He held up his arm, his fingers extended, his hand bent downward at the wrist. "It's like an arm. The finger bones are long." He made the stretching gesture with his other hand, slapped his arm. "These bones are there, holding, supporting the tissues of the wing itself…"
"I never noticed much of a skeleton in a fly wing,"
Hamson Bultitt interrupted, not bothering to hide the growing of his annoyance.
The sand was beginning to have a sucking feel to it. "Yes, but a fly, any insect, has but the tiniest fraction of the weight of even a small bird. A bird," Colin said,, grasping at a fact that would convince these two that he was not merely throwing up phony obstacles to milk them of their money. "The largest bird. A condor. Ten feet across the wings. Weighs how much? Forty pounds.
"Now a horse. Even a lightly built saddle horse will weigh a thousand pounds, and you know better than I how large his muscles have to be just to move him around on the ground.
Even if we did…" he stopped himself. He was beginning to think like these people about the fantastic.
"Even if we could," he corrected himself and went on.
"Even if we could re-form his front tegs into some semblance of wings, the muscle structures needed to lift half a ton into the air would be so huge that the poor beast probably couldn't even stand under their weight. Then to support all that weight we'd have to make the bones thicker and sturdier and that would add to the weight and… don't you see?" he ended helplessly.
"Weight," Bullilt said. "Don't prattle about weight. Only last night on TriV we saw a… some kind of a flying dinosaur. Weight." He snorted.
"A reptile," Colin said, and it was quicksand he felt the suction of. "A pterodactyl. But even the largest of those had only a twenty-foot wing span."
Colin hadn't been watching Mrs. Bullitt particularly, but now she seemed to explode out of her chair. "You see," she flung at her husband. "I told you there was no point in trying to be nice to these people. They know only one kind of language. All right, if that's the way they want it."
Her eyes, flat and expressionless in spite of the anger in her voice, bored into Colin's. "Young man." she said, "I want a flying horse. Are… you… going… to… give … it… to… me? She spaced me words deliberately.
"I • -. I…" Coiin floundered and then was amazed to hear Ed's voice.
Calmly, rationally, Ed was saying, "Now let me understand this clearly, Mrs. Bullitt. You want us to recreate for you the legendary Hying horse Pegasus. Is that correct?"
Colin stared at Ed. Recreate… legendary… what had gotten into Ed?
And then he heard Mrs. Bullitt's voice. "Legendary. You mean someone has already had a flying horse?"
Colin's eyes snapped back to Mrs. Bullitt's face. Petulance seemed to be always in the set of her mouth, but was there something else there now? Did he see disappointment?
Hope flared up in Colin at the method he thought he saw in Ed's apparent madness. If Mrs. Bullitt became convinced that someone else had beaten her to me possession of a flying horse, even centuries removed in time, then maybe enough of the bloom would be rubbed off the idea of her to abandon it.
But he must have, couldn't have, but he must have misread Ed's intent because his partner's next words were, "Not exactly, perhaps, but 1 do believe that many legends, even the more fantastic, may well have a basis in fact."
Mrs. Bullitt took Ed's words for ammunition. "You see." she snapped at Colin. "Your partner admits that it can be done."
But Colin was staring at Ed. Unbelieving.
"What are you talking about?" he half shouted at Ed.
"What legends and what facts?"
And Ed was looking him right in the eye and saying, "Almost any legend… or folk saying. Like 'dumb blonde' for example. You know that every once in a great while someone comes up missing one of the pigment-forming enzymes.
Naturally, they can't help but be blonde. But they are also mentally retarded, and seriously. Somebody noticed the two conditions, jumped to a vastly broader conclusion than the observation warranted, and there you are. But there was.some basis in fact."
Colin could only stare at Ed. The enzyme was phenylalanmase and the mental condition phenylpyruvic oligophrenia.
But Ed couldn't be serious about a Pegasus.
Or could he? Ed was going on. "And you remember the zoo on the continent that was back-breeding legendary animals?"
"Backbreeding legendary animals? They took modem cattle and backbred them until they had a cow that looked like an extinct ancestor. Where," he demanded, "where are you going to get me the germ plasm of a demigod to repeat the feat for a flying horse?"
Taking firm hold of his voice because he didn't know whether to laugh or hit somebody or just bang his head on the paneled and trophy-hung walls, Colin said to the room in general, "Thank you very much for your confidence in our ability. It is very flattering, but very much misplaced. We cannot build a flying horse. Thank you again and goodbye."
And he put a hand under Ed's elbow and almost shoved him out of the room, and into the passageway, the angry voice of Mrs. Bullitt following them out.
"You'll be back, I promise you. You'll be back, and remember, I won't be as easy to get along with next time."
Controlling himself, Colin slid the door shut gently.
He turned to Ed. "What got into you? You know as well as I do that we can't give her what she wants. Nobody can.*' "Of course I know it," Ed said. "But that woman isn't rational. I was hoping to at least gain us a little time to figure out something, anything. The way it is now. Lord knows what she'll do."
"I… I'm sorry, Ed," Colin started to say, but he was interrupted by the opening of the door they'd just come through. The Commodore emerged and slid it shut again. He stood rubbing the back of his white hair with the flat of one hand. "A flying horse," he said and shook his head. "A flying horse."
He looked at Colin. "I suppose it's impossible."
Colin didn't feel like going through that one again. He nodded.
"Are you sure?" the Commodore persisted. "I don't want to quote an old saw, but the one about doing the difficult right now and the impossible taking a little longer has a good deal to it, I think. We are doing things today as a matter of course that we used to know were impossible."
He smiled. "It used to be an obvious fact that what went up had to come down." He paused and looked from Colin to Ed and back to Colin again. "Have you checked any of our satellites lately?"
It struck Colin that the Commodore was beginning to sound like Harrison Bullitt. "I think I get your point, sir," he said, not because he did, but because the quicksand feeling was back and he wanted to get away from it and Abby Bullitt's office.
"No you don't," the Commodore said, suddenly blunt. "I thought of buying Ato's Pride, looked him over very carefully. Then I realized mat if you can do for food animals what you did for him, then you've got something I can use. I could give you an initial contract and I could defend it, I'm sure.
But with Abby throwing her weight around there's more to it than being willing to justify your actions to an investigating committee. She's thorough and she's fast. You'd probably get hung up because one of your hogs dribbled on the sidewalk."
He shook CoHn's hand and then Ed's. "You think about it," he said. "And you look me up when you get Abby Bullitt off your back. Hear?"
And after the older man had left them to go back up the ramp, it was Ed who broke the gloomy silence that he'd left behind him. "You know," he said, "he might just be right."
"About getting Mrs. Bullitt off our backs? I'm convinced."
"No, about what we know is impossible. We know that a horse can't fly and we know why not. Maybe if we turn the 256 F.A. Javawhole thing upside down and start by assuming that a horse can fly. Now what can we come up with?"
But Colin's mind was numb. A horse can fly. Now the Bullitt virus was getting to Ed. A horse can fly. "Forget it," he said aloud. "Let's go secure Ato and then check out."