Rocket Science (4 page)

“I ain’t giving you no money,” said Odus automatically.

Floyd waved his hands, as if pushing Odus away. “No, no, Odus, you misunderstand me. I don’t want your money. I just want to keep a lid on things for a while — maybe four, six months.”

“Lid?” Odus sipped his drink. I toyed with mine, then shucked a couple of peanuts from the little ceramic bowl.

Floyd gave Odus a narrow-eyed stare. “You see that halftrack I pulled off the train?”

Odus chuckled. “Of course.”

“It wasn’t no halftrack.”

Odus’ chuckle turned into a laugh. “Floyd Bellamy, if you’re going to flim-flam me, you’re going to have to do a lot better than that.”

“No, Odus, it had wheels and treads. That’s not what I mean. But that funny little housing on the back? It was a mobile fertilizer plant. High-yield fertilizer straight from bunker-grade crude. Nazis had to develop that stuff to survive near the end of the war when we had ’em cut off from overseas shipments and on the run.”

Odus gave a low whistle. I was pretty impressed myself — Floyd must have worked on that routine for a while.

“Anyway,” Floyd continued, “Vernon here’s an engineer. Me and him are going to break down that equipment, reproduce the process, and make Augusta, Kansas the fertilizer capital of the world. And we only need one thing to do it.”

“What?” After that last bout of resistance, Odus was completely under Floyd’s spell. I figured Floyd could get money from him now if he had a mind to.

Floyd reached across the table to touch Odus’ lips. “Your silence,” he said.

Odus sipped from his beer and thought that over. He glanced around the bar at the oil-stained roughnecks. I could almost see him thinking about all the wells in eastern Kansas, the business it would bring to the railroad, wondering where the plant would be built. I’ve got to give Odus credit — he held back.

“I’ll make sure the boys keep their mouths shut,” Odus finally said. “I’ll put out the word it was European farm machinery.”

Floyd clapped him on the shoulder. “Odus, we’ll all be famous someday, because of the wisdom of men like you.”

If I had half Floyd’s gift of gab, I’d be a wealthy man. Somehow on the way out the door, he convinced me to keep the tractor and drive it back to the farm the next day.

Early that morning — it was a Friday — I drove my Hudson the thirty mile round trip into Wichita and borrowed some tools from work, including a magnifying glass and a set of measuring calipers. I was extremely curious about the manufacturing history of the airplane we had hidden in Floyd’s barn. When I got back to Augusta, I parked down by the railroad depot and got on the Farm-All. My knees would be sore by the time I got to the Bellamy place, but Floyd could darn well give me a ride home in his dad’s pickup.

When I came sputtering up their drive into the yard of the farmhouse, Floyd and Mrs. Bellamy were sitting on the front porch in the deep shade of the giant wisteria that grew on the front of their house. From the parlor, you couldn’t even see outside, just a dark jumble of sticks and leaves. I killed the Farm-All out by the oak tree and walked up to join them. I was covered with mud and sweat.

“Vernon, you really should take more care of yourself,” Floyd’s mother said.

“Good morning, Mrs. Bellamy.”

“I’ll fetch you some apple cider.” She swished inside, under way with the same slow determination as a Mississippi barge.

Floyd stretched his arms upward, rolling his neck to clear a crick. “Have a nice night?”

“Went home, listened to the radio.”

“I really appreciate you taking care of the tractor. I had to catch up with Mary Ann.”

“Without your mattress in the truck?”

“Vern,” Floyd hissed. “Mama’s right in the house.” He grinned. “Besides, there’s other places and ways.”

And women
, I thought, remembering the waitress laying that big old kiss on Floyd in the State Street Lounge. I’d never know, at least not until I was married. If.

Mrs. Bellamy came back on to the porch, rescuing me from my thoughts. “Floyd tells me you boys have a special project going in the barn.”

I glanced at Floyd. “I was wondering when he was going to let you in on our little efforts.”

She handed me an apple cider, then sat on the glider. It hung on rusted chains from the wasp-blue porch ceiling, which was why I had taken one of the shell-back metal chairs. I was too much the engineer to trust those old chains and their hidden mounting.

“I don’t hold with airplanes, Vernon Dunham,” she said. “I know its what you do for a living and all, but they are the work of Satan.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, ma’am.” I’d gotten this lecture when she found out what I was studying in college, and gotten it again when I went to work at Boeing. I’d never had the heart to tell Mrs. Bellamy that I was a licensed pilot.

“If God had meant man to fly,” she went on, “he’d have given us brains like the birds.”

“Uh, yes, ma’am.” I couldn’t work out if that meant only the stupid should fly, or the fearless, or the natural aviators. It didn’t matter — the general tone of her opinions was quite clear.

She shook a finger at me. “Rest assured, Vernon Dunham, Daddy and I will stay out of that barn. But you know what that means?”

I shook my head, eyes wide. I glanced at Floyd for a signal. He just covered his mouth and laughed with his eyes. “No, ma’am, what does that mean?”

“You have to help Floyd with his chores.”

Of course.

In the barn, we set about stripping the rest of the crate off the aircraft. That took some doing to accomplish safely — Floyd had to rig a block and tackle in the rafters so we didn’t have any more incidents like yesterday’s near-accident with the first panel. I spent the whole time focusing on the wood, cursing and picking splinters out of my fingernails. Every time I looked at that damned airplane I’d stop working and just stare, until Floyd yelled at me to get back to work.

Several hours’ work with the crowbars and the ropes exposed the airplane, sitting on aluminum landing skids on the crate base, still on the bed of Dad’s truck. I didn’t want to move it off the truck until I knew what I was doing — we didn’t know the simplest things, like the attachment points for a safe lift. Besides, Dad wouldn’t miss his equipment for weeks, even if he somehow managed to sober up in the mean time. Nobody else would even care where the truck had gotten to.

“That is just about the smallest airplane I’ve ever seen,” I told Floyd. We were on a break, sitting on the stacked crate panels and drinking root beer from bottles Floyd had brought in a little bucket of cold water from the spring house.

“Not as small as it looks.” Floyd took a deep swig of his beer. “It sort of folds in on itself.”

I stood up and walked around the back of the truck, inspecting the aircraft from various angles. “It is sort of...
folded
,” I told him. “You’re right. Crumpled, almost...but not like a wreck.” God knew I’d seen plenty of those along the way.

“What are those planes they flew on aircraft carriers?” Floyd asked.

“You mean the F-4U?” The Chance-Vought fighter had folding wings so it could be stored efficiently in the below-deck hangars. “It does look folded. But why bother? This wasn’t carrier-based, was it?”

“Arctic duty,” Floyd said, “but I don’t get all the details. That’s why you’re here.”

I shot him a look. “I understand you were spinning a line with Odus about the fertilizer. Hell, it was a great grift you did on him. What’s your line with me? Where is this thing going when we crack it open and work it out?”

Floyd smiled. “Blue sky, Vernon. You and me and that thing heading for the open air.”

I snorted. “You never did anything just for pleasure.”

“Well,” Floyd said, glancing at the mattress in the corner behind a rotary plow, “a few things.”

“Cripes,” I muttered. He never would change, my buddy Floyd. In a way, I had to admire that. I struggled back onto the bed of the truck and pulled out the magnifying glass and the calipers.

Up close, it still looked seamless, like a milled block of metal. I decided it wasn’t titanium, but I was hard pressed to put a name to it. I resolved to take some shavings into work for analysis — I’d be going back next week to my regular schedule. Regardless, this aircraft was easily the most finely machined piece of equipment I had ever seen in my life.

It took me almost ten minutes to identify an actual joint in the body segments. The folds and crumples in the airframe that were visible from a distance seemed to vanish into smooth convolutions up close. Sort of like looking at the ground from a thousand feet up — the abrupt lines of the watersheds so obvious from the air are impossible to find on foot.

Using the magnifying glass and the calipers, I tried to measure the manufacturing tolerance in the joint. The metalwork was too finely machined for the scale my calipers could manage. “Damnation,” I hissed.

“What?” Floyd had been watching me without comment from a perch on the corner of the truck bed.

“I’m going to have to find a micrometer to measure this join.”

“Why do you care?”

I sighed. “It’s not obvious to me what this is made of. Or how it was built. Most aircraft are lightweight deathtraps — wood or aluminum bolted to a skeleton, cables and wires running through. There’s a hundred ways to cut into one, a thousand ways to shoot one down. This thing...the Germans have a great reputation for quality metalwork, and some of the best machine tools in the world. But this, it’s way beyond anything I thought possible.” I tore my eyes from the rounded edge I was fondling to glance at Floyd again. “Which of their aircraft designers did this? Do you have any idea how?”

“No. Like I said, why do you care? Here it is.”

“I don’t mean to sound goofy, but it makes things a lot easier if I know what it was for, who built it, why. Floyd, it doesn’t even
look
like an airplane. It’s obviously meant to fly — I’m guessing that when all the folds straighten out into their proper positions it’ll be a lot bigger than it is now. It’s basically just a great big wing. That’s damned hard to do.”

Floyd shrugged. “It was a secret project. They wanted to use this thing to challenge our air superiority late in the war. I don’t know a whole lot more — most of the documentation was destroyed.”

I didn’t want to ask why the Army hadn’t taken this thing to Wright Field. I knew perfectly well Floyd had somehow stolen an entire airplane and its ground support. I was a willing accessory after-the-fact to his crime just for the privilege of being around such a glorious machine. But I really wanted to know where it came from. I really wanted to be in the mind of whoever built it.

I turned around to ask Floyd the question again, but he was gone. Fine. I would study my airplane, understand it, and be very careful of whatever scam Floyd was running on me. He might be my best friend, but I knew him too well to trust him completely — with my life, yes, but not with my honor.

He wasn’t going to tell me everything he knew, I didn’t have to tell him everything I discovered.

Chapter Three

A
fter lunch, we were back in the barn
. I wanted to make the most of my last few days before getting back to work. “You know what I really hate?” I said to Floyd.

“What?” Floyd was measuring distances to rig a block-and-tackle to get the airplane off the flatbed.

“I’m going to go in to work on Monday, sit around all day talking about fasteners — you know, clips and rivets and bolt shear and tensile strength. If I’m lucky. Sometimes I have to go count the damned things, when the guys down on the floor find extras they shouldn’t have after attaching a wing or something.”

Floyd snorted back a laugh. “Yeah, I’d hate that, too.”

“That’s not what I hate.” I set my hands on my hips and just stared up at the collapsed beauty of that aircraft. “It’s just my job. What I
hate
is that I’ll be there instead of here, and I won’t be able to talk about it. Not one little syllable.”

“Oh, Vernon.” Floyd shook his head. “We can’t talk about this to nobody.”

“Do you think I want a permanent vacation in Leavenworth?”

He laughed at that, his smile pulling a reluctant chuckle from me in turn.

I was up on the trailer with the aircraft again, while Floyd crawled around in the rafters making sure the rigging points for our eventual lift were secure.

“How did it fly?” I called up to him.

“That’s your problem.”

“No, I want to know what you saw. Or were told by those ‘boffins’ you spoke with. It doesn’t have any propellers, or even engine cowlings. Heck, the darned thing doesn’t even have a cockpit windscreen.” Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic without one, but I wouldn’t care to fly in combat that way. Did the pilot use periscopes?

“Ever heard of a
Schwalbe
?”

Schwalbe
. I vaguely remembered vocabulary lists from college. “German for ‘swallow,’ I think.”

“Right. It was this Nazi secret weapon. The Jerries called it
Turbo
.”

“Oh, the Messerschmitt 262.” I knew what jets were. We’d seen some of the classified research at the plant, mostly on the know-your-enemy line, because the Japs had been rumored to be building an Me-262 knockoff, the Nakajima Kikka, or “Orange Blossom.” Not that I’d ever seen a jet airplane, or even so much as a jet engine.

And Floyd was right — this had to be a jet — no air screws, no place for them, and the smooth, curved lines that I had seen discussed in literature and had hashed over in late night engineering bull sessions. But this couldn’t be an Me-262. I had no idea how the Germans had manufactured this thing, but it didn’t come off any normal aircraft assembly line.

Even more than the fabrication techniques, the metal itself bothered me. The thing had obviously taken damage, because there were fairly crude aluminum patches on the bottom. Also, some of the tubing in the landing skids looked freshly milled and much less carefully finished than the fuselage work. But the rest of the ship was as smooth as a peach, and almost warm to the touch.

Climbing carefully down off the Mack flatbed, I went over to the f-panzer and stepped up into the cramped control box. I wanted to look around, to see if there were any more clues to the strange nature of my aircraft.