Jay Lake - Rocket Science

“Vernon Dunham,” the unseen voice said. It sounded a little less Negro and a little less German both. Somehow that saddened me.

I wanted to talk to my airplane, to understand how it could be what it was. I was an engineer, damn it, I wanted to get in there and see how the pieces fit together — everything from control cables to electronics, and especially whatever miracle of vacuum tubes and batteries produced human speech from a machine.

But I didn’t want to answer it where Garrett could hear me. Every time I talked to that invisible voice, people thought I was crazy. I could see their point. I stuck the handset in the pocket of the flannel bathrobe and walked out the door.

On the way down the stairs, clutching the carved banister all the way, the voice called my name twice more before falling silent. I walked slowly into the dining room, feeling somewhat better. I noticed that despite my cutting down the trim early that same morning, the shotgun damage to the kitchen door hadn’t been repaired yet.

Mr. Bellamy and Floyd sat at the dining room table, talking with a man I didn’t know. They were speaking quietly, but Floyd noticed me and interrupted the conversation.

“Vernon, you’re up.” He grinned. “Come over here and have a seat.”

I really needed to make it to the outhouse, but a quick rest didn’t seem to be a bad idea. Walking had proven tougher than I thought. “How are you all?”

“Forget us,” said Floyd. “How are you?”

I considered that. I was actually starting to feel better, but my overall sensation was one of having taken a bad fall and landed on my head. “Lousy,” I answered, “but improving.”

“You took a bullet along your scalp,” said Mr. Bellamy. His voice was clear and strong, the old Mr. Bellamy I had known all my life. The cough was gone, as was the querulous old man whining. “The whole back of your head was bloody when we found you. Another half an inch deeper and there wouldn’t have been any of you to find.”

“Why didn’t Reverend Little say anything?”

“He didn’t see that side of you,” answered Floyd cheerfully. “Not like us.”

“Vance, this here’s Mr. Neville,” said Mr. Bellamy, changing the subject. “He’s not from around here.”

“Another one of your gang?” I asked peevishly.

“Yep,” answered Mr. Neville. He looked like a man who rarely smiled, with a round face that reminded me of Ollie Wannamaker back in high school, but a heck of a lot smarter-looking. Mr. Neville had on a checked flannel shirt with a shoulder holster, which got my attention even though I couldn’t see the gun. He had that same core of hardness as Mr. Garrett upstairs, and come to think of it, Mr. Bellamy now. Given the way things had been going lately, I was already developing grave doubts about that miraculous recovery the old man was making.

“Daddy ran shine years back,” said Floyd. “Mr. Neville and Mr. Garrett and a couple of other old boys around here were part of the operation.”

That explained the firearms, I supposed.

“We get together to drink and whoop and holler a few times a year,” said Mr. Neville, “and when someone’s in trouble, well, we all pull together again, just like the old days.”

“And you looked to be in a heap of trouble when we found you sitting on the front of Doc Milliken’s car,” said Floyd. He had his puppy dog voice, that I used to hear a lot more when we were boys. It was Floyd’s way of being excited about coming in on something big.

“Oh heck,” I said. “The Cadillac.” By this time of day, the guys in the airplane — whoever they were — would have gotten help and be headed back looking for it. “What happened to the car?”

“You mean what did you do to it, or where did we put it?” asked Floyd.

“I know what’s wrong with it,” I snapped. “Way too much is wrong with it. But where is it? I might have killed someone with that car, and there will be people out looking for it.”

I suddenly wished I hadn’t said that last, but the three of them didn’t even blink.

“Humph,” said Mr. Neville. He was appraising me, as if he couldn’t believe I had what it took to take a man down. I didn’t, but I sure gave it the old college try. I smiled back at him.

“I fetched the tractor and dragged that car up into the peach orchard,” said Floyd. “Once I got it there, I covered it with hay. I didn’t reckon we needed to keep it around out in the open right now.”

These people certainly thought like criminals. All I wanted to do was go back to work at Boeing tomorrow and forget this whole business, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. For one thing, I’d lost two cars in two days, and automobiles didn’t come cheap. And now I was mixed in tight with a Kansas version of the Clanton gang. On the other hand, from their looks, these boys might be more along the lines of Quantrill’s Raiders. No wonder Floyd was always skating along the edge of the rules. He had his shine-running Daddy as an example. The things I never knew.

“Gentlemen,” I said, standing up again. “I need some more water. Please excuse me.” I limped out of the dining room into the kitchen, now thankfully cleaned of pig’s blood though a joint still dangled over the block table. I looked around for the crock Mrs. Bellamy always kept around. Of course, with her gone, there was no water.

To the pump then. I could use a moment of peace and quiet. I had no illusions about escaping, but just getting away from all the blood and murder in the next room would ease my heart a little.

I took the crock and slipped quietly outside. I didn’t let the screen door slam — the last thing I needed was Floyd following me. On the back porch, I realized I ought to stop in the outhouse first, so I set the crock down and walked across the yard. As I opened the door of the outhouse, I looked back and saw yet another man on the roof of the Bellamys’ house with a rifle. He seemed to be facing the other way.

With a shrug, I went to do my business.

It didn’t come easy. Too much trouble and pain, shutting me down. Well, that had happened before. There’s not a lot to do in a Kansas outhouse. I had read plenty of the Sears catalog, both recently and over the years past, and Mrs. Bellamy hadn’t cut loose of her Ward’s yet. I stared at the aged planking of the outhouse door and tried to ignore the odor from beneath.

“Vernon Dunham,” said the voice.

“What?” There was nobody to overhear me in here and decide I was crazy, but I whispered anyway. Maybe now I could get to the bottom of what the voice was about. I knew it was the aircraft, but every time I’d tried to make sense of that, my engineering training made me balk at the impossible design logic. On the other hand, the aircraft had come from… wherever… originally, to be found entombed in the Arctic ice. Talking machines weren’t really any harder to swallow than some of what I had already forced myself to accept.

“You are trying to be alone, son.”

“ Trying to be.” My alrea dy-troubled colonic activity conflicted with my intense interest in the subject at hand. No one was at his best squatting down over a crap hole, least of all me. “I am in an outhouse.”

“What is an outhouse?”

It definitely wasn’t a person on the other end of the line. “Never mind. I’ve got a lot of questions for you, but obviously you have something to say to me.”

“You’re hurt.”

“You have a startling grasp of the obvious,” I said. Then I thought about that for a moment. A machine that could see me at a distance and through walls was even weirder than a talking machine. “How could you tell I was alone?”

There was a brief pause. “I scanned you.”