Dunstan had seen Aquila that first Saturday when Geoff had knocked on the window. Or at least had realized something odd was happening when a hand appeared out of thin air and tapped at the glass.
‘But you didn’t say anything!’ said Tom.
‘Well, I could tell you didn’t want me to know about it,’ said Dunstan. ‘That’s why you sent me out to get a glass of water. And when I came back, I saw Geoff talking to you. Well, I saw his head.’
The sight had, not unnaturally, made Dunstan curious. He had thought about it, wondering what he should do, and on the day of Mrs Baxter’s party, when he had found himself alone in Tom’s room, he had taken the opportunity to look around for an explanation. That was when he had found the exercise book with ‘Licet volare si in tergo aquilae volat’ written on the front.
It was the exercise book in which Tom had written all the details of how they’d found Aquila, how they had brought it home and a journal of all the things they had done in it. It was the book that, as Tom had told Paige, had once been found by Miss Taylor. But while she had presumed it was all made up, Dunstan had believed every word, and decided he would like to see inside Aquila for himself.
He knew from Tom’s journal that the boys usually flew the lifepod to school, and then left it thirty feet in the air behind the domestic-science block. He also knew that they called it down at the end of the day by blowing three short blasts and two long on a dog whistle, and that this made the lifepod appear somewhere to your right.
So, on the day he had to stay home from school because of the burst water main, and with only Mrs Munns looking after him, Dunstan left a note on the kitchen table saying that he was going round to Tom’s house, walked into town, bought a dog whistle from the pet shop, walked to the comprehensive, blew the signal to bring down Aquila and climbed inside.
Tom stared at him. ‘This was the day everyone thought you were lost and your dad called the police, right?’
Dunstan nodded.
‘So what did you do in it?’ asked Geoff. ‘Where did you go?’
‘I didn’t go anywhere,’ said Dunstan. ‘I’m not very keen on flying. I just wanted to see if it would connect to my computer.’
Tom’s jaw dropped a little further.
‘And did it?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Dunstan nodded calmly. As if connecting a laptop to a six-thousand-year-old piece of alien technology was the sort of thing one did all the time.
‘How?’ asked Geoff. ‘How did you do it?’
Dunstan frowned. ‘I didn’t do anything really,’ he said. ‘I just asked Aquila if it could do it for me. It can speak most of the known languages of the galaxy, you see, and I thought if I told it about the wavelength mobile phones used, maybe it could work out the connection. And it did.’
‘So you can … talk to it? On your phone?’
Dunstan nodded again. ‘I just have to dial up the number and –’
‘Aquila has a phone number?’ Tom could not hide his astonishment.
‘Two,’ said Dunstan. ‘One connects it to the phone, and I use the other to talk to it on my computer. That’s what I wanted it for really.’ He looked up at the boys sitting either side of him. ‘I just wanted to ask it things. About where it came from. How it works. You’re not angry, are you?’
Tom stared at him. He’s eight years old, he kept thinking. He worked all this out and he’s only eight years old. No wonder his teachers think he’s a genius.
‘No,’ said Geoff slowly. ‘No, we’re not angry. Now tell us what happened today.’
‘Today?’ Dunstan looked a little vague.
‘Today,’ Geoff repeated. ‘How did you know where we were? How did you know we were in trouble? How did you know to come and rescue us?’
‘Oh, that …’ Dunstan did his thoughtful look again. ‘Well, today, when you said you were going out, I thought you were probably going off in Aquila so I used the computer to ask where you’d gone and Aquila said you’d gone to Norway. Then I asked it to tell me when it got back and about an hour later, it did. It said it was back at the water tower, only you weren’t in it. Either of you. You were both still in Norway, which was a bit odd.
‘So I asked why it had come back and it said it had received this signal from the dog whistle and I thought maybe there’d been a mistake. Perhaps you’d blown the wrong signal or something and you were stuck in Norway and I thought I’d better check you were all right. I thought of just sending Aquila back on its own, but then I thought I’d better go with it. In case something had happened.
‘So I told Aquila to come round and pick me up, told Mrs Murphy I was going out, and then told Aquila to fly to –’
‘Hang on,’ said Geoff. ‘You told Mrs Murphy where you were going?’
‘Yes.’ Dunstan’s expression did not change. ‘You said I had to ask permission before I went anywhere, remember?’
‘What did you tell her?’ Tom asked. ‘Exactly.’
‘I asked her if it was all right if I went to Norway.’
‘And … she said you could go?’
‘She told me it was fine,’ said Dunstan, ‘as long as I was back for tea.’
Alan stood beside Mrs Baxter in the kitchen, looking out of the window down the garden. ‘How’s he been?’ he asked.
‘All right, I think.’ Tom’s mother was setting out plates and knives on the table. ‘I’m only just back myself.’
‘I’ve been worrying that maybe I shouldn’t have left him.’ There was a slightly anxious look on Alan’s face. ‘Not for that long anyway. Dunstan’s not always easy to look after and if he and Tom had an argument …’
‘They don’t seem to be arguing.’ Mrs Baxter pointed out of the window to where Tom, Geoff and Dunstan were sitting in the shade of a cherry tree. Tom and Geoff were listening patiently, while Dunstan seemed to be explaining something about his mobile phone.
‘I know, but …’ Alan still sounded doubtful. ‘It’s quite important they get on together, isn’t it? And if they didn’t –’
‘Well, let’s go and find out, shall we?’ Mrs Baxter took Alan’s hand and led him outside. ‘You can ask them if they’ve enjoyed themselves.’
‘So … what have you all been doing?’ Alan asked, looking down at the boys. ‘Have you had a good time?’
Mrs Baxter smiled at Dunstan. ‘Mrs Murphy says you asked permission to go to Norway. That’s quite a long way, isn’t it? What were you doing there?’
Dunstan did not answer immediately.
‘Dunstan?’ said Alan. ‘Mrs Baxter asked you a question.’
‘He had to come and rescue us,’ said Geoff. ‘Tom and I had flown out there, but we couldn’t get back because we lost our flying machine. So Dunstan came out and rescued us.’
‘Did he now?’ Alan smiled down at his son. ‘Well, that sounds like quite an adventure!’
‘Yes, it was,’ Dunstan agreed. ‘I’m hungry now. Can I have something to eat?’
‘Of course you can!’ Mrs Baxter said. ‘Tea’s laid. Tom, take him inside, will you?’
She watched as the three boys walked up the garden towards the house. ‘I don’t think you need to worry too much about them,’ she said. ‘It looks to me like they’re getting on really well together.’
And Alan, as he watched the boys go into the house, still deep in conversation, had to agree that it did.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tom stood at the table in the Eyrie, packing the bags for New York. He had finished his maths and, although he was not too sure of some of the answers, he had spent an hour on it, and Mr Duncan had said that an hour was quite enough time for anyone to spend on homework. If there was anything he couldn’t do in an h
our, they would go over it together in school.
At the moment, he was counting out the money they would be taking on the trip to America. Two days earlier they had changed £150 into dollars at the bank, but Tom thought it would not be wise to take it all. Fifty dollars each ought to be enough, he thought, and he put the rest of the money back in the tin they kept on the shelf above his collection of mountain peaks.
As well as the money, he had already packed the two rucksacks with sandwiches, some drinks from the fridge, several guide books, a map and a list of places of interest for them to visit. When Geoff got back from his Saturday morning lesson with Miss Stevenson, they would be crossing the Atlantic again, and this time they would be able to stay a bit longer than half an hour.
Miss Taylor was responsible for several of the items on the list of sights they planned to see. The Deputy Head had found the boys in the library one lunchtime studying a New York guide book, and recommended several places worth visiting if they were ever lucky enough to go there. Apparently she had worked as a dancer on Broadway for a year before going to university. Which was a bit of a surprise. But then life had delivered quite a few surprises recently.
Tom picked up the rucksacks, carried them over to Aquila and was carefully packing them under the seats when his phone rang. It was Geoff, calling to say his lesson was finished and asking if it was all right to tell Aquila to come and pick him up. Tom said it was, stepped back and a moment later the bulk of the lifepod blinked into invisibility. Then, as Tom watched, the faint shimmer in the air outlining its shape disappeared through the window.
Giving instructions to Aquila by phone was a huge improvement on using dog whistles. Now, you simply dialled the number Dunstan had given them and told Aquila what you wanted it to do. You could tell it to come and pick you up, you could send it to pick up someone else and you could even, if you wanted, tell it to take Paige back to Norway and then fly itself back to the water tower. Having the phones meant there would be no more panic about getting lost in New York, nor any risk of getting stuck in a foreign country because someone with a mathematical dog had blown the go-home signal on a whistle.
The phones had been a present from Alan.
‘He said he wanted to say thank you for the time you helped him find Dunstan,’ Tom’s mother had told him when he came home from school to find a box wrapped in silver paper waiting for him on the kitchen table. ‘I told him you’d already got a phone, but he said this one’s got some extra features you might like.’
The same day, Geoff received an identical parcel, with a note from Alan for Mr and Mrs Reynolds, saying he hoped they wouldn’t mind a small gesture of thanks for the help that Geoff had given him.
Later, when Tom and Geoff rang to say thank you, Alan told them he’d been trying to think of a suitable reward for days.
‘I asked Dunstan in the end,’ he said, ‘and he was the one who suggested the phones. I hope he’s right and it’s what you wanted, but if it’s not and you’d prefer something else …’
The boys assured him that the phones were exactly what they wanted, and Dunstan had set up the system so they could use them to phone Aquila. They were, he explained, not satellite phones, but used a system that meant they would work in most of the countries around the world. Tom and Geoff could not have been more pleased.
The phones gave them an unexpected bonus as well. When Aquila reappeared at the water tower, Tom could hear Geoff inside it, asking the lifepod what time it would be in New York when they got there, and Aquila telling him that it would be a little after eight in the morning.
Because Aquila could now talk.
The lifepod’s own voice box no longer existed after that photon blast from an Yrrillian battleship six thousand years before, but, as Dunstan explained, it still had the software to convert digital information into sound. The phones gave it the hardware so that it could speak. It had a cheerful, relaxed, rather comforting voice.
‘All set?’ Geoff asked.
‘Everything’s packed.’ Tom pointed to the rucksacks. ‘Food, maps, fifty dollars each …’
‘Ah … we may need a bit more than that,’ said Geoff. ‘I had a call from Paige this morning. She wants us to get her a top from some shop on Fifth Avenue.’
Tom sighed.
‘She says she’ll pay us, but she really needs it for a party on Sunday, so if we could fly over with it tomorrow …’ Geoff grinned sheepishly. ‘She says she can get us an invite to the party as well if we like.’
Tom collected the extra dollars from the sweet tin and put them in his pocket. It was still as hard as ever to say no when Paige wanted something done, but he didn’t really mind. She, after all, was the reason they had so much money in the first place.
They had been in Norway one afternoon, picnicking on an island off Stavanger, and talking about their next trip to New York. Geoff had been saying how much more fun it would be if they had money to buy something to eat or go to the cinema and Paige had said she couldn’t understand why, if they wanted money, they didn’t just get a job.
‘Because we’re not allowed to,’ Tom told her. ‘We’re not old enough.’
Paige waved a hand dismissively, as if this were no excuse. ‘Can’t you … deliver newspapers or something?’ She looked at Geoff. ‘I mean your dad has a newspaper shop, doesn’t he?’
It was such a simple idea that the boys couldn’t understand why they hadn’t thought of it themselves. Delivering newspapers might be bit of a chore if you had to do it on foot, but in Aquila …
For nearly a month now, the boys had been doing four paper rounds each morning, and earning a little over seventy pounds a week. With Aquila loaded with newspapers, Geoff would swoop from door to door, hopping over the hedges and walls between the houses, while Tom leaned out the side and pushed the papers through the letter box. They did two paper rounds for Mr Reynolds, two for another newsagent’s on the other side of Stavely, and they could finish all of them in a little under fifteen minutes before heading back to the Eyrie to put their feet up and have a second breakfast.
Geoff’s father had been particularly impressed. Mr Reynolds said he had never employed anyone as reliable as Tom and Geoff, and what he really admired was the way they never complained about the weather. It didn’t matter if it was raining or cold, they just smiled and got on with it. As he told his wife, it was the sort of thing that made you proud to be a father.
‘How was it last night?’ asked Geoff.
‘It was all right.’ Tom climbed into Aquila beside his friend. ‘If you like that sort of thing.’
The evening before, Alan had taken him, his mother and Dunstan to a theatre in Nottingham to see a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tom had never been to a theatre before but on the whole he had enjoyed it. It had certainly made his mother laugh, but he had noticed she did a lot of laughing these days.
‘Ready?’ asked Geoff.
Tom nodded.
‘OK! New York, here we come!’ Geoff reached for the controls, but paused before pressing the button that would send them forward. ‘A lot’s happened since the last time, hasn’t it?’ he said.
Tom agreed. Since the last time they had crossed the Atlantic, a great deal had happened. Meeting Alan, the business with Paige, Dunstan, getting stuck in Norway … All in all the last few weeks had been quite a roller coaster.
And, when he thought about it, Tom couldn’t help being struck by how wrong he had been a lot of the time. Wrong about Alan, wrong about Dunstan, wrong about Paige … Well, not wrong exactly …
It wasn’t that when he’d first met them he’d thought they were one thing and that since then he’d found out they were something else. They were sti
ll exactly the sort of people he’d thought they were, it was just that, in the last few weeks, he’d realized they were a lot of other things as well. He’d found they were more somehow than he’d realized at the start.
The first time he’d seen Alan, Tom had thought he was one of those men who, if they see something they want in life, simply reach out and take it. And it was true. Alan was like that, and one of the things he had wanted and reached out for was Tom’s mother. But as the weeks passed Tom had discovered he was other things as well. Alan was someone who had once sat in a classroom and wondered what on earth to do with his life. He was someone who had set up a very successful business despite having no qualifications. He was a dad who cared a good deal about his son, he was generous, he made people laugh, he was frightened of Miss Taylor … In fact, he was a whole host of things you could never have guessed from that time Tom had first seen him, sitting in a chair in the living room.
It was the same with Dunstan. Tom had thought when he first met him that Dunstan was one of those slightly odd boys who always seem to be better with computers than they are with people … and it was true. Dunstan was very good with computers and not quite so good at conversation. But he was also the most remarkable person Tom had ever met. He had found out about Aquila but said nothing. He had worked out, entirely on his own, how to connect the lifepod to a mobile phone and, on the day that Geoff and Tom were in trouble in Norway, he had come to their rescue. Tom had tried to imagine what it must have been like for an eight-year-old to climb into Aquila and fly across the North Sea on his own … and decided that, whatever else he was, Dunstan was also extraordinarily smart and brave.
And then there was Paige. Tom had presumed at the start that she was one of those girls who are only really interested in how they look, and Paige certainly gave a lot of time and attention to her clothes and her hair. But then she was also the only person who had given Tom any sensible advice on how he should cope with Alan. She was the one who had given them the idea of how to use Aquila to get money, and it was Paige – the girl who usually said the first thing that came into her head to anybody – who had kept her promise not to tell anyone about Aquila rather better than Geoff had.
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