by Bova, Ben
Joe squeezed into the pilot’s seat, and Danny crawled up after him and sat at his right. The control panel in front of him was covered with dials and instruments. A little half-wheel poked out of the panel, and there were two big pedals on the floor.
Joe showed Danny everything: the instruments, the controls, the throttle and fuel mixture sticks that were down on the floor between their two seats, the radio.
“Just like in the books,” Danny said.
Joe nodded happily. “Let’s see how she runs.”
Within minutes they were speeding down the runway, the engine roaring in Danny’s ears, the propeller an almost-invisible blur in front of him. Danny gripped the safety belt that was tightly latched across his lap.
Joe pulled back slightly on the wheel and the plane lifted its nose. Danny felt a split second when his stomach seemed to drop inside him. The ground tilted and dropped away. They were off!
Danny watched the airfield get smaller and farther behind them. Joe banked the plane over on its right wing tip, so Danny felt as if he was hanging by his seat belt, with nothing between him and the ground far below except the window he was looking through.
Then they climbed even higher. The plane bounced and shuddered through a big puffy cloud, and broke free again above the clouds.
Danny could feel himself grinning so hard that it almost hurt. “This is the greatest!”
Joe nodded. “She’s a good ship. Nice and stable. Handles easy.”
They flew for a few moments in silence, except for the droning engine. Danny looked down at the white-covered ground, sprinkled with the shadows of clouds. He looked across at the clouds themselves, floating peacefully. Then he looked up at the impossibly clear blue sky.
“Want to try her?” Joe shouted over the engine’s noise.
“Huh?”
Joe took his hands off the wheel. “Take over. It’s not hard. Just keep her nose pointed on the horizon.”
Danny grabbed the wheel. Instantly the plane bucked upward, like a horse that didn’t like its newest rider.
“Steady! Easy!” Joe shouted. “Just relax. Get her nose down a bit. That’s it....”
Danny slowly brought the plane under control. Under his control!
“Hey, I’m flying her!”
“You sure are,” said Joe, with a huge grin.
Joe showed Danny how to turn the wheel and push the pedals at the same time, so that the plane would turn and bank smoothly. He explained how to work the throttle and fuel mixture controls, how to watch the instruments.
“This is fun!” Danny yelled.
They tried a few shallow dives and turns. Nothing very daring, nothing very fast.
Finally Joe said, “Look down there.”
Danny followed where Joe’s finger pointed. Far below them was a group of buildings clustered together, near the main highway. It took Danny a moment to realize that it was the Center.
“Looks different from up here,” Danny said. “So small....”
Then his eye caught another set of buildings, far from the highway, tucked away in the hills. These were gray and massive buildings. A high stone wall stood around them. They looked like something straight out of the Middle Ages.
“State prison,” Joe said.
Danny said nothing.
“It’s a big world,” Joe said. “You’ve just got to start looking at it from the right point of view. Lots of the world is pretty crummy, I know. But take a look around you now. Looks kind of pretty, doesn’t it?”
Danny nodded. It was a big world, from up here. Hills stretching off to the horizon; towns nestled among them; roads and rivers winding along.
“People make their own worlds, Danny. You’re going to make a world for yourself, a world that you’ll live in for the rest of your life. You can make it big and clean... or as small and dirty as it’s been so far. It’s up to you to choose.”
They flew back to the airfield, and Joe landed the plane. Then they drove back to the Center. Danny was silent, thinking, all the way back.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was a few minutes before six when Danny and Joe returned to the Center.
Danny went straight to the cafeteria. He could hear his own pulse pounding in his ears. His knees felt wobbly, and he knew his hands were shaking. His chest was starting to feel heavy. He fished in his pockets for the pills. Forgot them! Left them in my room.
Ralph and Hambone were finishing up an early dinner. Noisy was loafing by the water cooler. Vic and Coop were sitting off in a far corner.
Danny turned around and walked outside. In a few minutes the five others joined him.
“Where’s Midget?” he asked. His chest was hurting now.
“He’s at the administration building, just like you told him. When the lights go out, he’ll go in the tunnel and cut the phone line.”
“What’re we waitin’ for?” Ralph said. “Let’s go!”
They walked through the darkness toward the power station. As they got close enough to see the building, the maintenance man who had been on duty there came out of the door and walked past them, heading for the cafeteria. Ralph began to jog and was soon far ahead of them.
“Come on!” he said. They started running for the power station.
Danny trotted behind the others. He couldn’t run, couldn’t catch his breath. His mind was spinning: Laurie, Joe, Lacey, Ralph... flying over the Center, looking at the world beyond its fences... Lacey punching him... Laurie’s face when she told him to forget about her....
And then he was inside the power station. It was like stepping into another world. The place was hot. It smelled of oil. The huge generator machinery, crammed up to the ceiling, seemed to bulge out the walls. The metal floor-plates throbbed with the rumbling beat of power, and almost beyond the range of human hearing was the high-pitched whine of something spinning fast, fast.
Nobody could hear Danny wheezing as he stood just inside the doorway. Nobody watched him struggling his hardest, just to breathe.
The light in the generator room was bright and glaring. Lacey stood up on a steel catwalk that threaded between two big bulky piles of machinery, about twenty feet above the floor.
“Hiya guys!” Lacey called out above the whining hum of the generator. “What d’you want?”
“Come on down,” Ralph said. He walked over to a tool bench near the door and picked up a heavy wrench. Hambone giggled.
Danny stared at the generator. He had only seen pictures of it before, drawings and diagrams on SPECS’ TV screens. Now it looked huge, almost alive. And he had to kill it, make it silent and dead.
But before that, Ralph and Hambone were going to kill Lacey.
Lacey clattered down the steel steps to the floor.
“What’s going on, man? What you doing here?”
“Grab him,” Ralph snapped.
Hambone wrapped his beefy arms around Lacey’s slim body, pinning his arms to his sides.
“Hey... what you....”
Ralph started toward Lacey, raising the heavy wrench in his big hand. The others stood frozen by the door.
Danny shouted, “Stop it!”
Ralph spun around to face Danny. Suddenly Danny could breathe, his chest was okay. Even the shakes were gone.
“It’s no good,” he said to Ralph. “Stop it. Forget the whole thing.”
“What’re you pulling?” Ralph’s face was red with anger.
“I’m saving us all from a lot of trouble,” Danny said. “Forget the whole deal. Breaking out of here is stupid. They’ll just catch us again.”
Ralph started to move toward Danny, his knuckles white on the wrench handle. “Listen kid... we’re getting out. Now! And you’re going to....”
Danny slid over to the tool bench and reached for another wrench. “Forget it, Ralph. I’m the only one who knows how to knock out the generator. And I ain’t going to do it. I changed my mind. The deal’s off.”
They stood glaring at each other, both armed with heavy metal wrenches. Th
en suddenly Hambone yowled with pain.
Lacey was loose and streaking up the steel steps to the catwalk. Hambone was hopping on one foot. “He kicked me!”
“Stop him!” Ralph screamed, pointing at Lacey.
Vic and Coop started for the stairway. Danny knew exactly where Lacey was heading. There was an emergency phone on the other side of the generator. He dashed toward the stairway, too, past Ralph, who seemed too stunned to move.
Danny barged into Vic and Coop at the foot of the steps, knocked them off balance, and got onto the stairs ahead of them. He raced to the top, two steps at a time. Then he stopped and turned to the rest of them.
“Before you can get to him you got to go through me!” Danny shouted, holding the wrench up like a battle weapon. If I can hold ‘em off long enough for Lacey to make a call....
With a roar of rage, Ralph pushed past Vic and Coop and boiled up the stairs. Hambone came up right behind him. Danny swung his wrench at Ralph, then felt an explosion of pain in his side.
He began to crumple. The wrench slipped from Danny’s fingers as another blow knocked him to his knees. He looked up and saw Ralph’s furious face. Beside it was Hambone’s, no longer grinning. The wrench in Ralph’s hand looked twenty feet long. Danny tried to raise his arms to cover his face, to protect himself. The wrench came blurring down on him. Danny saw sparks shower everywhere.
Somewhere, far off, he could hear people yelling, screaming. But all he could see was bursts of light going off inside his head; all he could feel was pain.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Danny awoke in the hospital. He blinked his eyes at the green curtain around his bed. His head felt heavy, like it was carrying pounds and pounds of cement on it. He reached up to touch it. It was covered with bandages.
Then he realized that he could only move one arm. The other was wrapped in a heavy, stiff cast.
The curtain opened and Joe Tenny stepped in, grinning at him.
“Feel better?”
Danny tried to answer, but found that his mouth was too swollen and painful.
“I don’t mean your body,” Joe said, pulling up a chair and straddling it cowboy-fashion. “I mean your conscience... your mind.”
Danny shrugged. His side twinged.
“You made the right choice. It cost you a couple of teeth and a few broken bones, but that can all be fixed. You’ll be out and around in a week or two.”
“You...” It hurt, but he had to say it. “You knew.”
Joe gave him that who-are-you-trying-to-kid look. “We knew that you were going to try a break. But we didn’t know where or when. You covered up your tracks pretty darned well. If you hadn’t been so smart, we could have saved you the beating you took.”
“I... the asthma... it went away.”
Nodding, Joe said, “The doctors told me it would, sooner or later. You didn’t have anything wrong with your lungs. In your case, asthma was just a crutch... a little excuse you made up in the back of your mind. Whenever the going got tough, you started to wheeze. Then you could flake out, or at least have an excuse for not doing well.”
Danny closed his eyes.
“But when the chips were down,” Joe went on, “you ditched the excuse. No more asthma. You stood on your own feet and did what you had to do.”
“How’s Lacey?” Danny asked.
“When we got there, after Lacey called us, he was trying to pry Hambone and Ralph off of you. They never laid a finger on him... thanks to you.”
“We would’ve never made it,” Danny mumbled.
“That’s right. Even if you got out of the Center, we’d have tracked you down. But it was important for you to try to escape.”
“What?”
Joe pulled his chair closer. “Look, what’s the one thing that’s kept you going ever since you first came here? The idea of escaping. Don’t you think I knew that? Every prisoner wants to escape. I was a prisoner-of-war once. I tried to escape fourteen times.”
“Then why....”
“We used the idea of escaping to help you to grow up,” Joe said. “Why do you think I told you the Center was escape-proof? To make sure you’d try to prove I was wrong! All the teaching and lecturing in the world couldn’t have done as much as that one idea of escaping. Look what you did: you learned to read and study, you learned how to work SPECS, you learned how to plan ahead, to be patient, to control your temper, you even learned to work with other people. All because you were trying to escape.”
“But it didn’t work....”
“Sure! It didn’t work because you finally learned the most important thing of all. You learned that the only way to escape jail—all jails—for keeps is to earn your way out.”
Danny let his head sink back on the pillow.
“And you played fair by Lacey. I think you learned something there, too.”
Looking up at the ceiling, Danny asked, “What happened to the other guys?”
“Vic and Coop are in their rooms. They’ll stay in for a week or so, and then we’ll let them start classes again. I’ll have to start paying as much attention to them as I did to you. I don’t think they’ve learned as much as you have... not yet. Same for Midget and Noisy, except that one of the other staff members is in charge of their cases.
“Ralph and Hambone are here in the hospital, upstairs. They’ve got emotional problems that’re too deep to let them walk around the campus. I’m afraid they’re going to stay inside for a long while.”
Danny took a deep breath. His side hurt, but his chest felt fine and clear.
“Look,” Joe said. “When you get out of the hospital, it’ll be almost exactly one year since you first came to the Center. I think you’ve learned a lot in your first year. The hard way. But you’ve finally learned it.”
Danny nodded.
“Now, if you’re ready for it I can start really teaching you. In another year or so, maybe we can let you out of here—on probation. I can see to it that you get into a real school. You can wind up studying engineering, if you want. Learn to build airplanes... and fly ‘em.”
In spite of the pain, Danny smiled. “I’d like that.”
“Good. And it’ll be a lot cheaper for the taxpayers to send you to school and get you into a decent career, than to keep you in jails the rest of your life.”
Joe got up from the chair.
Danny found himself stretching out his right hand toward him. The teacher looked at it, then smiled in a way Danny had never seen him do before. He took Danny’s hand firmly in his own.
“Thanks. I’ve been waiting a year for this.”
“Thank you, Joe.”
Joe let go of Danny’s hand and started to turn away. Then he stopped and said:
“Oh yeah... Laurie’s on her way here. She wants to see you. Says she’s still got to give you your Christmas present.”
“Great!” said Danny.
Joe pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket. “You two have a bright future ahead of you. And I can tell about the future. I’m part gypsy, you know.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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