It was his old flying machine.
Erx and Berx began laughing.
“Brother Multx!” Erx said, shaking his head. “Never at a loss for the dramatic!”
“That old mutt,” Berx exclaimed. “Did he take it with us when we left Fools 6, or did he have someone go back to get it?”
There was no answer to that question now — and frankly Hunter couldn’t have cared less about how Multx had been able to retrieve it. The important thing was this: His flying machine was here, and obviously it was what Hunter would pilot in the Earth Race.
Once he had regained his composure, Calandrx began shivering with delight.
“It’s such a beautiful machine!” he declared, approaching the strange craft and passing his hand along the underside of the fuselage. “It’s so not like the flying triangles everyone flies now. It’s so less boring.”
He began walking the length of the aircraft, fascinated by its unusual design, its wings, its overall sleekness. When he arrived back where he’d started from, he could not stop shaking his head.
“I’ve never seen such a machine as this, not while I was awake, anyway,” he said. “This thing is stunning.
It looks like it should be flying, not like those cheese wedges the Empire insists on churning out.”
Calandrx looked to the stars and began searching for the right words. “Your machine contains what no one else can see these days. There is a unique design here. A unique passion. This thing has… what is the word they used many years ago?”
“ ‘Kick-ass’?” Erx offered.
“ ‘Ballsy’?” Berx weighed in.
Calandrx was shaking his head. “No, you dullards!” he said. “The word was ‘style,’ I think. Yes, that’s it. Style. This machine has style.”
Now that Hunter had been immersed in all things Empire for the past few weeks, he had to agree that his flying machine certainly looked different.
He was still astonished that it was here at all, on Earth, right in front of him. Its familiar smell wafted through his nostrils. He always believed an invisible aura surrounded the aircraft — he could feel its vibrations now just like every time he was near it back on Fools 6.
“They will freak out when they see this thing pull up to the starting line,” Calandrx said.
“Bingo that,” Erx agreed.
“And you should see this thing fly!” Berx said.
Then, to Hunter’s embarrassment, the explorers recounted for Calandrx aerial displays he’d put on for them during their brief stay on Fools 6. Though their retelling was tinged with hyperbole, Calandrx took in every word as if it were Bible truth. He was clearly delighted at this turn of events.
“The Earth Race hasn’t been shaken up in a long while,” he said, rubbing his hands together at the possibilities. “If this thing can fly half as good as my brothers here say it can, I think we are in for some very interesting times in about a week or so.”
Hunter looked skyward, through the streams of Star-Scrapers, out into the rim of the Milky Way. He imagined he could see Fools 6 way out there. Less than a month ago, he was on that isolated planet, wondering if there was anybody else in the universe. Since then he’d witnessed one space battle, fought in another, been smuggled across the Pluto Cloud, and had set his foot on Earth— again.
How much more “interesting” could it get?
That’s when Calandrx turned to him and said: “So how does this magnificent craft work?”
Hunter began to say something but then stopped. Calandrx just stared at him. Erx and Berx did, too.
“How does it work?” he heard himself mumble.
“Yes, my son,” Calandrx said. “How does it fly? How is it propelled through air? Through space?”
But Hunter was finally stumped. He had to speak the truth: “I don’t know,” he said.
And finding out would not be easy.
It took Hunter and Calandrx three hours just to get the flying machine’s power plant access door open.
The problem came from the transfer out of the twenty and six. Such interdimensional leaps weren’t always perfect things; distortions could occur. In this case, the flying machine that came out of the twenty-sixth dimension was slightly smaller than the one that went in. Mere micrometers in difference, it was enough to nearly weld the access door fasteners to the body of the craft. Using the electron torch didn’t help. If anything, it made the atoms in the fasteners expand even farther.
Finally they had to replicate a tool that looked like a knife with its leading edge flattened out. By inserting this edge into the cross-groove in the fastener and twisting it, the fasteners gradually loosened up. But it took a lot of work and a lot of time to do the twisting.
Erx and Berx had fallen asleep somewhere along the way. They eventually drifted into the sixth dimension, where a good night’s sleep was always a guarantee.
But Hunter and Calandrx stayed awake and took turns twisting, and finally the seized covers came off.
But while gaining access to the interior of the flying machine’s power plant chamber answered one question, it brought about a few million more.
“What madness is this?” Calandrx asked upon getting his first glimpse of what lay within Hunter’s craft.
What he saw was a massive jumble of wires, hoses, fasteners, screws, all surrounding a long shaft of steel that seemed to have thousands of small, shiny blades attached to it. This shaft ran nearly the length of the flying machine. A multitude of other unidentifiable things did, too. For someone like Calandrx, who was used to seeing a starfighter’s orderly and compact power plant, this was madness.
“The shaft spins,” Hunter began explaining. “It sucks in the atmosphere, it mixes with the power source, and together they produce propulsion. More than enough to get the thing airborne.”
But Calandrx was still baffled. “In theory I can see how it would work — this just seems like such a strange way of doing it.”
He looked up at Hunter.
“How did you say you built this?”
Hunter began to give his standard answer. “I gathered parts I’d salvaged from a crashed ship that was—”
Calandrx interrupted him with the wave of his hand.
“I know all that,” he said. “I mean, how did you build it? How did you come up with the concept? The design? The blueprint?”
Here comes the really strange part, Hunter thought.
“It was just after I found myself on Fools 6,” he began. “I woke up one night. Got dressed. And started drawing.”
“Drawing?”
“Yes, drawing — I took a piece of burned wood and made drawings on my floor, my walls, my chairs and table. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I don’t know where it all came from. I don’t know if it was set off by a dream, or whether one piece of my lost memory decided to come back. I just don’t know.
“But I transcribed everything I put down that night. And from that plan, I built this. And believe me, I was astonished that it actually worked.”
“So, it really does fly?”
“It did,” Hunter replied. “And assuming nothing else was skewered in the transfer, it should still be able to.”
Calandrx went back to studying the machine’s guts.
“You were obviously more than just a pilot, wherever you’re from,” he told Hunter. “You must have built your own machines as well. I mean, how else can we explain the fact that you were not only able to come up with this concept, but to put it together, successfully, as well.”
Hunter just shrugged good-naturedly.
“You know how those electron torches are,” he said. “Sometimes all you have to do is think about what shape you want something to be — and the torch just takes over and does it, big or small.”