Jay Lake - Rocket Science

“Do you know how to open it?” asked Floyd. In the direction my thoughts had fled, his voice was a profanity, but that profanity brought me back into myself.

Ask permission , I thought, but I didn’t say that. “I think that I can open the pilot’s hatch if I push on it in the right place,” I said carefully.

I desperately hoped that Pegasus would get the hint. The radio handset, heavy in my pocket, still possessed that tingling warmth it had exhibited ever since I first fooled with it. That meant it was active. I hoped.

“Vernon Dunham,” said Pegasus’ voice in my ear. I didn’t dare answer it with Floyd standing right next to me.

“Cripes,” said Floyd. “Get it open.” He stopped talking, dropped the knife into the straw. “Vern… I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. With you, it’s like with Mama… they’ll hurt me, or worse, if I don’t do what they say.”

Never in his life had I seen Floyd so uncertain. Crazy as his father was, with Mr. Neville around and all those guns, maybe I wouldn’t have behaved any better.

“Let’s figure this out,” I said. I wasn’t going to tell him everything, but if he wanted to talk, show his regrets, I needed to encourage him. “Something will come up.”

I approached the Mack stake bed. Pegasus towered over the truck, filling much of the barn, just as I had seen her that morning. The wing geometries caught my eye and held it, this time as an engineer rather than with that sense of awed supplication that Floyd had just banished. I had been studying, building and flying airplanes for five years. Looking at Pegasus with its wings spread wide I was utterly convinced of its alienness. No human engineer could have conceived those wings. I knew of no equations to explain them.

“Can you open it?” asked Floyd behind me.

“Approach me near my front section,” said Pegasus in my ear.

There was a crate positioned near the middle of the truck that I left there before to help me climb up. Painfully, I swung up to crouch under the spread wings along the narrow margin of the truck bed. Pegasus had unfolded so dramatically that I had to lean backwards to keep my footing. Pegasus’ nose faced the rear of the truck. I worked my way along that direction, feeling the bumps and textures of Pegasus’ skin pass underneath my fingers.

Skin was the only word for it. When I’d first seen the computational rocket, I had thought it milled from a block of metal. Pegasus had been dormant then. Now, I stopped moving, just feeling that skin. At Floyd’s urging, embarrassed by some girls from the junior high, I had once reluctantly held a python at the White Eagle Fair in Augusta. A snake act had shown up, earning a little money by scaring the girls and thrilling the boys at the fall festival. I vividly remembered the densely compact feeling of the snake in my hands, the complex texture of dry scratchiness and flexible tension under my fingers.

Pegasus reminded me of that snake. There was an intense sense of life, a subtle motion under the apparently static skin. That was when I realized that Pegasus was no more an aircraft or a rocket than I was fish. There was some relationship to the physics of airfoils and the mechanics of flight, but my B-29s were creaky toys left behind in a child’s nursery when I set them next to Pegasus.

“What’s the matter? Can’t find the hatch?”

I couldn’t figure if he was angry or what now. Maybe both. “Take it easy, buddy.”

“They’re going to come check soon, Vern.”

I hung onto the rippling skin of the computational rocket and twisted around to look at Floyd. “Floyd Euell Bellamy, if you call me ‘Vern’ one more time, so help me God I will knock you upside the head, carving knife or not. My name is Vernon, and if you can’t remember that, you can just forget getting my help on this thing.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But you have to keep working. Or else…”

He was rattled, somewhere between his regrets and his anger. I felt strong, and reckless. The only card I held was Pegasus, and whatever emotionality I could hector out of Floyd. I adopted his father’s tone. “Or else what? You threatening to kill me twice? That’s getting mighty old, Floyd. Think of a better one or shut the heck up.”

Floyd glared at me but said nothing. I wondered why Mr. Bellamy hadn’t sent him up here with a gun. Didn’t trust his own son? Maybe Mr. Neville didn’t trust Floyd. That man held a lot of power over the two Bellamys, for all that everyone said Mr. Bellamy was in charge. Maybe he was a Soviet spy, minding the Bellamy cell.

I turned back towards Pegasus. The thing seemed to breathe.

“Are you ready Vernon Dunham?” asked Pegasus.

“Yes,” I whispered. I tensed myself to scramble inside. I didn’t see any kind of hatch, but I had to trust Pegasus.

“Now,” said the computational rocket. There was a snapping click, and a hole opened in the side of Pegasus, the strangest thing I’d ever seen. It just sort of dialed open — there was no other way to describe it. Like watching someone’s eyes widen.

I was so surprised I lost my balance. My weak leg folded under me, and I fell backward off the truck onto the barn floor.

The fall knocked the wind out of me completely. I felt like I might have broken my left hip, too. It ached tremendously. I wanted to shriek with frustration — all the care and planning I could bring to the problem, and my bad leg just gave out on me. Floyd stepped over to reach down and grabbed my wrist. He pulled me up.

“Stupid gimp,” he growled. Now that my sense of power was gone, I regretted antagonizing him. “You almost landed on me. Now let’s get inside and check that darned thing out.”

I had muffed it. I lost my chance to get inside Pegasus and away from Floyd. He was already jumping up onto the truck bed, reaching down to drag me after him. And he’d brought the knife with him.

There wasn’t anything I could do now.

“Patience,” said Pegasus. “This will work. You are only set back, not defeated.”

I scrambled back onto the truck bed as Floyd pulled at my wrist. My hip wasn’t broken, because I could stand okay, but it hurt like crazy. Floyd bent over and stepped through the open hatch in Pegasus’ side. I followed after him, torn between a sense of profound excitement and feeling sick at heart that Floyd would be inside Pegasus with me, carrying the poison of his father and his family into this bright future.

Even though I was right behind him, I missed my best friend.

The inside of Pegasus resembled the world’s largest vacuum tube. It was much larger than I would have thought from the outside. The entire cabin glowed a dull orange. Twisted shapes as unsettling as the exterior lines of the computational rocket cast strange shadows across the entire cabin, and nothing was level or true, not even the deck.

Screens vaguely resembling large versions of the hooded radar terminal in the f-panzer outside lined the front of the cabin, dominated by a huge, flat one displaying a view of the inside of the barn. That explained the lack of cockpit windows or vision blocks. Unlike a normal cathode-ray tube, there was no curvature to its face whatsoever. There were two steeply angled chairs, big and padded, in front of the screens. They were obviously the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats.

Purple, white and orange lights flickered in patterns and sequences across the faces of curved panels gathered around the seats. There were dozens of wide, concave buttons, some of them backlit and some of them matte dark. A white column of light rose from a low platform in the middle of the cabin just behind the seats, with a shifting diagram of color-coded curves and vectors displayed within it. The whole thing looked like a three-dimensional movie, if such a thing were possible.