean.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re to warn us we’re running out of power.’

  ‘Like the light on a car that says you’re running out of petrol?’

  ‘Right.’ Geoff pointed at the sticking plaster taped over the invisibility button. ‘It would explain that as well. It’s trying to cut out anything that uses too much energy.’

  For a moment neither of the boys said anything, and then Tom broke the silence. It was a fairly obvious idea, but he thought it might be worth mentioning.

  ‘Maybe we need to put in more petrol.’

  Geoff looked at him.

  ‘Well, I know it wouldn’t be petrol,’ said Tom. ‘It’d be something else, but if we found what it was, we could maybe get some and put it in.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Geoff. ‘I mean, what powers a machine like this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tom shrugged. ‘But I suppose we could ask.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mr Bampford, t
he physics teacher, was a short, balding man who usually enjoyed answering children’s questions, but preferred not to do it at the end of the school day, when he was trying to get back to the staffroom and smoke his pipe.

  However, when Geoff and Tom appeared in front of him, holding out a copy of the Sunday Mirror, he stopped to listen. As far as he could remember, neither of the boys had ever spoken to him before, and he was curious to hear what they wanted to say.

  ‘We were wondering what a UFO like this would have worked on,’ said Geoff.

  Mr Bampford took the paper and looked at the photograph on the front page.

  ‘Worked on?’

  ‘What it would have had in it,’ said Geoff. ‘You know… to make it go.’

  ‘We thought possibly uranium,’ put in Tom. ‘Or plutonium?’

  Mr Bampford studied the blurred image of Aquila for a moment before handing it back to Geoff. ‘Apart from the fact that this photograph is an obvious fake –’ he set off down the corridor towards the staffroom – ‘I think any scientist would tell you that if there were such things as flying saucers, they would hardly be likely to run on anything as dangerous as radioactive isotopes.’ He took his pipe out of his pocket as he walked. ‘An advanced star-travelling technology would be capable of extracting the energy from more basic forms of matter.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Geoff.

  ‘Anything.’ Mr Bampford took out a box of matches. ‘Did you know that theoretically there’s enough energy in a sugar lump to supply a city the size of New York with electricity for a week?’

  ‘You’re saying it runs on sugar lumps?’ said Geoff.

  ‘I’m saying that if your technology is advanced enough, you could run something like that on any form of matter you chose.’ Mr Bampford stopped as he reached the staffroom door. ‘Even the molecules from something as simple and basic as sugar.’

  ‘You mean it could run on anything?’

  ‘Anything at all.’ Mr Bampford pushed open the door. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an important staff meeting to attend.’

  It had been a disappointing conversation, Tom thought, as he and Geoff walked back to the domestic science block. If Aquila could be powered by anything, then their chances of finding out what it was, were slim to say the least.

  Not that it made much difference, he thought. Even if Mr Bampford had told them exactly what Aquila needed, they would still have had the problem of finding where to put it. Aquila’s hull had no visible openings that they had ever found. Not so much as a glove compartment.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Geoff said when Tom told him. He paused with one foot on the bottom rung of the fire escape. ‘And maybe that’s what we need to know first. Not what the fuel is, but where it goes.’ He started up the ladder. ‘I mean, if we found where the fuel tank was, and it had a bit of fuel left in it, we could look at what was in there, find out what it is, and maybe get some more of it.’

  There was, Tom admitted, a certain logic to this.

  ‘Like, if we found the end of a sugar lump, we could go out and buy some more sugar?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Geoff clambered off the ladder and disappeared into Aquila. Tom followed him.

  ‘But we don’t know where the fuel tank is, do we?’

  Geoff settled himself at the controls, and gestured to the row of lights in front of them.

  ‘No. But I should imagine it’s opened by one of these.’

  The plan Geoff outlined was very simple. They would press each of the lights in turn, starting at the top and working their way along the rows from left to right, and each time they pressed a button, they would check to see if any secret doors or flaps opened up on Aquila.

  Both boys were acutely aware that the last time they had pressed a button, they had started eleven fires, but Geoff suggested that if they took Aquila to some isolated part of countryside, they would at least be unlikely to actually kill anyone.

  Then they discovered that Aquila would never make it to the open fields. As Geoff flew Aquila away from the side of the domestic science block, he found Aquila’s top speed had slowed to little more than a walking pace, and Tom pointed out that there were now four of the purple lights flashing from the dash.

  Instead, they went to the park. It had a hill at one end, the remains of an iron-age fort, with a hollow in the top that they hoped would not only conceal them from passers-by, but also prevent them doing too much damage if they found anything like the laser beam again.

  The first three buttons Geoff tried produced some interesting results, but none of them seemed to have anything to do with fuel. The first changed the colour of the underside of Aquila to a deep blue – for what reason, they never discovered. The second heated the seats, unfortunately to a degree that was a shade more than comfortable, and the third produced a hologram in the air directly in front of them consisting of two words.

  ‘SERVUS STO.’

  The boys had no idea what either of them meant.

  The results of pressing the fourth button, however, were rather more dramatic.

  It started with a loud humming sound and then a thread of blue light appeared from under Aquila. It was not a straight beam, as the laser had been, but more like a moving coil that undulated over the grass in front of them, writhing like a snake and rapidly extending in length as if reaching out for something.

  Tom found it slightly unnerving and wanted to turn it off, but Geoff was not so sure.

  ‘It could be a fuel line,’ he said hopefully, as the blue light twisted its way up to the lip of the hollow. ‘Maybe it’s looking for fuel. And when it finds some it’ll bring it back.’

  If Tom thought this was unlikely, he also realized that it was no more unlikely than most of the things that had happened since they found Aquila. The truth was that neither of them had ever had much idea what they were doing.

  Until it was too late.

  Reynolds’ Newsagents stood at the end of a row of four shops, serving a housing estate that had been built on the east side of Stavely in the seventies. When Miss Taylor walked in, both Mr and Mrs Reynolds were serving behind the counter, and the shop was busy with customers.

  Mr Reynolds, a large, confident, good-looking man, gave her a cheery wave as soon as he saw her and, ignoring everyone in the queue, came over to ask how he could help.

  ‘I wanted a word about Geoff, if you had a moment,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘But don’t worry if you’re busy. I’m quite happy to wait.’

  ‘Wouldn’t hear of it.’ Mr Reynolds led Miss Taylor to a door at the back of the shop. ‘Can’t keep a busy woman like you waiting, Miss Taylor. You come on through.’

  Experience had taught him that it was not wise to leave Miss Taylor in the shop for any length of time. In the course of her career, she had taught a good many of his customers and she had a habit, if given the chance, of telling them not to waste their money on chocolate and reminding them how unhealthy it was to buy cigarettes.

  He ushered her straight through to the sitting room and pulled up a chair. ‘So what trouble’s he in this time then? Nothing too serious, I hope?’

  ‘It’s not really trouble at all,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘It’s just his behaviour recently has been a little… odd.’

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘Yes.’ Miss Taylor hesitated. It was not easy to put what she felt into words. ‘He’s been seen in the library a couple of times, and he’s been asking questions in class, wanting to know about things…’

  ‘Asking questions?’ Mr Reynolds’ face furrowed with concern. ‘Right. I’ll have a word with him about that.’

  ‘No, no, we don’t mind,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘In fact it’s the sort of thing we encourage. It’s just that Geoff’s never done it before. It seems to have started on this geography field trip he went on. You haven’t noticed anything different about his behaviour since then?’

  Mr Reynolds thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  ‘There’s nothing he’s done?’ Miss
Taylor persisted. ‘Nothing he’s said or talked about?’

  Mr Reynolds dug deep in his mind to try and remember anything that Geoff might have talked about in the last week. ‘I could ask Mrs Reynolds,’ he said eventually. ‘I know she listens to the lad sometimes.’

  Mrs Murphy was walking home through the park, her shopping trolley loaded with cat food. As she paused to catch her breath at the point where the path circled the crest of the old fort, the sound of a low humming caused her to look up.

  The noise grew louder, and a moment later a cord of blue light appeared over the edge of the hill, paused for a second, as if it were an animal sniffing the air, and then turned towards Mrs Murphy.

  Mrs Murphy backed away, but the light was already moving straight towards her, purposefully humming its way down the side of the hill, gathering speed as it did so. In rising panic, Mrs Murphy began to run. She moved with remarkable speed for an eighty-three-year-old with bad legs, but she was no match for the light. In a last desperate effort to get away, she abandoned her trolley and then watched in horror as a second later, the blue light caught it, engulfed it, and began dragging it back up the hill.

  ‘My shopping!’ Mrs Murphy called to anyone who could hear. ‘Help! It’s taken my shopping! And my purse. It’s stolen my purse!’

  Sitting in Aquila, Geoff and Tom could not hear Mrs Murphy’s cries, but they watched in fascination as the tip of the blue light reappeared over the brow of the hill, pulling something along with it.

  ‘Wow… what is that?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Tom. ‘But it looks like a shopping trolley.’

  Geoff reached out and turned off the button. The light disappeared and the trolley fell over sideways on the grass. In the silence, they could hear Mrs Murphy calling for help, and then a man’s voice asking what had happened.

  ‘We’d better get out of here,’ said Tom.

  ‘Right.’ Geoff pulled the sticky tape over the invisibility button, and put his hands on the controls. There were several voices now, and they were getting nearer.