The trouble was that, though Aquila was invisible, it was still there, and it was protected by a force field that could withstand collision with anything up to and including a nuclear explosion. If either of the planes had hit them, or the taxi, the damage would have been a lot worse than a stunned bird or the roof ripped off the top of a lorry.
So on Saturday morning, while Geoff was at his reading lesson with Miss Stevenson, Tom asked Aquila if there was some way it could warn him of anything coming near, and perhaps do something to make sure whatever it was didn’t hit them.
Aquila assured him that it could, and Tom instructed it to attach the alarm to an orange light on the dash that had previously switched on the meson fluctuator – one of several buttons that didn’t seem to do anything they’d found useful. The result was, in many ways, a typical example of how asking Aquila to do something could sometimes get so complicated that you wished by the end that you hadn’t bothered.
When Geoff arrived at the Eyrie, soon after twelve, Tom told him what he had done and Geoff was suitably impressed.
‘Nice move,’ he said, nodding approvingly. ‘And all I have to do is press this button, right?’
‘You press the button,’ Tom told him, ‘and Aquila warns you if anything’s coming too close, and then makes sure it doesn’t crash into you.’
‘Cool!’ Geoff reached forward and pressed his finger on the button.
Instantly, the air in front of him was filled with flashing red lights and huge letters in the air that spelled out ‘DANGER! DANGER! ALERT! ALERT!’. At the same time, Aquila vibrated, violently, in time to the flashing lights.
Startled, the boys looked round, up, down and sideways to see what might be coming towards them when they had thought they were safe in the Eyrie. They couldn’t see anything though, and when Tom eventually turned off the alarm and asked Aquila what the danger was, it turned out a fly had flown in through the window.
It took Tom a while to make the adjustments. He told Aquila that an object as small as a fly was not what he had meant and that the warning alarm did not need to include so many lights and the heavy vibrations. Aquila asked what changes he wanted and they decided in the end that only an object more than a metre in width should set off the alarm – and then it should simply be the orange light flashing on the dash.
They did a test run of the new settings on a small road to the north of Stavely. Geoff brought Aquila down to road level at a point where they were facing the oncoming traffic and could easily see if a car was coming. That way, he said, if Aquila’s warning system didn’t work, they would have time to get out of the way.
The warning system worked perfectly. After a minute or so, the orange light started flashing and a moment later, a car came round the corner towards them. Geoff was just moving his thumb to the up button so that the car could pass underneath when, instead of turning the corner, it veered off the road, careering fifty metres into a field of wheat, trailing fence posts and barbed wire, before finally coming to a halt.
‘Why did it do that?’ said Tom, a little nervously.
‘No idea,’ said Geoff. ‘Better go and see if they’re all right though.’
He flew them up and over the field until they were floating alongside the car. There was only one person inside, a woman, slumped unconscious in the driver’s seat.
As Geoff reached inside the open window to turn off the engine, Tom remembered that, as well as giving a warning, he had asked Aquila to make sure that a collision didn’t happen. And the lifepod, he remembered, could be very precise …
He pressed his hand on the small green button and, even before the words ‘HI, WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?’ had appeared in front of him, asked, ‘What happened to the car?’
‘VEHICLE WAS DIVERTED TO AVOID COLLISION AS INSTRUCTED.’
‘What’s it saying?’ asked Geoff, peering at the letters.
‘It’s saying it made the car crash, so that it wouldn’t bump into us,’ said Tom. ‘Is she all right?’
He was talking to Geoff, but it was Aquila that answered.
‘SUBJECT HAS BEEN RENDERED UNCONSCIOUS, BUT WILL RECOVER FULL FUNCTIONALITY IN FOURTEEN MINUTES.’
Tom’s mobile was back at the Eyrie, but they found the woman had one of her own in the car and used it to call an ambulance. Then they waited until it arrived, along with three police cars, and watched as the woman was carefully taken out and put on a stretcher. Her eyes opened as she was being lifted into the ambulance and she seemed OK as she tried to ask what had happened.
‘I’ll have another go with the instructions,’ said Tom as they watched the ambulance drive away. ‘So it doesn’t do anything like that again.’
‘Or perhaps we should just skip the alarm,’ said Geoff, ‘and go back to keeping a good lookout.’
And Tom agreed, as they went back to the Eyrie for lunch before heading off to the Pyrenees and the Pico del Aneto, that that might be best.
On Sunday, Tom and his mother had their lunch out with Alan. The Royal Oak was the most expensive hotel in Stavely and lunch there ought to have been a treat. Tom, however, did not enjoy it. There was something about the size of the hotel dining room, the number of knives and forks at each place setting and the exaggerated politeness of the waiters that was a little overpowering.
And, if he were honest, Alan was a bit overpowering as well.
Mrs Baxter’s old school friend, with his broad chest and muscled physique, gave the impression that he had never been overpowered by anything or anyone. He was polite, made sure Tom had whatever he wanted to eat and didn’t get upset when he knocked over a glass of cola, but Tom couldn’t help thinking how much he would have preferred to be out with Geoff in Aquila. His friend had called in that morning to say that he was going off to find a beach in France and have a swim.
‘The weather report says it’s quite sunny there at the moment,’ Geoff had said, sitting in the lifepod as it hovered outside Tom’s bedroom window. ‘Can I borrow a towel?’
In England, it had been the wettest June for nearly a century and Tom would have liked very much to go to the beach. He went and got a towel and passed it out through the window.
‘Thanks!’ Geoff stowed it under his seat and put on a pair of sunglasses. ‘When do you think you’ll be back from this lunch?’
‘About two o’clock,’ said Tom. His mother had warned him that lunch at the hotel would take at least a couple of hours.
‘OK, I’ll see you then.’ Aquila blinked out of visibility, and Geoff’s voice could be heard as he flew off. ‘Have a good time!’
In fact, at two o’clock, Tom was still sitting in the hotel lounge while his mother and Alan had coffee and talked about the party Mrs Baxter was planning.
The party was to celebrate her recovery from agoraphobia and, as far as Tom could tell, she planned to invite more or less everyone she had ever known. She had sent out invitations to relatives, neighbours, friends from work and had even contacted people she’d been to school with, through a website. It was on the website that she had found Alan.
The party was only two weeks away now and Mrs Baxter was full of plans for how she was going to organize the food, what she might do if it rained, who had said they could come and who couldn’t, and it was while she was on this subject that she mentioned the name Freddie Dimble.
‘Do you remember him?’ she asked Alan. ‘Only I had an email from him this morning.’
Alan considered this. ‘Little fellow with sticky-out ears?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I do. Didn’t he have a crush on you?’
‘Oh, I don’t remember that!’ Mrs Baxter blushed. ‘But do you think we should ask him?’
‘Why not!’ Alan turned to T
om and smiled. ‘Half the class had a crush on your mother in those days,’ he said. ‘And who could blame them!’
Tom managed a vague smile in reply, but inside there was a sinking feeling in his stomach.
‘Do you think we should ask him?’ That was what his mother had said. Not ‘Do you think I should ask him?’ but ‘Do you think we should …’
It didn’t sound like the sort of thing you said to someone who was ‘just a friend’.
When he finally got home, Tom was up in his room, getting changed into a pair of jeans that didn’t have cola spilled down the front of them, when there was a tap on the window.
Opening the window and looking out, there was nothing to be seen, but from somewhere in the emptiness came the sound of Geoff’s voice.
‘Tom?’ he said. ‘I think we have a problem.’
‘What is it?’ asked Tom. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Well …’ Geoff’s voice hesitated. ‘There’s no one here is there?’
Tom looked quickly around the garden. The trees on either side shielded them from the neighbours and the field at the back was empty. ‘All clear,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’
Aquila blinked into view and there was no need for Geoff to say anything because Tom could see at once what the problem was.
Geoff was scarlet. The skin on his face, his hands and his arms was a bright, glowing red.
‘I think I may have caught the sun a bit,’ he said. ‘While I was on the beach.’
Tom let out a long sigh. It was definitely a problem. Sunburn, when there had been solid cloud cover in England for the last fortnight, was not going to be easy to explain.
CHAPTER FOUR
Geoff’s trip to the beach had started well. After calling at Tom’s house to borrow a towel, he had taken Aquila up to a couple of thousand feet, pointed its nose south and headed off for France. A few minutes later he had crossed the Channel, three minutes after that he passed Paris somewhere to his left and, changing course to south-south-east, he had simply kept flying until he got to the Mediterranean.
The sun was shining, the sea was a deep, sparkling blue and he had followed the coastline west for a few miles before coming to what looked like a particularly pleasant sandy beach, where he parked Aquila behind some rocks. He got changed into his swimming things, checked there was no one watching before climbing out, and strolled down to the water.
‘It was brilliant,’ he told Tom. ‘Really brilliant. But then …’ he hesitated. ‘But then I sort of lost track of the time.’
‘How long were you there?’ Tom asked.
‘About two hours, I think.’ Geoff had left Aquila outside the window and was standing in Tom’s bedroom, studying his reflection in a mirror. ‘It wasn’t too bad to start with, but flying home it seemed to get worse.’ He lifted up his T-shirt. His chest was the same colour as his arms and face, and his whole body radiated heat. ‘You think anyone’ll notice?’
‘Of course they’ll notice!’ said Tom. ‘And they’ll want to know how you got like that. What are you going to tell them?’
‘I don’t know.’ Geoff chewed at his bottom lip. ‘That’s why I came here. I thought you might have an idea.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ said Tom. ‘I don’t see there’s anything you can say.’
‘Perhaps I could hide in the Eyrie until it’s gone.’ Geoff patted cautiously at his skin. ‘How long would that take?’
‘Days,’ said Tom. ‘And you can’t hide anywhere because …’
But before he could explain why hiding for several days was not a good solution, the door opened and Mrs Baxter came in.
‘If you give me those trousers,’ she was saying, ‘I’ll put them in the wash before … Geoff?’ She stopped in surprise. ‘I didn’t know you were here!’
‘I let him in,’ Tom explained.
‘Oh, I see. Well …’ Mrs Baxter’s voice trailed off again as she noticed the colour of Geoff’s skin. ‘Oh, my goodness! What on earth have you been doing?’
‘I … I’m not sure,’ said Geoff.
Mrs Baxter stepped forward for a closer look. ‘That’s sunburn!’ She frowned. ‘How did you get sunburn in this weather?’
Geoff opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came out and it was Tom who had a moment of inspiration.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘Geoff might have been spending too much time under one of those UV lamps.’
‘Oh, you haven’t!’ Mrs Baxter tutted anxiously. ‘Didn’t your parents tell you how dangerous those things are?’
‘No,’ said Geoff. ‘No, they didn’t.’
‘Well, they should have,’ said Mrs Baxter firmly. ‘You’re far too young for that sort of thing. How long did you have it on?’
‘I’m … not sure,’ said Geoff.
‘Look at the state of you!’ Mrs Baxter studied Geoff’s arms and neck. ‘I’ll get you some lotion, but you really must be more careful in future.’
‘I will be,’ Geoff promised, and when Mrs Baxter had left the room, he turned to Tom. ‘What’s a UV lamp?’
‘They’re special lights people use to get a suntan in winter,’ he said. ‘Mum’s got one.’
‘So I could tell everyone that’s what happened?’
‘Well …’ Tom hesitated. ‘It might work.’
‘Fantastic!’ Geoff sat on the bed and grinned up at his friend. ‘I knew one of us would think of something!’
It was, he thought, why he and Tom made such a good team. Whatever happened, one of them always seemed to know how to sort it out.
There was still a bit of the afternoon left after Mrs Baxter had finished putting on the lotion, and the boys took a quick trip down to Salisbury Plain to look at Stonehenge. Geoff did the flying, so that Tom could do his maths homework on the way – with Aquila’s help, of course.
Sitting in the lifepod, Tom read out the problems Mr Duncan had set him on ordering negative numbers, and Aquila produced the answers, with the full workings, in the air in front of him. All Tom had to do was copy them out. He felt a brief stab of guilt as he did this – it was cheating after all – but life was so busy at the moment it was the only way he could think of to get everything done.
The homework took no more than ten minutes and, by the time he had finished, they were hovering directly above Stonehenge. There was a crowd of visitors walking round the outside – they were not allowed to get close to the stones themselves – but Tom and Geoff had no such problems.
Geoff flew them down to the outer ring of sarsens, then round in a slow circle before taking them through one of the gaps to the next ring and finally into the centre, where they paused above the stone which Miss Poulson had told them was where a sacrifice was made each year when the sun rose on midsummer’s morning. Sitting there, with the rain pattering gently on Aquila’s hull, was rather peaceful.
‘Are you going to take a chip off one of them,’ asked Geoff, ‘as a souvenir?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Tom. A chunk of one of the stones would be a nice addition to his collection and he had brought his geological hammer but, now that he was here, it didn’t seem quite such a good idea.
‘They’re pretty big,’ said Geoff, looking around. ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to notice if a bit goes missing.’
Tom agreed, but decided in the end to leave the stones as they were. Instead, they sat in the lifepod in the centre of the great circle and he told Geoff about lunch at the Royal Oak and spilling cola and Alan and his mother talking about the party. And somehow, surrounded by the stones that had been put there over four thousand years before, none of it seemed to matter quite as much.
That was what Tom had always liked about rocks. Ro
cks didn’t worry about things. They didn’t want you to do anything or to make polite conversation, they just … were. Millions of years might pass, but a rock was still a rock and a stone was still a stone, solid, patient and enduring.
They were the reassuring presence that told you not everything in life has to change.
When Tom tried to hand in his homework to Mr Duncan the next day, he found the maths teacher was not at school.
‘He’s had to go to the hospital,’ said Miss Taylor when the boys reported to her office at lunchtime. ‘His wife had a car accident on Saturday. Blacked out and drove straight off the road into a field. They’re giving her tests to try to find out what happened.’ She took the homework and looked at the pages of neat calculations. ‘Did this take you very long? Mr Duncan was worried he might have given you more than you could manage.’
Tom said he’d worked at it on Sunday afternoon, which was true, and Miss Taylor nodded thoughtfully before taking off her glasses and swinging them between her fingers for several seconds before continuing.
‘Would you mind,’ she said, slowly, ‘if I gave you both some advice?’
Tom and Geoff assured her that they wouldn’t mind at all.
‘It’s very good to see you doing all this work,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘and asking your teachers all these questions about Stonehenge and Norway and how to find out what the weather’s like in the Mediterranean, but … I’m a little worried that maybe you’re pushing too hard.’ She held up a hand as if to ward off an interruption. ‘Don’t get me wrong! Asking questions and being interested in things is all very wonderful, and the last thing I want to do is discourage you, but –’ she hesitated – ‘perhaps you should remember there are other things in life besides work. It’s important to find the right balance in life, you know. You need to have a bit of fun occasionally as well.’
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