“If God had meant man to fly,” she went on, “he’d have given us brains like the birds.”
“Uh, yes, ma’am.” I couldn’t work out if that meant only the stupid should fly, or the fearless, or the natural aviators. It didn’t matter — the general tone of her opinions was quite clear.
She shook a finger at me. “Rest assured, Vernon Dunham, Daddy and I will stay out of that barn. But you know what that means?”
I shook my head, eyes wide. I glanced at Floyd for a signal. He just covered his mouth and laughed with his eyes. “No, ma’am, what does that mean?”
“You have to help Floyd with his chores.”
Of course.
In the barn, we set about stripping the rest of the crate off the aircraft. That took some doing to accomplish safely — Floyd had to rig a block and tackle in the rafters so we didn’t have any more incidents like yesterday’s near-accident with the first panel. I spent the whole time focusing on the wood, cursing and picking splinters out of my fingernails. Every time I looked at that damned airplane I’d stop working and just stare, until Floyd yelled at me to get back to work.
Several hours’ work with the crowbars and the ropes exposed the airplane, sitting on aluminum landing skids on the crate base, still on the bed of Dad’s truck. I didn’t want to move it off the truck until I knew what I was doing — we didn’t know the simplest things, like the attachment points for a safe lift. Besides, Dad wouldn’t miss his equipment for weeks, even if he somehow managed to sober up in the mean time. Nobody else would even care where the truck had gotten to.
“That is just about the smallest airplane I’ve ever seen,” I told Floyd. We were on a break, sitting on the stacked crate panels and drinking root beer from bottles Floyd had brought in a little bucket of cold water from the spring house.
“Not as small as it looks.” Floyd took a deep swig of his beer. “It sort of folds in on itself.”
I stood up and walked around the back of the truck, inspecting the aircraft from various angles. “It is sort of… folded,” I told him. “You’re right. Crumpled, almost… but not like a wreck.” God knew I’d seen plenty of those along the way.
“What are those planes they flew on aircraft carriers?” Floyd asked.
“You mean the F-4U?” The Chance-Vought fighter had folding wings so it could be stored efficiently in the below-deck hangars. “It does look folded. But why bother? This wasn’t carrier-based, was it?”
“Arctic duty,” Floyd said, “but I don’t get all the details. That’s why you’re here.”
I shot him a look. “I understand you were spinning a line with Odus about the fertilizer. Hell, it was a great grift you did on him. What’s your line with me? Where is this thing going when we crack it open and work it out?”
Floyd smiled. “Blue sky, Vernon. You and me and that thing heading for the open air.”
I snorted. “You never did anything just for pleasure.”
“Well,” Floyd said, glancing at the mattress in the corner behind a rotary plow, “a few things.”
“Cripes,” I muttered. He never would change, my buddy Floyd. In a way, I had to admire that. I struggled back onto the bed of the truck and pulled out the magnifying glass and the calipers.
Up close, it still looked seamless, like a milled block of metal. I decided it wasn’t titanium, but I was hard pressed to put a name to it. I resolved to take some shavings into work for analysis — I’d be going back next week to my regular schedule. Regardless, this aircraft was easily the most finely machined piece of equipment I had ever seen in my life.
It took me almost ten minutes to identify an actual joint in the body segments. The folds and crumples in the airframe that were visible from a distance seemed to vanish into smooth convolutions up close. Sort of like looking at the ground from a thousand feet up — the abrupt lines of the watersheds so obvious from the air are impossible to find on foot.
Using the magnifying glass and the calipers, I tried to measure the manufacturing tolerance in the joint. The metalwork was too finely machined for the scale my calipers could manage. “Damnation,” I hissed.
“What?” Floyd had been watching me without comment from a perch on the corner of the truck bed.
“I’m going to have to find a micrometer to measure this join.”
“Why do you care?”
I sighed. “It’s not obvious to me what this is made of. Or how it was built. Most aircraft are lightweight deathtraps — wood or aluminum bolted to a skeleton, cables and wires running through. There’s a hundred ways to cut into one, a thousand ways to shoot one down. This thing… the Germans have a great reputation for quality metalwork, and some of the best machine tools in the world. But this, it’s way beyond anything I thought possible.” I tore my eyes from the rounded edge I was fondling to glance at Floyd again. “Which of their aircraft designers did this? Do you have any idea how?”
“No. Like I said, why do you care? Here it is.”
“I don’t mean to sound goofy, but it makes things a lot easier if I know what it was for, who built it, why. Floyd, it doesn’t even look like an airplane. It’s obviously meant to fly — I’m guessing that when all the folds straighten out into their proper positions it’ll be a lot bigger than it is now. It’s basically just a great big wing. That’s damned hard to do.”
Floyd shrugged. “It was a secret project. They wanted to use this thing to challenge our air superiority late in the war. I don’t know a whole lot more — most of the documentation was destroyed.”
I didn’t want to ask why the Army hadn’t taken this thing to Wright Field. I knew perfectly well Floyd had somehow stolen an entire airplane and its ground support. I was a willing accessory after-the-fact to his crime just for the privilege of being around such a glorious machine. But I really wanted to know where it came from. I really wanted to be in the mind of whoever built it.
I turned around to ask Floyd the question again, but he was gone. Fine. I would study my airplane, understand it, and be very careful of whatever scam Floyd was running on me. He might be my best friend, but I knew him too well to trust him completely — with my life, yes, but not with my honor.
He wasn’t going to tell me everything he knew, I didn’t have to tell him everything I discovered.
Chapter Three
After lunch, we were back in the barn. I wanted to make the most of my last few days before getting back to work. “You know what I really hate?” I said to Floyd.
“What?” Floyd was measuring distances to rig a block-and-tackle to get the airplane off the flatbed.
“I’m going to go in to work on Monday, sit around all day talking about fasteners — you know, clips and rivets and bolt shear and tensile strength. If I’m lucky. Sometimes I have to go count the damned things, when the guys down on the floor find extras they shouldn’t have after attaching a wing or something.”
Floyd snorted back a laugh. “Yeah, I’d hate that, too.”
“That’s not what I hate.” I set my hands on my hips and just stared up at the collapsed beauty of that aircraft. “It’s just my job. What I hate is that I’ll be there instead of here, and I won’t be able to talk about it. Not one little syllable.”
“Oh, Vernon.” Floyd shook his head. “We can’t talk about this to nobody.”
“Do you think I want a permanent vacation in Leavenworth?”
He laughed at that, his smile pulling a reluctant chuckle from me in turn.
I was up on the trailer with the aircraft again, while Floyd crawled around in the rafters making sure the rigging points for our eventual lift were secure.