Jay Lake - Rocket Science

Floyd’s voice was filled with awe as he broke his self-imposed silence. “How did you do that, Vernon?”

Pegasus’ voice echoed from the cabin walls, instead of whispering behind my ear. “False-color low-light imaging from massively redundant low-bandwidth atmospherically dispersed microspore telemetry units. You may think of that as smart dust.”

“Holy cow!” Floyd yelled. “Who said that?”

Well, I’d only understood about four words of it myself, at least on the first go-round. “That was the voice of this computational rocket. Who I’ve been talking to for the past few minutes while you were whistling ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ over there. It has a personality, you know, and it’s not very happy about everything that’s been going on around here.”

“Floyd Bellamy, you may call me Pegasus.”

Floyd screwed his eyes shut. He looked as if he were either crying or praying. Either one would have been out of character for the Floyd I knew. That was before he’d come back from Europe doubled by the Nazis, before I’d seen how much he had been bent by his father.

“Oh God,” Floyd said. “This is so crazy. Please Vernon, let me out of this thing. I’ll just walk away. I’ll never say anything. Please let me out of here.” It was almost a chant, like he was praying.

To me.

“Shut up, Floyd.” Even in his panic and his fear, he hadn’t actually apologized.

Pegasus spoke in my ear again. “I regret this. I did not realize that I would disturb him so.”

“You’re pretty disturbing, my friend,” I said. “Even under the best of circumstances. For what it’s worth, I didn’t understand what you said either.”

“I did not intend to be comprehended. The truth is often better than a lie, if it can be made sufficiently obscure. Now, please watch the primary viewer.”

I looked at the screen. Three cars struggled up the muddy track toward the Bellamys’ house. I could see the man on the roof, prone with his rifle aimed to cover the approaching cars. I couldn’t see Random Garrett, but if he was still on top of the porch he wouldn’t be visible from this angle. He might even be inside, braced to fire from Floyd’s bedroom window. Mr. Neville and Mr. Bellamy were not in evidence either. I wasn’t sure who else might be in Bellamy’s old man gang, and I wasn’t about to ask Floyd about their numbers.

“Pegasus,” I said. “Can you tell how many people are around or in the house?”

The screen flickered, then showed the house as an outline, like an engineering plan. The image was glorious, load-bearing walls outlined, both chimneys, even the bricks of the foundation. There were five spots in and around the plan — on top of the house, in an upstairs room, two in the front room, and one in the root cellar. At least they’d gotten Mrs. Bellamy out of the cess pit. God bless her.

I was fascinated with the image Pegasus had given me. It was like having the eyes of God at my disposal. I sure could have used this on the B-29 line at the plant.

“How did you do that?” I asked in an awed voice.

“I scanned for calcium concentrations in the right configuration and volume for adult human skeletal structures.”

That almost made sense. Pegasus’ magic dust wasn’t just sending back television pictures that could see in the dark, it was doing some Pegasus-equivalent of chromatography. Remote control materials analysis. I almost groaned for the pity of it — such a profound technology could change the world overnight. Just sitting, distracted and in fear for my life, I could imagine a dozen beneficial and profitable applications. If this was the future, I definitely wanted to be a part of it.

“You can do that?” I asked. “From how far away?”

“From anywhere in my line of sight,” answered Pegasus. “Under the right conditions, all the way out to a range of about two hundred kilometers.”

Two hundred kilometers. That was about one hundred and twenty miles. And Pegasus could locate people hidden in cellars and behind walls. What the cops wouldn’t give for a system that just did what I was seeing.

Cops. Missing people. Something fearsome gripped my heart, a cold hand of mixed hope and dread.

“Can you find my dad?” I asked in a small voice.

“Unfortunately, I cannot sufficiently refine the scan to identify individuals.”

I missed the radio preacher voice. Talking to Pegasus had become something like reading a textbook, but that was a language I could understand, even if I didn’t normally speak that way. My college education was finally coming in useful. “Dad has a surgical steel plate in his skull. And I think he’s somewhere here in Butler County.” After a moment’s consideration, I added, “He’s probably dead, though.”

“These killers extinguished your father?”

“Yes,” I said miserably. I didn’t know which particular set of killers had done the deed. They were all starting to run together in my mind — bad guys everywhere, out to get me, out to get Pegasus. At this point, it didn’t really matter any more. They were all evil sons of bitches as far I was concerned, even the Army.

“When we are next airborne, I will execute a scan. Assuming human skeletons with implanted metal content are reasonably rare, your father can probably be located.”

Somehow, that made me feel worse rather than better. Even though I had asked for the help, in a way I didn’t really want to know. As long as Dad was missing, I could hope that he was still alive, even against all common sense.

I was pretty sure Pegasus would find Dad, and I was pretty sure he would be dead. Discomfort or not, for my own peace of mind, I needed to know what had happened to him. I didn’t matter whether Truefield had killed him, or if he really had been kidnapped like Hauptmann had told me. Maybe if we found Dad’s body, I could figure something out from his remains, where and how we found him. Clearly I wasn’t going to get any help from Pegasus in avenging my father, but then my limited taste for vengeance had already run dry in the stress of the last few hours.

The machine was rubbing off on me.

Besides, I’d brought a lot of this on myself. I’d signed myself up for trouble by going along with Floyd’s obviously criminal intent in the first place, seduced by the magic of Pegasus. If Mr. Bellamy’s story was true, and I figured it was, Dad had never been blameless. There were old sins and crimes going back to the First World War. The only real innocent was Mrs. Bellamy, regardless of whatever grudge Mr. Bellamy had carried in the twenty-five years since Floyd was born.

But I still needed to know about Dad. And Dad’s fate wasn’t going to be knowable until we got Pegasus out of Mr. Bellamy’s barn and away from the Kansas City Mob and the Bellamy Gang.

“What are the people in those cars doing now?” I asked Pegasus.

The image shrank to include more of the area around the farmhouse. I tried to imagine the lens that could do all that, somehow distributed among the specks of Pegasus’ magic dust. The three incoming automobiles slowed to a stop in front of the house, next to the old Ford coupe. On Pegasus’ scan the vehicles showed up as simplified schematics, like the house had, to the point where I couldn’t identify the make or model. There were four people in each car.

Floyd’s breath hissed. That meant he was worried. Twelve mobsters come to call on four old men. It didn’t look good for his father if negotiations got energetic. As I suspected they would.

“Can you see those license plates?” I asked Pegasus.

The image jumped and switched back to the greenish photographic-type view I had seen before. The three cars filled the screen in sharp focus. Now I could see that they were all Cadillacs, Series 75 limousines from about 1941. Even the mob couldn’t get new cars during the war. Cadillac had been building tanks for Uncle Sam, and Detroit was only just now retooling.