Ghosts of Engines Past (22 page)

“But they let him go, with only a warning. He was such a good boy. Now that I think of it, he called the balloon thing the Pharaoh too.”

“He did?” I exclaimed with a sharp pang of excitement. “Are you sure?”

“Well, some name like Pharaoh. It's in the police museum if you want to see it.”

The officer in charge of the museum was enthusiastic and helpful. Among the exhibits were such strange items as a small cannon that fired beer cans filled with concrete: it had once belonged to a motorcycle gang, we were told. Stephen's two flying machines put all the other exhibits to shame, however.

The first looked like a hang glider attached to a propellor driven go-cart—except that the thing was made out of packing case wood, the wheels were from a pram, and the motor was electric. Stephen had been ten years old when he had built it—alone. It showed signs of extensive damage, which had been carefully repaired.

“This bird actually flew,” Sergeant Powell told us. “It only got off the ground because he was such a small kid, and he took off downhill.”

“He must have had help,” I said. “Who bought the tools and materials?”

“No problem for Steve. His old man died the year before, and he had free run of the workshop in the garage. He scrounged the parts from neighbours, or the local tip.”

There were three photographs beside the aircraft. In the first, a small boy wearing thick glasses stood beside his creation. His face was a study in determination, mixed with nervousness. In the next, the aircraft was a few feet above the ground. The last showed a scattering of wreckage, with an ambulance and police cars in the background.

“He took off from the street in front of his home. The motor's coil burned out, the craft stalled, and you can see the results. A neighbour took these pictures.”

“Fantastic,” I said, “but most kids just build models if they're interested in flight. Why did he go to so much trouble? Why do something so dangerous?”

“Oh, just some rivalry at school. A couple of kids were talking about becoming pilots when
they grew up, and Stephen said that he'd become a pilot as well. They teased him, said that nobody as short-sighted as him could ever get a pilot's licence.

“It's funny, you know, but most people thought of Stephen as a sort of absent-minded little whizz kid. He was actually stubborn, bad tempered, resourceful, and very, very proud. He shouted that he'd fly a plane before they could even drive a car, then went home and started to build this. He was right, too.”

I looked at the last photograph again. “Was he hurt?” I asked. “I'd say he came down pretty hard.”

“Several fractures,” said the sergeant, shaking his head. “When he got out of hospital we agreed to forget the whole thing if his mother kept him locked out of the garage workshop. He wore that for a year or so, then decided he wasn't going to be pushed around. He ran away.”

“All kids do that,” said Taylor, “I used to run away to Gran's nearly every month.”

“Little Steve was not just any kid,” he replied, walking along to the next exhibit. It was a display of newspaper clippings. “It was over a year before we found him, in a city 2000 miles away. He had travelled by hiding on trains and big rigs, and earned money by selling newspapers, sweeping, and other odd jobs. Talk about resourceful: he was renting a cheap room, and had $500 in the bank when we found him. The kid was barely thirteen!”

We examined the clippings and photographs. A picture was emerging of Stephen's character, but one that was not at all encouraging for us.
He must have had helpers, so find those helpers
, they had told us in the Pentagon. It was now becoming clear that this short-sighted little boy had enough resourcefulness and mechanical skills for a dozen normal people. He could have built the Pharaoh with no help at all, I was sure of that now.

The last exhibit was a deck chair. Above it was a cluster of weather sonde balloons attached by thin wires. It rested on a wicker frame which enclosed a gimballed chainsaw engine driving two small rotors which cancelled each others' torque.

“He called it the Pharaoh's Chariot,” said Sergeant Powell. “It can't leave the ground until the motor is started, because it needs a small downward thrust to help the balloons raise it. The deckchair was from his mother's sunroom, the chainsaw engine from a neighbour's junkpile.”

It was a masterpiece of safety design, and Stephen had obviously been influenced by the crash of his first aircraft. This one could not crash! If the motor failed, the craft drifted down slowly. If some balloons burst as well, he could reduce weight by dropping the motor and wicker frame and so still descend slowly. To steer he tilted the rotors' mounting slightly, to go up throttle forward, to go down throttle back. His main expense had probably been the balloons and hydrogen.

“He was fourteen when he built this,” explained the sergeant. “His school was running some sort of science day, and the kids were told to bring along some special project. This was Stephen's contribution, and he actually flew it to school.”

He pointed to a photograph that had been taken on the day. The Pharaoh's Chariot was descending towards the school's football field, while a police helicopter hovered in the background.

“He seems to have a police escort,” Taylor observed.

“He sure did, and this time he was in real trouble. He had flown through the approach path to Eagle Farm airport, and he was charged with nine counts involving the Air Navigation Act. He was given a good behaviour bond, and I was one of the officers who counselled him. He behaved himself for the next five years, so we must have done some good.”

I reached out and touched the deckchair, and the contraption wobbled slightly. It was suspended from the ceiling by wires, as were the dummy balloons, yet one could see that it was viable.

“We've noticed that Stephen named his last two aircraft after the Pharaohs,” I said. “Did he ever mention his interest in ancient Egypt to you?”

“Yeah, he was crazy about it. You should have seen his room: books and comics piled everywhere, walls covered with pictures of Egyptian art. Apparently a teacher had once told his class that the tools and technology for building some inventions can be around for thousands of years before anyone thinks of the invention itself. He went on to say that the ancient Egyptians could have actually flown, using hot air balloons. Even three thousand years ago they had charcoal burners, papyrus fabric, strong cord and wicker baskets, everything you need to build a balloon except the idea itself. By the way, did you know that he took out a patent on his balloon-helicopter? Even after the fines and court costs had been paid he still had several thousand dollars left in royalties.”

So, Stephen had a few thousand dollars available, probably more than enough to build that fantastic third craft that he had eventually died in.

“One last question,” I said as we were about to leave. “What was his bedroom like when you visited to counsel him?”

“Well... I don't like to run down the departed, but it was a pigsty. Full of rubblish, bits of radios and odd gadgets, dirty mugs and plates, piles of clothes—his mother had given up trying to make him keep it tidy years before. Remember how stubborn he was about getting his own way?”

“More answers and more mysteries,” I said as we drove through the sub-tropical heat to the University of Queensland. “We now know that Stephen had both the manual skills and money to build the Pharaoh all by himself. We also know that at some stage he changed from being a slob to being meticulously tidy. There must be something behind that.”

“Well, our contact at the university discovered that he lived with another student for five months,” said Taylor, ticking off items in a file. “She must know something.”

I smiled. “His mother was very quiet about that.”

“And about his police record. Poor woman, she just wants to remember him as a good, clever son.”

I began to daydream. A hot air balloon was drifting over the seaside palace of one of the Pharaohs. The pilot called to the guards and waved. The guards looked up in astonishment, then one of them panicked and shot the aviator dead with an arrow. He tumbled from the wicker gondola, and with his weight gone the balloon rose rapidly. The wind took it out to sea, and by the time the Pharaoh's chief engineer arrived it was out of sight.

“This man was flying over the palace wall, so I shot him,” the guard informed the engineer, pointing to the body.

“How was he flying?” asked the engineer. “Did he have wings?”

“No, he was in a basket under a huge bag. His clothing smelled of burning wood. There were no wings.”

“He must have had wings,” said the engineer. “When birds and insects fly they use wings. Think again, did he have very thin wings, perhaps?”

“Er... he was waving his arms.”

“Marvellous!” exclaimed the engineer. “He was obviously flapping invisible wings.”

“But what about the huge bag?” protested the guard.

“Hah! The man was clearly a thief, and the bag was to carry off the Pharaoh's treasures.”

Far out to sea the furnace beneath the balloon died, and it sank slowly to the waves. My little fantasy had its lesson. The Egyptians certainly could have built a manned balloon three thousand years ago, yet the idea of using hot air to fly did not arise until the Montgolfier Brothers began their experiments in late 18th Century France.  

Dianna, Stephen's former lover, was a part-time tutor and research student at the university, and our agent had arranged a meeting in her room in the Geography Department. She was fresh faced and well scrubbed, and wore no makeup whatever. Her long pale hair was drawn tightly back into a neat pony tail. Her room was likewise severe and spotless, with only a desk, five chairs, and a bookcase.

Most of the time that we were there she sat behind her totally clear, polished desk, perhaps using it as a rampart against the memories that we wanted to exhume.

“Stephen and I were an item for about a year, and he lived with me for five months,” she began in a flat, controlled voice. “I met him at a friend's party, and found him interesting... different. He had a marvellous dry sense of humour, and delightfully different ways of looking at things. He would ask people things like 'if your right hand becomes your left in a mirror, why doesn't your head get swapped with your feet', and 'if I put a book on this chair, then take the chair away but maintain the book's potential energy, will the book fall?'“

“His mother said nothing about you,” said Taylor. “Were there problems between you?”

“Were there ever! He must have been the most badly house-trained person I've ever met, and I'm sure Mrs Cole did it deliberately—so that the likes of me would never go near him. He never washed his own clothes and dishes, he just let things pile up until I couldn't stand it any more and did them myself. When he moved in with me he seemed to think that I was taking over from his mother. I put up with it for a while, but then he started to yell at me for even tidying up after him. He said I was disturbing the order of his mess! One day I decided that I'd had enough, so I changed the lock on my student flat, packed his gear into cartons and had it delivered to his mother's house. Then I left for a conference in Sydney that I'd been thinking of attending.”

“From what I know of Stephen, he would not have taken all that lying down,” I said.

“True. He tried tears, threats, and presents, then he went through a stage of following me about everywhere—and I mean everywhere. It was then that I met Brian, who was on an exchange program from the US. Apart from being a trainee astronaut in the Shuttle program he was also clean, patient, considerate, organised and mature, everything that Stephen was not. I mean, at last I had someone that I was actually game to introduce to my parents!

“One night Brian and I arrived at my flat to find that my slob of an ex had picked the lock, then got drunk on two of my best bottles of Hunter Valley red. I told Brian to go for a walk, then had a row with Stephen, a really bad one. I was shouting the whole time so that the neighbours could hear, and there was plenty to listen to. Stephen was easily embarrased, you know.

“He was a lousy lover, had the manners of a pig, dressed like an ape in an op shop, actually preferred to live in squalor, and couldn't finish a major project to save himself. He said that I was just looking for excuses to leave him for an astronaut, and that he was as good as any astronaut. That was the end. I pushed him out of his chair and told him to get out. As he got up he took a little tin box from his pocket, the type that pipe tobacco comes in. He pressed a switch that protruded from the lid, and when he released the box it just hung in mid-air. Then he pressed the
switch again and handed it to me.

“It was just some cheap trick, I'm sure of that, but at the time I was speechless. Then he said 'I'm better than Einstein, too!' and something really snapped inside me. He was still the same arrogant, opinionated pig as before, and I shouted it in his face. I threw the box in the waste-bin, got his arm in a judo lock and marched him through the door and down the stairs. I warned him that I could have him charged with breaking and entering, and that he'd go to jail when the judge saw his past record.

“That was eight months ago. Friends told me that he had suddenly become very neat and well dressed, had started wearing contact lenses, had learned to drive, and was taking flying lessons. I'm sure you know more about the rest of his story than I do.”