Stealing Air

by Trent Reedy

  Brian saw Ms. Gilbert watching him from her desk. She raised an eyebrow. He hated lying to Wendy. Things would get better once they were flying. They had to.

  That night, both Mom and Dad were home, so Dad made pork chops and potatoes. It was pretty tasty, and Brian would usually have eaten three or four chops and at least two scoops of potatoes, except that after the battle for Mr. Piggly last Saturday, Brian wasn’t too crazy about pork just yet. More than that, by the time they sat down to eat, he was an hour late for the meeting at the Eagle’s Nest.

  “Brian, would you please relax and eat? It’s still early. You can go play with your friends when you’re done with supper.”

  Play? Why did adults call spending time with friends “playing”? He didn’t have many friends, but he wouldn’t make any more if anyone heard his mother treating him like a little kid. He tried to slow down and eat right so Mom wouldn’t complain. Maybe he could divert their attention. “How’s Synthtech, Dad?”

  Dad offered a short smile. “Storm knocked the power out for a bit in Iowa City last night, but our security system kicked over to batteries and kept running.” He chuckled. “I’d like to see anyone try to get their hands on the Plastisteel now.”

  Brian was grateful when the phone rang. Mom answered and then handed it to Brian.

  “Hello?” Brian said.

  “Dude, where are you?” Alex said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “I’m almost done with supper. Then I’ll be right over.”

  “Don’t bother going to the Nest now. Max and I about killed ourselves, but we have everything set up at the place we used the first time. Hurry and get down here.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Brian said. He hung up the phone and went back to eating, speeding up a bit and hoping Mom wouldn’t notice.

  “Can I go now?” he asked when he’d finished.

  “Is your homework done?” Mom said.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to be doing?”

  Brian sighed. “Skateboarding.” It was sort of true. There were skateboards on the flyer.

  Mom took a drink of water. “Just with Max and this Alex boy?”

  “Oh, let him go already, Diane,” Dad said. “Let him be with his friends. While he still can,” he added quietly.

  Mom closed her eyes for a moment, then waved Brian away from the table. Part of him felt bad for ditching them, but another part didn’t want to stay around for the rest of a tense meal. He grabbed his backpack and headed out, dropping Spitfire to the pavement and kick-starting down the street. He was rolling close to the ground now, but soon he’d be flying.

  “It’s about time,” Alex said when Brian reached the grain elevators. The enormous form of Mr. Piggly floated eight feet overhead, with two ropes staked in the ground holding it in place. Beneath the balloon, the flyer looked like it was ready for action.

  “I said I was sorry,” Brian said. “What’s up?”

  “Hopefully the flyer, in just a moment.” Max said with a laugh. Alex shook his head. “Yes, well … Here’s the plan.” Max took his toy Star Trek phaser out of his pocket and pointed the red laser dot at a metal ring on the flyer’s engine. “You see how the cable from Mr. Piggly attaches to the flyer at this ring. Brian, at the right moment, you must pull the pin, which will release the ring and cut the flyer loose from the balloon.” Max used the phaser to point out two more rings on the skateboards below Alex’s seat. “At the exact same moment, Alex, you must kick out both of these pins. Releasing all three metal rings at the same time is key to keeping the flyer balanced when you’re breaking away from Mr. Piggly.”

  “So I start the engine when we’re how high?” Brian asked.

  “I’d say when you’re over five thousand feet.”

  Brian frowned. “How do we know when we’ve over five thousand feet?”

  “Chill, dude.” Alex pulled a gadget about the size of his iPhone from his pocket. “I bought this altimeter online for about ten bucks. I figured we’d need it, since part of what we’re doing tonight involves dropping from the bottom of the balloon.”

  “How do you order online?” Brian asked. “You have a credit card?”

  Alex waved away the question. “Please. I know everything about money. I just buy Visa gift cards at the gas station.” He shook the altimeter. “Anyway, this baby will tell us how high up we are.”

  “That’s … actually incredibly helpful, Alex. Thank you,” Max said.

  Everything was set. Mr. Piggly smiled big above them. Brian put his hand to his stomach.

  “How did you ever get enough hydrogen to fill this thing?” he asked. “And why not helium, anyway?”

  “Ah, that’s another issue.” Max looked up at Mr. Piggly. “Helium is too expensive to buy in such large quantities. Hydrogen, on the other hand, floats even better, and can be produced through a process called electrolysis.”

  “Electrolysis?” Brian said.

  “He rigged up this device to capture the gas,” Alex said, “and then he ran an electric charge through water.”

  “Which separated the water’s oxygen and hydrogen atoms,” Max explained. “Hydrogen is flammable, but that won’t be a problem. It’s not as if we’re exposing the balloon to any open flames.”

  Brian climbed into the pilot’s seat. Alex sat down behind him. Brian went over the controls again, checking that it all worked.

  “We’ve already checked the ailerons, rudder, and everything,” Alex said. “Systems are all go.”

  Max stood at the front. “When the flyer is up to top speed, it should be pulling Mr. Piggly through the air like a ship dragging its anchor. That’s when you separate. Remember, right after you’re released, you should expect the flyer to fall a little bit. Keep her level and open the throttle. Once it gets up to speed, it should fly.”

  Brian took a deep breath. “Okay, Max. Release Mr. Piggly.”

  “Good luck, guys,” Max said. He tugged on the stakes anchoring the balloon to the ground, but he couldn’t get the ropes loose.

  “Come on, Max!” Alex shouted. “You can do it! Be like Captain Kirk. He could pull those stakes up.”

  Max bit his lip and yanked hard again. The ropes fell away from Mr. Piggly and the flyer began to rise straight up into the air.

  “Woo-hoo!” Alex yelled. “We have liftoff!”

  “Yeah!” Max said. “Warp speed!”

  The engine was off, so all was silent, but they were rising steadily. Everything on the ground seemed to shrink away beneath them. Max became smaller and smaller, then they cleared the treetops and kept going. To their left, they could see all of Riverside, the Catholic church steeple lit up brightly as always.

  “Dude, this rocks!” Alex said.

  Brian laughed. “We’re really doing it! We’re flying. Well … we’re floating.”

  “You know what we need?” Alex said. “We need a name for this machine. We can’t keep calling it ‘the flyer.’ You’re supposed to give boats and bikes and planes and things cool girls’ names, like Annabel or Suzie. Something like that. She needs a good name for good luck.”

  They reached the top of the grain elevators. Brian was sure that nobody had looked down on the tops of the giant cement cylinders in many years. They weren’t quite as cool as the Space Needle back in Seattle, but still a good five or six stories high. The flyer floated above them now.

  “What do you think?” Alex asked.

  “It’s awesome up here,” Brian said.

  “It is,” said Alex. “But I mean about the name for the flyer.”

  “Oh. Well, you know how Ms. Gilbert was telling us about all the things named after Greek mythology? I was thinking about how the mission that took the astronauts to the moon was called Apollo. Maybe we could find a cool mythology name like that.”

  “Like Apollo? But that’s already been taken.”

  “I know, but you know how we’re going to do our project on this Icarus kid? Ms. Gilbert told me a little about him. He and
his dad built these cool wings and then flew out of a maze.”

  “Icarus?” Alex said.

  “Yeah. I looked online a little bit tonight before supper, and I couldn’t find any spaceships or planes or anything named after Icarus.”

  “I guess it sounds cool, but I still think a girl’s name would be better.”

  “Naw,” Brian said. “Girls’ names are no good for flying. You never hear about girl pilots. Just that one woman, what was her name? Amelia Earhart.”

  “Okay, Icarus it is.” Alex patted the wing. “Hear that, Icarus? You’ve got a name now, so make us proud. Fly like you flew out of that maze.”

  They were so high now that Riverside resembled a little island of lights in a dark ocean. Cars and trucks driving on the streets looked like toys. Brian looked up and saw Mr. Piggly carrying them up into the sky. He swallowed. How high was five thousand feet? He had seen videos on the Internet where cameras tied to balloons soared up practically to space. On one, the camera picked up the curvature of the earth.

  Brian shivered. Was it getting colder or was he just scared? If they went up too high, they’d start to run out of oxygen. Then there was a lot of stuff about air currents that he didn’t understand. If they flew into one of those, they could be blown hundreds of miles away.

  “Alex, check the gauge. How high are we?”

  “Just a little higher to go. This thing’s reading four thousand eight hundred thirteen feet.”

  “Does that mean four thousand eight hundred feet above sea level or four thousand eight hundred feet above the ground?”

  Alex didn’t answer right away. “Oh … um, I don’t know. I never thought about that. I wish we could ask Max. He’d know.”

  Brian remembered that when he used to fly with Dad, he would check the altimeter and then look out the window to see how small houses and cars appeared at different altitudes. The houses were tiny now, but he had no idea how high they were.

  “We’re at five thousand feet now,” said Alex.

  “I don’t think we should wait any longer. It’s time to start the engine.”

  “Woo-hoo! Fire this baby up! Let’s go, Icarus! It’s flying time.”

  “Okay, don’t kick the pins out until I tell you to. I have to start the engine and get our speed up first.”

  “You got it!”

  When Brian leaned forward to grab the handle on the engine’s pull-start rope, Icarus rocked in her cables a little, just enough to make his stomach twist around. He wasn’t afraid of heights, he reminded himself. He was only afraid of being really high up on something shaky and unstable. He got a hold of the handle and yanked. The engine sputtered and growled a bit, but then died down.

  “Come on, Icarus. Fire up, baby!” Alex shouted.

  Brian pulled even harder. Icarus rocked some more, but the engine didn’t engage. Brian pulled again. No good. He took the handle with both hands and tugged as hard as he could, again and again and again. Icarus swung back and forth under Mr. Piggly.

  “Whoa,” Alex said. “We’re really shaking here. Is there a problem?”

  What if the engine didn’t start at all? How would they get back down? They didn’t have any parachutes. There was no backup plan. Once they had the engine going, they were just supposed to fly under their own power until they came in for a safe landing.

  “Please, baby. You gotta start,” Brian whispered. He pulled the starter again. The engine roared to life, propeller spinning.

  Suddenly, something somewhere cracked, and Icarus lurched hard to the left, dropping its right wing almost straight down. Alex screamed behind him. Brian grabbed on to the port-side wing and looked back. The rope tying the right side of the aircraft to the balloon had already come loose somehow. Alex had fallen out of his seat, but managed to grab the right-side skateboard. He kicked his legs in the open air beneath him. “Brian, help! I’m gonna fall!”

  What could he do? There was only one safe way back down. Struggling to hold on, Brian slammed the throttle lever up to give the engine more power. They shot forward, but with tethers holding only the front and left points of the aircraft, Icarus was almost totally on its side. Worse, while Brian could still pull the front pin to cut them loose from Mr. Piggly, there was no way Alex could reach the left-side pin now — not when he was struggling just to hang on.

  “Brian! The tail’s on fire!”

  He glanced back. The rudder and horizontal stabilizer looked fine. “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Piggly!” Alex tried to kick a leg up to get back into the flyer. They lurched again. “His tail is on fire! The metal ring for the cable must have sparked when it broke.”

  Brian looked up. Alex was right. The dopey curly tail was burning, with bright red flames inching closer and closer to Mr. Piggly’s butt. “The hydrogen!” Brian shouted. If the fire reached the balloon, all the gas inside it would ignite.

  “That’s going to be the biggest pig fart Riverside’s ever seen!”

  Brian pushed the throttle, trying to do something to save the situation while still holding on with one hand and squeezing the center plank between his legs to keep himself from falling. He was helpless unless he could get those other two pins pulled at the same time. If he pulled the front pin first, Icarus would tip straight down. They might be completely banked with one wing pointed to the ground right now, but at least the engine and tail were still on the same level.

  “It’s going to blow!” Alex kicked his legs again. Brian could see his arms shaking in the growing light from the burning tail. “We’re going to die!”

  WHOOF. Flames suddenly burst from the pig’s butt and expanded fast. For an instant, Mr. Piggly’s big grin stretched and his eyes grew wider, as if he was shocked at what was happening to him.

  Then his face was all fire, and they were falling.

  The wind whipped through Brian’s hair. Somehow he managed to crank the yoke to the left and shift the ailerons into position. The whole aircraft shook. Brian could barely hold the yoke. But it worked! Icarus leveled out!

  “Alex! I think I’ve got it! Hold on!”

  “The heck you think I’m doing back here?” Alex screamed.

  When the wings were level with the ground, Brian quickly pushed the yoke to starboard to flatten the ailerons, then moved it backward to try to bring the nose up. They were still plummeting down toward the darkness of the woods that lined the river, but the angle of their fall gradually flattened out as they shot forward. Mr. Piggly was nothing more than a big lump of burning rubber now, a fireball chasing them through the dark.

  “Hold on, Alex!” If they hadn’t dropped so fast at first, they’d be flying fine by now. In the dim light cast by the fire behind them, Brian could see tree branches to the right and left. They were over the river, and it was coming up fast.

  “Brian!” Alex screamed as his grip on Icarus slipped. He fell away into the dark.

  “Alex!” Brian pulled back on the yoke, trying to bring Icarus up. “Alex!”

  Icarus’s descent slowed until it was just above the surface of the river. “Come on, girl, pull up. Pull up,” Brian muttered. The wheels skimmed the water with a little splash. He felt her slow down on contact. Then the skateboards entered the water too and he was thrown forward in his seat, just before the engine splashed down and water careened up to knock him out of the flyer. The cold water shot up his nose and into his mouth, and his face smacked the tail rudder as he somersaulted past it.

  When he finally found which way was up, he surfaced and coughed out the river water. A smoky mess floated past him, the remains of that stupid pig balloon. A few feet downstream, Icarus floated on its Plastisteel wings.

  “Alex!” Brian shouted, still hacking water as he swam after the flyer. “Alex!”

  He grabbed hold of the flyer and kicked to push her onto the muddy shore. He scrambled up to the bank himself, then flopped over on his back in the muck, his eyes stinging. “Alex,” he mumbled. How high had they been when Alex fell? What if they hadn
’t been over the river? Alex could have hit a tree or the ground, and even if he fell into the water, there were still branches and rocks…. “Oh, God, no, Alex.”

  “Brian?” A voice came from upstream. “Are you okay?”

  Brian shook his head to try to get the water out of his ears. He couldn’t have really heard what he thought he heard. “Alex?”

  “Brian, where are you?”

  They kept calling out to each other until Alex swam up beside him. Then they both staggered away from the river, over to a tree, and rested. They yelled to Max until he came running out of the scrub brush nearby.

  “Are there any injuries?”

  “I’m not broken,” Alex said. “But that was the worst belly flop I’ve ever done.”

  Brian touched his puffy, sore cheek. “I think I’m okay.”

  Max dropped down to his knees, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I saw the fireball and assumed the worst. What happened up there?”

  “The engine wouldn’t start,” said Brian. “I had to keep pulling the starter cable, and that rocked us around a lot.”

  “Then one of the rings on Mr. Piggly broke and started the stupid balloon on fire,” Alex said. “We were hanging there tipped on our side and I fell off.”

  Max closed his eyes, rested his chin on his chest, and let out a long breath. “It was great to hear you yelling to each other. You are very fortunate that you went down over the river.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he took another deep breath, put his glasses back on, stood up, and walked toward Icarus on the bank. “How’s the flyer?”

  “She was flying, Max,” Brian said. “If she would have had a more controlled drop, if we would have had just a little more time to level out, I swear she would have pulled out of the fall.”

  Max examined the aircraft. “We’ll need to get it back to the Eagle’s Nest and check it under better light to be sure, but there doesn’t appear to be any damage.”

  “A waterlogged engine, though.” Alex coughed. “Maybe Icarus wasn’t the luckiest name.”

  “You named the flyer Icarus?” Max asked.

  “Ms. Gilbert talked about it,” Brian said. “We thought it would be cool.”