Jay Lake - Rocket Science

I realized that I had been studying Floyd while I thought. I was checking out his nose, his hairline, the set of his jaw. Looking for signs of Dad — or me — in him. This wasn’t the moment to spill Dad’s secret.

“There’s something pretty funny I need to tell you,” I said, “but it will have to wait. There’s people in fighter planes shooting at us right now. I’m trying to figure a way to give us up without getting us killed.”

“And what happens then?” He glanced around the cabin. “To your Pegasus?”

My Pegasus, he’d said.

“Nothing good,” I admitted.

“You’ll do what’s right,” he muttered. “You’re the only one who always did.”

Because I was the only chump who never knew the secrets . Well, I had a secret now. Pegasus deserved to live too. I couldn’t give it up. Me, maybe. My brother, yes.

But not Pegasus.

I stared at the main screen, which showed three P-51Ds chasing us. One of the side screens indicated that we were closing in on the refinery. Maybe the refinery itself would shelter us. Hopefully the Mustang pilots would stop firing in case they blew an oil storage tank or something.

The pilots , I thought. Pegasus was right. They’re all people out there, not just machines and weapons and bad intentions. If I could get someone on the Army side talking, this didn’t have to end in a flaming disaster. Maybe I could get out of this, go to a nice, peaceful jail for half of forever.

“Can you find what radio frequency they’re using?” I asked Pegasus. “I need to call that Colonel Pinkhoffer, or Ollie Wannamaker.”

“It would be easier to tap into the telephone system,” said Pegasus. “And you have yet to secure permission for me to take the oil.”

Right , I thought. The oil . Ethics were hell sometimes. “Just get me a line to the operator.” Another of Pegasus’ myriad engineering marvels — the computational rocket could plug remotely into the telephone system.

There was a series of buzzing clicks in the same place behind my ear that I normally heard Pegasus, followed by a nasal female voice. “Will the party please clear the line? The telephones are required for emergency use at this time.”

It sounded like Susie Mae Leach. She was the usual off-hours operator at the Augusta exchange. “Susie Mae? It’s Vernon Dunham.”

“Oh, hi, Vern. Look, you gotta get off the line.” She rattled something, which generated a series of clicks on the line. “Hey, where are you calling from?”

Her switch couldn’t tell her where my call was coming from, I was pretty sure of that. Pegasus had to have tapped the trunk line. I must have looked like an inbound long distance call.

“Susie Mae,” I said, “I am the emergency. I’m on a radiotelephone right now.” Close enough to true, and not bad thinking on the fly. So to speak. She didn’t need to know I was circling the refinery at three hundred miles an hour being chased by Army fighter planes.

“Huh?” Susie Mae had never been the brightest spark in the bonfire.

“Look, I need to talk to the St. Francis Hospital in Wichita. And stay on the line, please . When I’m off that call, get me Ollie Wannamaker or that Army Colonel Pinkhoffer who’s probably at the police station. This is an emergency, Susie Mae.”

“All right.” Susie Mae sounded doubtful, but I heard her patch the call through to Wichita. They had direct dial in Wichita, but that particular bit of progress hadn’t made it to Augusta yet.

“St. Francis, Sisters of St. Joseph,” said a crisp female voice, picking up on the first ring.

“Emergency telephone call for you from Augusta, Kansas,” said Susie Mae. “This is a radiotelephone patch. Operator will remain on the line.”

That was my cue. “Look, I’m the guy that just landed a plane outside and dropped off a patient,” I said.

The woman gasped. “Doctor must speak to you immediately,” she said. I heard a bang as she slammed down the phone, followed by a lot of shouting.

A new voice came, male, hurried. He sounded excited rather than angry. “Hello, hello. This is Officer Krieger of the Wichita Police Department. Who is speaking, please?”

“I need to talk to the doctor handling the new admission,” I said. I felt foolish.

There was the sound of a brief struggle, then I heard a man’s voice say faintly, “Keep that idiot away from this telephone!” There was a pause, and the voice continued, much louder, “Doctor Rubenstein here. Who is this?”

There was no point in lying. Enough people in August had seen me get inside Pegasus. “Vernon Dunham of Augusta,” I said. “You’ve got my father Grady Dunham in there.”

“Grady Dunham?” I heard scratching. Rubenstein was making notes. Good. “What happened to him?” Even better. He wasn’t asking stupid questions about me. That man had a sense of priorities.

“He got beat up real bad yesterday. Assailants unknown. Ribs kicked in, and they tried to kill him by whacking him over the head. Dad’s got a metal plate, though.”

“We’ve noticed that.”

“Check the records. One of your surgeons put it in there four years ago. Instead of getting treatment after his beating, Dad was abandoned to die. Then I rescued him and got him to you. How is he?” The connection was breaking up, and I didn’t have a lot of time.

“He’s stable, and conscious. He’s been asking for you, and for someone named Floyd.”

I realized there was one thing I desperately needed to know from Dad. “This is incredibly important. I need you to ask him something. Ask him what color Captain Markowicz’s hair is.”

“What?”

“Just ask the question. Lives depend on it.” Well, mine probably did, at any rate. “Please, Doctor, I’m running out of time here.”

The phone banged down again, and there was more yelling. I heard stomping around for few moments, then Rubenstein came back on. “Frankly, I’m amazed that he understood the question. Mr. Dunham said the Captain’s hair is blond.”

Good old Dad. Drunk as a skunk, broke the man’s arm in a fight, but he could remember what color Markowicz’s hair was. The real Markowicz wouldn’t have beaten Dad half to death and dumped him. That meant the red-headed man I had run over with the Doc’s Cadillac probably was the real Captain Markowicz, United States Army CID I’d bet my good right leg that nobody had died in Kansas City — the third, dead Captain Markowicz was just one of the lies fed to me by those two fascist sympathizers, Hauptmann and Milliken.

“Tell Officer Krieger to keep Dad under tight guard,” I yelled into the worsening connection. “And don’t let anybody from the Butler County Sheriff’s Department see him.”

The line went dead. I didn’t know if Rubenstein had caught the last part. There was nothing I could do about it now. I glanced over at Floyd and realized that he had heard my entire side of the phone call. He was just watching me with an expression of calm curiosity, recovered from his fit of emotions.

I smiled at him, despite myself.

Susie Mae came back on the line. “Vernon? I’ve got the Police Department ready to speak to you.”

“Put them through,” I said. I looked at the various screens. The fighters still circled, but they weren’t firing at Pegasus right now. We zigzagged close to the ground, circling the towers and tanks of the refinery complex in an evasion pattern. There were police and soldiers all over the place below us. Pinkhoffer or Chief Davis must have called out the State Police, or maybe all the local cops and county Sheriff’s Deputies within driving distance.

“Vernon? Is that you? Ollie Wannamaker here.”

Good old Ollie. He really had tried to help me, maybe the one true blue person left in my life. “Hey Ollie,” I said. “You were right to try to warn me off. I’m in a world of trouble here.”