by Lynne Jonell
Christina sat down to leaf through the drawings that Taft had let fall, found the diagram of the plane, and shone her flashlight on the instructions.
“After initial activation,” she read aloud, running her finger under the first line of print, “sustain tone until replicated.”
She glanced at Taft, but he looked as puzzled as she felt. She went to the second line. “Lights. Fundamental Frequency.” She moved her finger again. “Hold the light for me, will you?”
“It’s getting dimmer,” said Taft.
Christina peered at the next two lines. “Prime Fuel Chambers: Raise to the Third. Set Internal Switches: Raise to the Fifth.”
Taft moved the flashlight so it almost touched the writing. Its fading beam illuminated the fifth line. “Hey, it says ‘Ignition’!” cried Taft. “It does fly! We just have to figure out how—”
His voice broke off as the feeble light in his hand diminished sharply, gave a last weak flicker, and blinked out. They were plunged into darkness.
IT was more than darkness, it was blindness. It was blacker than anything Christina had ever known, and it had weight that pressed on her eyeballs. She moved her hand in front of her face—she touched her nose—and saw nothing at all.
Something came down on her arm. Christina nearly screamed.
“It’s just me.” Taft’s hand groped for her wrist. “Get out the spare batteries and we’ll switch.”
Christina felt her face flush red under cover of darkness.
“No,” said Taft. “No, no, no. Don’t tell me you didn’t bring any fresh batter—”
“I didn’t bring any.” Christina tried to speak lightly, as if this were an amusing mistake. She gripped her knees with her hands to keep them still. She tried very hard not to panic.
Taft didn’t sound panicked—he sounded mad. “Even I know you don’t go into a dark tunnel without extra batteries for your flashlight.” He sighed deeply. “All right. We’ll just have to walk out. We’ll keep the wall on our left and keep touching it.”
“But there were side tunnels, lots of them—”
“Look, I know. But what else can we do? Stay here forever? It’s not going to get any lighter.”
This was not a cheering thought.
“Anyway, the side tunnels were smaller. We’ll be able to figure it out. Come on.” He felt for her hand and tugged.
Christina tried to get up, but her knees would not hold her. “Just—give me a minute,” she said, breathing quickly.
“What’s the matter? Scared?” Taft sat down beside her.
Christina didn’t want to answer. The solid darkness seemed to press on her shoulders. She had been afraid ever since she had seen the heavy rock hanging overhead, but now that there was no light at all, it was even worse. She imagined the rocks settling, giving way, crashing down on her . . .
“Listen.” Taft squatted next to her, his voice calm and steady. “The way to keep from being afraid is to think of something else. I should know—I’ve had lots of practice.”
Christina was at the ragged edge of terror, but Taft’s matter-of-fact tone did her good. She sat on the cave floor, holding tightly to his sleeve, and shut her eyes. If she shut her eyes, she could pretend it was night in her room. She could think of something else besides the fact that they were stuck in a cave, deep underground, with no light—
It was impossible to think of anything else.
All right, then. The other way to keep from being afraid was to face what you were afraid of. Christina tipped her head back and stared into the darkness above, sweating. She couldn’t see them, but she knew the rocks were there. Let’s see . . . she could think of them as strong, instead of heavy. As if they were holding everything up, instead of ready to fall. As if—
She blinked. There was a pinprick of light, directly above.
Was it her imagination? She moved a few inches to the left, and it disappeared. Back to the right, and there it was again.
“Taft. Look up.”
“What?”
“Do you see it? The light?”
Taft’s clothes rustled and he grunted slightly as he got into position. He put his head next to hers. “Nope.”
“Move over a little. Here, like this.” Christina moved farther to the right to give him room.
“Holy cats,” said Taft, low and with feeling. “It’s a star.”
“You sure?” Christina squinted.
“Look at it. There’s got to be some kind of opening, high up in the roof of the cave. And in the morning there’ll be sun coming in.”
Christina watched the star, mesmerized. It pulsed faintly, twinkling an immeasurable distance away.
“It’s like my mother’s song,” she said, almost to herself.
“What song?”
“Just this lullaby she wrote for me . . . I found it in the scrapbook.”
“Oh.” There was a pause. “So, was it just for babies? Or was it for kids, too?”
“Kids, too, maybe,” said Christina, trying not to sound as surprised as she felt. It was funny how Taft could be so calm in a crisis and, in the next minute, sound like a little kid who missed his mom.
Well, maybe he did. Maybe she did, too, for that matter. In her mind, Christina held again the sheet music and looked at the notes. Quietly, shyly, she began to sing:
Little one, child of mine, safely rest tonight
Through the window, shining star touches you with light
She stopped. “It is kind of for babies, I guess.”
“I like it,” said Taft unexpectedly. “Is there more?”
Someday you may wander far, someday you may roam
Someday you may find yourself lost and far from home
Christina paused and swallowed hard. In a moment, she went on, her voice stronger:
Never fear, Mother’s near, though just out of sight
Look above, find your star, in the darkest night.
The last line echoed in the cavern, almost as if another singer had chimed in a fraction late. As the echoes died, Christina could hear a tiny, burbling sound, like that of running water or a small stream.
“Christina,” breathed Taft, “look.”
Christina turned. A rosy glow, beautifully warm and pink, showed briefly in the dark, not far away. It faded as she watched.
“Sing it again,” said Taft urgently. “The whole thing. All the same notes.”
Christina did. And saw what Taft had seen.
“It happens when you sing ‘star’ in the last line.” The curve of Taft’s cheek was briefly visible in the glow that came again, then dulled. “Sing it again. Just that one note.”
Christina took a breath, sang a high G-sharp, and held it for as long as she could. The glow began, softly pink, and quickly intensified to a deep, rich color, gleaming dully through the silvery metal of the plane’s body, leaking out in bright fingers from around the edges of the fuel cap. In a side pocket in the rear of the plane, a canister the size of a milk carton glowed pink, too. And then, just as she was about to run out of air, the plane itself began to hum.
They walked back through the length of the cave with the plane rolling between them, each pushing on a wing. The soft glow of the fuel tank through the plane’s body, together with the canister in its rigid pouch, threw just enough light for each step forward, and the droning sound that came from the plane was loud enough to discourage conversation.
Christina glanced at the rolled-up drawing she had tucked in the back seat. She would take a closer look at it once they had more light, but for now she was just as glad to think without interruption. The deep hum of the plane, two octaves lower than the note she had sung, vibrated through her fingertips as she worked out the problem in her head.
First, the plane must run on zoom.
It was too much of a coincidence that a harrier’s cry, starting with a high G-sharp, should melt the pink and green streaks in Starkian rock—and that a high G-sharp should, apparently, get the fuel in the tank going, so
mehow.
And yet the plane wasn’t going. It was humming—it was glowing—but they still had to push it. It was as if the plane was just getting ready to go, just barely—
“Activated!” she said aloud.
“Huh?”
The plane’s drone was dying down, the glow fading.
“I think you’ve got to hold it,” said Taft. “Hold the note long enough so the hum starts.”
Christina took a deep breath and sang a long, sustained note, thinking hard. Her father had talked about frequencies—vibrations that were heard as sound—but she had ignored him. It had just seemed like more math that she didn’t want to learn. But it had to do with music, too, clearly. And there was something nagging at the corner of her mind, if only she could remember . . .
When they got to the big square door and the lighted tunnel, Christina unrolled the drawing and read the instructions again.
“After initial activation, sustain tone until replicated.” Well, she had already done that; the plane was humming nicely.
“Lights. Fundamental Frequency.” What on earth was a fundamental frequency?
“Prime Fuel Chambers: Raise to the Third. Set Internal Switches: Raise to the Fifth.”
She paused. She knew she had heard those terms—a third, a fifth—used together recently. Where? When?
She looked down at the paper and read the next line: “Ignition: Raise to the Minor Seventh,” and then she knew.
It was a chord!
“Hey!” She thumped Taft on the shoulder. “I’ve got it!”
“Got what?”
“The instructions. It’s a chord. The fundamental frequency is the root, the first note in the scale—like do in do, re, mi, fa, sol, you know. The third is three notes up, the fifth is five, and then the seventh tone, down one half step, is the minor seventh—”
Taft looked annoyed. “You are making no sense at all.”
Christina grinned. Taft looked as confused and bored as she felt every time her father talked about math. But this wasn’t math, it was music; it was fun, it was easy.
Christina shut her eyes, the better to think. Okay, she had the plane activated. Which note would be the root of the chord? She went right up the scale, singing C, C-sharp, D, D-sharp, E—
The plane bucked slightly, as if it had a hiccup.
“Maybe you’re supposed to sing into this.” Taft grasped the funnel on its striated metal tube and pulled it toward her.
Christina bent over and sang an E into the funnel. The control panel lit up like a Christmas tree. Two lightbulbs in the tunnel went dark.
Of course. Just like her mother’s lullaby was written in the key of E.
“Hold that note!” Taft shouted. “Keep singing!”
She couldn’t get enough air for a strong tone, bending at the waist. Christina threw a leg up over the plane’s curved silver side and scrambled into the front seat. The speaker-funnel was in front of her. She pulled it toward her mouth, sat up straight, and held the note, loud and long. Just as she was about to run out of breath, the plane’s hum became two-toned, taking over Christina’s E and making it stronger, deeper. The plane’s rosy glow changed to a fiery orange.
Taft laughed out loud. “Now the next note!” he crowed, and Christina sang it. The orange color shifted subtly into golden, with a gurgling sound of liquid. Three more lightbulbs blinked out.
“Now sing the fifth,” Taft prompted. “Set internal switches.”
Christina took in another deep breath and sang a B. She could hardly hear anything over the deep sonorous humming, but she could feel through the leather seat a multitude of simultaneous clicks. The yellow color turned greenish. The plane’s hum took on a third note, high and harmonious. The tunnel grew darker as the string of lightbulbs flickered one by one down the line, but Taft didn’t seem to notice or care.
“Now ignition—the minor seventh!” Taft crackled the paper in his hand, his eyes wide with excitement.
Christina gasped for breath, but she sucked in yet another lungful of air and let loose with a high D.
The chord took on an added tension, a piercing musical urgency that made Christina long to sing a final E for resolution. The plane trembled beneath her knees, gave back her note with deeper resonance, and the green color shifted to blue. With a soft whoosh of air, the craft rose gently and hovered a foot off the floor, in a shimmer of color and expectant sound.
“DON’T leave without me!” Taft scrambled over the tail fins and slid into the back seat with a thump. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Christina raised her voice over the plane’s musical drone. “Anyway, I don’t know how to fly this thing.”
Taft leaned over her shoulder and pointed. “Use the instrument panel. Punch that button.”
Christina pressed the circular spot of light with GO across its face, but nothing happened.
“Maybe we missed a step.” Taft bent over the drawing again, following the numbered lines with his finger in the vivid violet light.
“Lights, fuel chambers, check. Switches, ignition—ditto. Here we go—Takeoff.” He was silent for a moment as he read, and his expression changed.
“What does it say?” Christina turned in her seat and tried to read it upside down.
Taft’s mouth twisted sourly. “It says, ‘Thought vibrations complete the fuel circuit. Place helmet on head and strap securely.’ Thought vibrations,” he repeated in disbelief. “It’s nothing but a toy. It goes up and down, it has pretty colors—and that’s all.”
Christina didn’t want to believe it. She searched the cockpit. There was no side pocket, no glove compartment, and no place big enough to hide a helmet, anyway. Maybe the helmet—if there was one—was still back at the far end of the cave.
She suppressed a shudder. She didn’t want to have to go back there. It might be easier to just assume Taft was right.
But her father had said that Leo Loompski had been working on the frequency of thought. Maybe he had done it. Maybe he had actually figured out a way to make a person’s thought vibrations line up with sound vibrations, and together with the liquid zoom create some sort of power.
She reached under her seat. Were there more instructions there? Yes, there was something; she could feel it but she only succeeded in pushing it farther back.
“I see it.” Taft pulled out the object and gave a derisive snort. “Yeah, this is just what we need for all our happy thoughts!” He held up a soft, padded helmet, with a strap that went under the chin and two clear, flexible tubes that hung down, ending in couplings.
“Maybe it’s for real,” Christina suggested. She grasped the ends of the tubes and looked for a place to plug them in.
“Of course it’s real!” Taft said grumpily, from the back seat. “And so is fairy dust and talking rabbits and magic lamps that grant wishes—”
“Just try it,” said Christina. She had found two slots at the base of the speaker tube and pushed the ends in.
“If you insist,” said Taft, strapping on the helmet, “but it’ll never work. Go. Go. Come on, you stupid plane, GO!”
Christina held on, just in case.
Nothing happened.
“See? I told you.” Taft took off the helmet. “I mean, give me a break. Thought vibrations?”
“Oh, be quiet,” said Christina. “Give it to me if you think it’s so stupid.”
“It is stupid,” said Taft, unbuckling the strap. “Leo Loompski might have been a genius, but he was off his rocker with that theory.”
Christina looked at the clear plastic tubes. Thought vibrations did sound pretty lame. How could your thoughts have power? For power, you needed things that moved, like water or wind, or things that were explosive, like gas and gunpowder . . . or zoom.
But sound had power, too—they’d just proven that. Why not thought? Her father had said that, on a molecular level, surprising things happened all the time. She hadn’t understood everything he’d said about quantum physics, but cert
ainly thought waves, if there were such a thing, would be made up of even tinier particles than anything else in the world. And if incredible things happened all the time on a molecular level, then how much more amazing and strange would be the things that happened if you went to the level of thought?
She strapped on the helmet. All right. If something in the zoom could respond to the invisible vibration of her thoughts, then she was going to think about nothing but flying. She didn’t understand how to do it, not yet, but she wasn’t blocking it out of her mind—she wasn’t starting by saying it was impossible. She plugged her ears against the sound of Taft’s laughter, and focused.
And then Taft stopped laughing. He tapped her on the shoulder and pointed at the flexible tubing hanging from the left side of her helmet.
Christina watched wordlessly as a deep blue liquid moved slowly up its length. She felt the fluid spread through the helmet’s padded pockets, cool and with a slight additional heaviness that was not unpleasant. Then, slowly, the blue liquid flowed down through the tube on the right, and back into the plane.
“Try it out,” whispered Taft. “Think something.”
Christina looked at the control panel, at the button she had pushed. Go? she thought tentatively.
The plane stayed still, floating gently above the tunnel floor.
Taft rustled the drawing behind her, holding it open with his elbows. “Wait. Here’s one more thing at the end. It says, ‘To engage, resolve the chord.’ What does that mean?”
Christina knew. She had been longing to finish the chord ever since she had sung the D. She opened her mouth and sang a high E. The blue liquid turned violet. With all her might, she thought, Go.
And the plane went. It zoomed along the tunnel—blink, blink, blink-blink-blink went the rest of the lightbulbs, fizzing out as they passed—faster and faster, a rushing wind in their faces and the walls screaming by.
“STOP!” cried Christina, panicked, and almost flew over the windscreen as the plane halted suddenly in midair, just short of the tunnel’s end.
